> and still nobody has gone beyond Aristotle and Kant in giving anything close to a rigorous definition of life as such
You stopped reading after the 1800's? Schrödinger told us life is what feeds on negative entropy and that is pretty good.
Freezing water is life?
I guess that is true, but it isn't much. But my basic point was that before you can have "life" you have to have a theory of life which ultimately requires metaphysics, and there hasn't been much of an update to our understanding of what would ground a definition of life beyond Aristotle and Kant, and even their work is not determinative by any means.