Vitalism

This paper thematizes the crucial agreement and point of departure between Jacobi and Fichte at the height of the “atheism controversy.” The argument on the proper relationship between philosophy and existence or speculation and life had far-reaching consequences in the history of thought after Jacobi and Fichte in German Idealism on the one hand, primarly advocated by Schelling and Hegel, and on the other hand by existentialism and vitalism. The essay focuses first on Jacobi’s philosophy of life, which centrally influenced (...) and attracted Fichte to Jacobi. Jacobi’s dualism between speculation, of which he was skeptical, and life, became Fichte’s dualism. Fichte’s transcendentalism, however, prioritized, contrary to Jacobi, both speculation and systematicity. Both of these elements became central for later forms of German Idealism. In the last part of the essay Hegel’s absolute idealism becomes the platform affording a critical perspective on Fichte’s transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and death camps—all in an attempt to support notions of racial superiority. By investigating the past, the contributors to _Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins_ hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future. Denis R. Alexander (...) and Ronald L. Numbers bring together fourteen experts to examine the varied ways science has been used and abused for nonscientific purposes from the fifteenth century to the present day. Featuring an essay on eugenics from Edward J. Larson and an examination of the progress of evolution by Michael J. Ruse, _Biology and Ideology_ examines uses both benign and sinister, ultimately reminding us that ideological extrapolation continues today. An accessible survey, this collection will enlighten historians of science, their students, practicing scientists, and anyone interested in the relationship between science and culture. (shrink)

The term ‘mechanism’ has been used in two quite different ways in the history of biology. Operative, or explanatory mechanism refers to the step-by-step description or explanation of how components in a system interact to yield a particular outcome . Philosophical Mechanism, on the other hand, refers to a broad view of organisms as material entities, functioning in ways similar to machines — that is, carrying out a variety of activities based on known chemical and physical processes. In the early (...) twentieth century philosophical Mechanism became the foundation of a ‘new biology’ that sought to establish the life sciences on the same solid and rigorous foundation as the physical sciences, including a strong emphasis on experimentation. In the context of the times this campaign was particularly aimed at combating the reintroduction of more holistic, non-mechanical approaches into the life sciences . In so doing, Mechanists failed to see some of the strong points of non-vitalistic holistic thinking. The two approaches are illustrated in the work of Jacques Loeb and Hans Spemann. (shrink)

Since Aristotle the central question in biology was the origin of organic form; a question put in the backyard by neo-Darwinism that considers organic form as a side effect of the interactions between genes and their products. On the other hand, the fashionable notion of self-organization also fails to provide a true causal explanation for organic form. For Aristotle form is both a cause and the principle of intelligibility and this coupled to the classical concepts of potentiality and actuality provides (...) a rational framework,currently embodied in the contemporary concept of ‘attractor’, for understanding the origin of organic form. (shrink)

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marks a period of transition between the vitalistic ontology that had dominated Renaissance natural philosophy and the Early Modern mechanistic paradigm endorsed by, among others, the Cartesians and Newtonians. This paper will focus on how the tensions between vitalism and mechanism played themselves out in the context of sixteenth and seventeenth century chemistry and chemical philosophy, particularly in the works of Paracelsus, Jan Baptista Van Helmont, Robert Fludd, and Robert Boyle. Rather than argue that these (...) natural philosophers each embraced either fully vitalistic or fully mechanistic ontologies, I hope to demonstrate that these thinkers adhered to complicated and nuanced ontologies that cannot be described in either purely vitalistic or purely mechanistic terms. A central feature of my argument is the claim that a corpuscularian theory of matter does not entail a strictly mechanistic and reductionistic account of chemical properties. I also argue that what marks the shift from pre-modern vitalistic chemical philosophy to the modern chemical philosophy that marked the Chemical Revolution is not the victory of mechanism and reductionism in chemistry but, rather, the shift to a physicalistic and naturalistic account of chemical properties and vital spirits. (shrink)

The 16th and 17th centuries marked a period of transition from the vitalistic ontology that had dominated Renaissance natural philosophy to the Early Modern mechanistic paradigm endorsed by, among others, the Cartesians and Newtonians. This paper focuses on how the tensions between vitalism and mechanism played themselves out in the context of 16th and 17th century chemistry and chemical philosophy. The paper argues that, within the fields of chemistry and chemical philosophy, the significant transition that culminated in the 18th century (...) Chemical Revolution was not a transition from vitalism to full-blown mechanism. Rather, chemical philosophy shifted from a vitalistic theory of matter and spirits to a naturalistic, physicalistic, and corpuscularian conception of chemical properties and reactions. Despite being naturalistic, physicalistic, and corpuscularian, however, this theory was not fully mechanistic. Special attention is paid to the contributions made by Paracelsus, Sebastien Basso, Jan Baptista van Helmont, and Robert Boyle to this ontological transition. (shrink)

Over the past decades, self-assembly has attracted a lot of research attention and transformed the relations between chemistry, materials science and biology. The paper explores the impact of the current interest in self-assembly techniques on the traditional debate over the nature of life. The first section describes three different research programs of self-assembly in nanotechnology in order to characterize their metaphysical implications: (1) Hybridization (using the building blocks of living systems for making devices and machines) ; (2) Biomimetics (making artifacts (...) mimicking nature); (3) Integration (a composite of the two previous strategies). The second section focused on the elusive boundary between self-assembly and self-organization tries to map out the various positions adopted by the promoters of self-assembly on the issue of vitalism. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the encounter between American intellectual culture and vitalist theories of mind and metaphysics in the 1910s. The exercise is an attempt to shed new light first, on the consolidation of "scientific" psychotherapeutics in the United States; and second, on the nature and derivation of radical progressivism. The energetic popular response to vitalism and the avid adoption of its key tenets by leading analysts of the American self and society also facilitates a deeper inquiry into the psychic, spiritual, (...) and moral dynamic of modernity at a signal point in its evolution. Exemplary of the process of disruption and remediation that animated the modern sensibility, vitalism subverted ethical, ontological, and metaphysical stabilities even as it extended the prospect of compensatory psychic regeneration via a new essentialism of the flux of life. Vitalism's constitutive duality was the source of its powerful efficacy for those disordered modern selves seeking their own, and comprehensive social, regeneration. Perhaps the most prominent and influential of these were James Jackson Putnam , and the radical progressive social critics Randolph Bourne, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Croly. The dissertation traces the mixed motives and consequences of these figure's participation in 'the vitalist insurgency.' In doing so it begins a necessary historical reconsideration of a much maligned but little understood current of modern thought, and invites new deliberation on its contemporary possibilities. (shrink)

The modernist movement has been regarded as representing a crisis point in Western thought. This volume looks at that crisis in terms of its reinterpretation of ideas concerning vitalism: the animation of the universe, whether spiritual or based in physical energies) of the universe. Beginning with vitalism's historical background in the enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and moving through scientific, philosophical and literary disciplines, the contributors chart the progress of vitalism and its influence on modernist thought. The focal point is (...) the work of Henri Bergson, whose part in this powerful reinterpretation had a considerable bearing on European and American intellectual life, and yet led to a vehement rejection of his work. A previously untranslated and little-known essay by Bakhtin will be of special interest in this stimulating collection, which includes original contributions from leading scholars in literature, the history of science, biology and philosophy, and comprises a wide-ranging reassessment of 'the perpetual crises of modernity'. The modernist movement has been regarded as representing a crisis point in Western thought. This volume looks at that crisis in terms of its reinterpretation of ideas concerning vitalism: the animation of the universe, whether spiritual or based in physical energies) of the universe. Beginning with vitalism's historical background in the enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and moving through scientific, philosophical and literary disciplines, the contributors chart the progress of vitalism and its influence on modernist thought. The focal point is the work of Henri Bergson, whose part in this powerful reinterpretation had a considerable bearing on European and American intellectual life, and yet led to a vehement rejection of his work. A previously untranslated and little-known essay by Bakhtin will be of special interest in this stimulating collection, which includes original contributions from leading scholars in literature, the history of science, biology and philosophy, and comprises a wide-ranging reassessment of 'the perpetual crises of modernity'. (shrink)

Introduction: The problem of vitalism : active/passive -- Brain, system, model : the affective turn -- Vitalism and theoria -- Inorganic art -- Inorganic vitalism -- The vital order after theory -- On becoming -- Living systems, extended minds, gaia -- Conclusion.

The philosophy of Hedwig Conrad-Martius represents a very important intersection point between phenomenological research and the natural sciences in the twentieth century. She tried to open a common pattern from the ontology of the physical being up to anthropology, passing from the biological sciences. An intersection point that, for the particular features of her thought, is rather a perspective point from which to observe, in an interesting and original way, both natural sciences and phenomenology. The 1923 essay entitled Real Ontology (...) (Conrad-Martius 1923) is the starting point for her reflections about science, but it is also the point that marks a separation from Husserl (for a detailed discussion, see: Ales Bello 2003, pp. 184–195), even if not from phenomenology. A fundamental question is faced: “why something instead of nothing?” or: “what is the reality?,” shifting the focus from essence to existence. Whichever the answer, a deeply realistic position must be assumed, based on the assumption of a clear distinction between the subject and the world, and the possibility of knowledge, intended as adaequatio of the subject’s intellectus to the external reality. (shrink)

This is an attempt to interpret the history of mechanism vs. vitalism in relation to the changing framework of culture and to show the interrelation between both these views and experimental science. After the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, causal mechanism of classical physics provided the framework for the study of nature. The teleological and holistic properties of life, however, which are incompatible with this theory yielded — as a result both of internal developments within biology and of a (...) general reaction against dogmatic rationalism — to a vitalistic interpretation of life which ascribed a mysterious force to living organisms. It will be shown that both mechanism and vitalism are related to the experimental climate of the time in which they were popular. The controversy has now lost its raison d'être as a result of the development of the theory of systems and of a better understanding of the chemistry and evolution of life. (shrink)

According to vitalism, living organisms differ from machines and all other inanimate objects by being endowed with an indwelling immaterial directive agency, ‘vital force,’ or entelechy . While support for vitalism fell away in the late nineteenth century many biologists in the early twentieth century embraced a non vitalist philosophy variously termed organicism/holism/emergentism which aimed at replacing the actions of an immaterial spirit with what was seen as an equivalent but perfectly natural agency—the emergent autonomous activity of the whole organism. (...) Organicists hold that organisms unlike machines are ‘more than the sum of their parts’ and predict that the vital properties of living things can never be explained in terms of mechanical analogies and that the reductionist agenda is doomed to failure. Here we review the current status of the mechanist and organicist conceptions of life particularly as they apply to the cell. We argue that despite the advances in biological knowledge over the past six decades since the molecular biological revolution, especially in the fields of genetics and cell biology the unique properties of living cells have still not been simulated in mechanical systems nor yielded to reductionist—analytical explanations. And we conclude that despite the dominance of the mechanistic–reductionist paradigm through most of the past century the possibility of a twentyfirst century organicist revival cannot be easily discounted. (shrink)

An extended discussion of Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 217 pp.

Viktor Hamburger was a developmental biologist interested in the ontogenesis of the vertebrate nervous system. A student of Hans Spemann at Freiburg in the 1920s, Hamburger picked up a holistic view of the embryo that precluded him from treating it in a reductionist way; at the same time, he was committed to a materialist and analytical approach that eschewed any form of vitalism or metaphysics. This paper explores how Hamburger walked this thin line between mechanistic reductionism and metaphysical vitalism in (...) light of his work on the factors influencing growth of neurons into limb buds, and the discovery of nerve growth factor, work carried out with Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen. (shrink)

This book demonstrates how and why vitalism—the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism—matters now. Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences while simultaneously addressing the object of life itself. The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities and questions about contingency, indeterminacy, relationality and change. All have special importance now, (...) as the concepts of complexity, artificial life and artificial intelligence, information theory, and cybernetics become increasingly significant in more and more fields of activity. (shrink)

This essay examines some aspects of the early history of the vitalism/mechanism controversies by examining the work of Nehemiah Grew in relation to that of Henry More , Francis Glisson and the more mechanistically inclined members of the Royal Society. I compliment and critically comment on John Henry's exploration of active principles in pre-Newtonian mechanist thought. The postulation of ‘active matter’ can be seen as an important support for the new experimental philosophy, but it has theological drawbacks, allowing for a (...) self-sufficient nature relatively independent of God. Grew resists this view and, like Henry More, advocates the need for a vital principle to direct material nature towards its ends. I illustrate the connection Grew sees between teleology and vitalism and the paper closes with Pierre Bayle's reaction to Grew's attempt to support his religious commitments by appeal to vital principles.So many Arts, hath the Divine Wisdom put together; onlyfor the hull and tackle, of a sensible and Thinking creature.Nehemiah Grew, Cosmologia. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett has claimed that if Chalmers' argument for the irreducibility of consciousness were to succeed, an analogous argument would establish the truth of Vitalism. Chalmers denies that there is such an analogy. I argue that the analogy does have merit and that skepticism is called for.

Recent successes of systems biology clarified that biological functionality is multilevel. We point out that this fact makes it necessary to revise popular views about macromolecular functions and distinguish between local, physico-chemical and global, biological functions. Our analysis shows that physico-chemical functions are merely tools of biological functionality. This result sheds new light on the origin of cellular life, indicating that in evolutionary history, assignment of biological functions to cellular ingredients plays a crucial role. In this wider picture, even if (...) aggregation of chance mutations of replicator molecules and spontaneously self-assembled proteins led to the formation of a system identical with a living cell in all physical respects but devoid of biological functions, it would remain an inanimate physical system, a pseudo-cell or a zombie-cell but not a viable cell. In the origin of life scenarios, a fundamental circularity arises, since if cells are the minimal units of life, it is apparent that assignments of cellular functions require the presence of cells and vice versa. Resolution of this dilemma requires distinguishing between physico-chemical and biological symbols as well as between physico-chemical and biological information. Our analysis of the concepts of symbol, rule and code suggests that they all rely implicitly on biological laws or principles. We show that the problem is how to establish physico-chemically arbitrary rules assigning biological functions without the presence of living organisms. We propose a solution to that problem with the help of a generalized action principle and biological harnessing of quantum uncertainties. By our proposal, biology is an autonomous science having its own fundamental principle. The biological principle ought not to be regarded as an emergent phenomenon. It can guide chemical evolution towards the biological one, progressively assigning greater complexity and functionality to macromolecules and systems of macromolecules at all levels of organization. This solution explains some perplexing facts and posits a new context for thinking about the problems of the origin of life and mind. (shrink)