Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy

Christopher Donohue, Charles T. Wolfe

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9783031126031
• eBook ISBN: 9783031126048
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

This Open Access book combines philosophical and historical analysis of various forms of alternatives to mechanism and mechanistic explanation, focusing on the 19th century to the present. It addresses vitalism, organicism and responses to materialism and its relevance to current biological science. In doing so, it promotes dialogue and discussion about the historical and philosophical importance of vitalism and other non-mechanistic conceptions of life. It points towards the integration of genomic science into the broader history of biology. It details a broad engagement with a variety of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century vitalisms and conceptions of life. In addition, it discusses important threads in the history of concepts in the United States and Europe, including charting new reception histories in eastern and south-eastern Europe. While vitalism, organicism and similar epistemologies are often the concern of specialists in the history and philosophy of biology and of historians of ideas, the range of the contributions as well as the geographical and temporal scope of the volume allows for it to appeal to the historian of science and the historian of biology generally.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Vitalism and Its Legacies in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy
• Vitalism and the Problem of Individuation: Another Look at Bergson’s Élan Vital
• On the Heuristic Value of Hans Driesch’s Vitalism
• A Historico-Logical Re-assessment of Hans Driesch’s Vitalism
• “A Mountain of Nonsense”? Czech and Slovenian Receptions of Materialism and Vitalism from c. 1860s to the First World War
• The Critical Difference Between Holism and Vitalism in Cassirer’s Philosophy of Science
• Canguilhem and the Greeks: Vitalism Between History and Philosophy
• Canguilhem and the Logic of Life
• Is There Not a Truth of Vitalism? Vital Normativity in Canguilhem and Merleau-Ponty
• A ‘Fourth Wave’ of Vitalism in the Mid-20th Century?
• Metabolism in Crisis? A New Interplay Between Physiology and Ecology
• Vitalist Arguments in the Struggle for Human (Im)Perfection: The Debate Between Biologists and Theologians in the 1960s–1980s
• What Is Living and What Is Dead in Political Vitalism?
• Back Matter