'Everyone Knows What Life is': Life as an Irreducible in and outside of Descartes's Metaphysics and Biology

The literature treats Descartes’s position on life as either reductionist or eliminativist. Here, I argue instead that Descartes treats life as an irreducible notion. This makes sense of some otherwise incongruous claims: Descartes makes explicit, if weak, metaphysical commitments to the existence both of a category of ‘life’ and of living creatures. He appears to recognize life, but has no way to account for it reductively. This is a problem for him, as long as we take his epistemology to be purely reductionist. However, his treatment of the union of mind and body suggests that he can allow nonreductionist knowledge. If we do take him to have nonreductionist knowledge of life, we can consider him to be a (very weak) kind of vitalist with respect to life itself, while still being an eliminativist about life when it comes to accounting for the operations of living bodies.