François Duchesneau. cité de construire un jeu d'expressions symboliques s' emboîtant par paliers et répondant à une norme analogiquement combinatoire. Au sommet de la construction et en assurant l'intégration, figurent des expressions ...

Les notions relatives au vivant jouent un role central dans l'economie interne du systeme de la nature selon Leibniz. Elles ont aussi influe sur les theories qui ont ponctue le developpement des sciences de la vie. Le dessein de cet ouvrage est de traiter de ce double objet. Comment Leibniz dessine-t-il le profil d'une science des vivants suivant un modele en partie inspire de Malpighi? Comment la theorie leibnizienne de la substance influe-t-elle sur la determination du concept de vivant comme (...) machine de la nature? Quel role charniere la dynamique joue-t-elle dans la conception leibnizienne de l' organisme, concept scientifique nouveau en son temps? Echangeant avec des figures majeures de la science et de la medecine de cette epoque, Hartsoeker, Stahl, Hoffmann, Johann Bernoulli, Michelotti et d'autres, comment Leibniz developpe-t-il la vision d'une physique speciale dont le vivant serait l'objet specifique? De quelle maniere le modele leibnizien s'integre-t-il d'emblee dans des theories sur la generation que developpent Conti et Vallisneri, puis Bourguet? Ainsi une exploitation multiforme d'idees leibniziennes sur le vivant pourra-t-elle s'amorcer au siecle des Lumieres. (shrink)

Par-delà le règne, puis l'éclipse, du paradigme newtonien, l'oeuvre philosophique et scientifique de ce penseur qui inventa le calcul infinitésimal, la dynamique et de nouveaux modèles pour la théorie de l'organisme, fournit un point d'ancrage privilégié à l'analyse épistémologique.

_The first unabridged English translation of the correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Georg Ernst Stahl detailing their opposing philosophies_ The correspondence between the eighteenth-century mathematician and philosopher G. W. Leibniz and G. E. Stahl, a chemist and physician at the court of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, known as the Leibniz-Stahl Controversy, is one of the most important intellectual contributions on theoretical issues concerning pre-biological thinking. Editors François Duchesneau and Justin E. H. Smith offer readers the (...) first fully annotated English translation of this fascinating exchange of philosophical views on divine action, the order of nature, causality and teleology, and the soul-body relationship. (shrink)

Les considérations physiologiques sont étrangères, en tant que telles, au projet de l'Ethique, et sans doute, à l'ensemble des préoccupations philosophiques de Spinoza. Au début de Ia seconde partie de l'Ethique, Spinoza précise clairement: “j'expliquerai seulement ce qui peut nous conduire comme par la main à la connaissance de l’ Arne humaine et de sa béatitude suprême”. Pourtant, le livre ne laisse pas de contenir une révision intéressante du modèle mécaniste que Descartes appliquait à l'explication du corps humain; il contient (...) surtout une hypothèse sur Ia structure organique, qui, nous le croyons, a joué un rôle de modèle pour un certain type de théorie de l'être vivant. Ce type de conception se trouve d'abord dans l'iatromécanisme de Boerhaave et de ses disciples au XVIIIe siècle, mais les séquelles en sont identifiables jusque dans Ia philosophie biologique contemporaine. (shrink)

The theory of living beings as machines of nature and the conception of composite substances endowed with conjoined souls, entelechies, or monads, as well as that of organic bodies, were solidified over the course of the transformations of Leibniz's thought that issued in the New System of Nature. On this basis, the monadological versions of a system of nature centered upon the integrated organization ad infinitum of living beings were gradually articulated. Leibniz aimed to spell out a science, or physiology (...) of vital processes, that would be, as much as possible, in agreement with the epistemological exigencies of the complex metaphysical model that he had elaborated. On the one hand, Leibniz offers a critical evaluation of the methodological options that divide the allegiances of the physicians and naturalists who are his contemporaries; what is more, he determines the profile of the analyses and explications that are to be promoted. For This double preoccupation translates into the scientific exchanges and correspondences that accompany the construction of the theory of organic bodies as constituents of machines of nature. The author focuses on the particular case of the propositions concerning the science of the living that stem from his reaction to the work of Georg Ernst Stahl. (shrink)

. G. W. Leibniz did not contribute directly to scientific discoveries in the life sciences, but he provided several relevant analyses on methods of investigation applicable to complex, and in particular organic, phenomena. Leibniz's theory of organic bodies and his methodological model had deep and broad implications for the development of physiology at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This paper focuses on a methodological issue which divided natural philosophers and physiologists during the early Enlightenment—about which Leibniz supported (...) original viewpoints which have kept a certain relevance, mutatis mutandis, in later contexts. The issue in question concerns the relation between the surface organization of phenomena and the deeper organization of underlying micro-structures and micro-processes. In a search for the sufficient reason for phenomena, hypothetical models are called upon to provide determining reasons for surface effects. These reasons represent processes involving micro-mechanisms combined so as to account for the emerging organization. (shrink)

François Duchesneau | : Nicolas de Béguelin, philosophe et scientifique, membre de l’Académie de Berlin, entreprit de concilier des thèses contrastées sur les fondements de la philosophie de la nature, qui semblaient suggérer une antinomie irréductible entre les principes leibniziens-wolffiens et les principes newtoniens. Dans une série de mémoires consacrés à ce projet, il tente d’établir qu’une philosophie expérimentale reste incertaine de ses hypothèses, si elle ne les confronte aux réquisits qu’imposent certains des principes architectoniques dérivant du principe (...) de la raison suffisante. Au coeur de l’argument figure une analyse visant à rattacher le concept de loi de la nature à la catégorie des vérités contingentes. Illustration en est fournie par la « déduction » des lois fondamentales de la mécanique : celles-ci ne sauraient être réduites à des propositions abstraites relevant de la seule nécessité géométrique. C’est en se fondant sur le réquisit de l’harmonie universelle que Béguelin propose des hypothèses sur l’intégration de forces motrices, intégration qui serait sous-jacente à l’inertie des corps, et sur l’espace comme ordre de coexistence des corps qui dépendrait de l’interrelation entre des éléments monadiques. | : Nicolas de Béguelin, philosopher and scientist and a member of the Berlin Academy, undertook to conciliate such conflicting views concerning the foundations of natural philosophy as seemed to suggest an irreducible antinomy between the Leibnizian-Wolffian and the Newtonian principles. In a series of memoirs, he argued that experimental philosophy would remain unsettled about the validity of its hypotheses as long as it failed to check them against requisites arising from architectonic principles and their source in sufficient reason. At the heart of his argument, one finds an analysis of the relationship that holds between laws of nature and contingent truths. Case studies were provided relative to the “deduction” of the fundamental laws of mechanics : these should be in no way equated with abstract statements featuring geometrical necessity. Relying on the requisites of universal harmony, Beguelin framed up hypotheses concerning the integration of motive forces underpinning inertia, as well as concerning space as an order of coexistent bodies that would depend on the interrelation between monadic elements. (shrink)

Both Stahl and Leibniz worked out conceptions of the organism that diverged significantly from the mechanistic models involved in the Cartesian dualism of soul and body. In the polemics which developed in 1709-1710 concerning Stahl's Theoria medica vera , Leibniz focused his attacks on what he considered a paralogistic theory of the soul; he wondered in particular how such an abstruse metaphysics could be reconciled with the scientific analysis of vital phenomena. Contrary to Stahl, Leibniz would defend the view that (...) the sufficient reason of organisms at the phenomenal level depends on an integrative combination of specific mechanisms; but the soul conceived as an entelechy needs to be called upon to account for the functional integration of the whole at the substantive level. Thus, the psychic and the somatic would involve a joint rationality unfolding in analogical and expressive relationships. However, both domains would require the use of separate analytic methodologies in any attempt at explaining those relationships. (shrink)

F. Duchesneau, La logique de Leibniz, Paris: Vrin, 1994 368 p., has been published. This has appeared at the same time as the pulication of M. Fichant, G.W. Leibniz, La réforme de la dynamique. De corporum concursu et autres textes inédits, Edition, présentation, traductions et commentaires, Paris: Vrin, 1994, 444 p.

L'une des tâches séculaires de la philosophie est de surmonter ce que Locke nommait l'abus des mots; le dictionnaire des ntions s'efforce de l'accomplir en présentant une technologie des réseaux sémantiques.

David Raynor aborde une pluralité de thèmes chez Berkeley, qui se rapportent soit à la signification ambiguë de l'immatérialisme par rapport à la philosophie spontanée des gens ordinaires, soit au dosage savant de réalisme et d'idéalisme dans une philosophie qui élabore une critique radicale de la doctrine de l'idée-représentation. Il est intéressant de noter que Raynor ne s'en laisse pas raconter par certains interprètes classiques de la pensée berkeleyenne et qu'il sait tirer avantageusement parti d'une confrontation de Berkeley avec des (...) rationalistes tels Male-branche ou Leibniz, mais tout aussi bien d'une mise en perspective à l'intérieur du courant empiriste à partir des réflexions de Hume et de Maupertuis. (shrink)

The text compares Leibniz’s architectonic principles with Wolff’s uses of teleological explanations. Among other points of divergence, it appears that in Wolff “the living being qua ‘natural machine’ has been dispossessed of its character of entailing ‘organism’ to infinity, and deprived of a sufficient reason for its operations equated with the finalized sequences of perceptions of the dominant monad”. As a consequence, while the Leibnizian machines of nature differ from any man-made mechanism, the living being, according to Wolff, is a (...) natural machine whose composition may be legitimately represented as a set of mechanist models. (shrink)

Leibniz differs from Descartes insofar as he submits the search for mechanical explanations to regulatory norms. This is the case, for instance, in dioptrics: provided the law of sines is shown to conform to a sufficient reason of functionality, a relevant mechanical hypothesis is found acceptable. Explaining by means of hypotheses implies a twofold process of connections between an analytic model defining such an order of the elements as may fit the norm of a mathesis, and a presupposed mechanical disposition (...) of the elements such as may produce the constant effects revealed through experience. (shrink)

Jean Gayon can be defined a philosopher of biology with a historical approach to epistemic issues. Evidence for this statement may come from reconsidering his Darwinism’sDarwinismStruggle for Survival (Gayon, Darwinism’s struggle for survival: Heredity and the hypothesis of natural selection, Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1992]), which he presented as “a scenario of rational reconstructionRational reconstruction.” He was essentially interested in developmental perspectives on concepts, theories and analytic procedures, but the reconstructions he considered had to undergo the test of fitting with (...) a historical analysis of the antagonistic theories that developed and succeeded that of DarwinDarwin, Charles. The rigorous and successful methodology Gayon applied in this major work and several others may account for the lasting value of his reconstitution of the transformation phases that the Darwinian hypothesisHypothesis of evolution by natural selectionSelection underwent up to the advent of the evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

To paraphrase Locke (Essay, 9-10), Leibniz may be counted among the master-builders of modern science, but also among the philosophical under-labourers who helped clear the ground for scientific knowledge. In the area of natural philosophy, he contributed directly to the advancement of science, but his achievements, for instance the invention of the infinitesimal calculus and the foundation of the dynamics, bore the mark of a philosophical mind and were systematically exploited in furthering significant epistemological objectives. The scope of Leibniz's scientific (...) interest and contributions was broad. (shrink)