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.
1. Brooke Holmes (Princeton): The Two-Soul Problem: Aristotle, the
Stoics, Galen.- 2. Hannah Landecker: Metabolic Materialism.-
3. Christopher Donohue (NIH): Concerning the Tenacious Adherence of Animal
Spirit to Matter".- 4. Crystal Hall (Bowdoin College) and Erik L. Peterson
(University of Alabama): Who were the vitalists and where did they go?.-
5. Jane Maienschein (ASU): Early Twentieth Century Accounts of the
Individuality of Organized Whole Organisms.- 6. Bohang Chen (Ghent): Hans
Driesch and vitalism: the standpoint of logical empiricism.- 7. Mazviita
Chirimuuta (Pittsburgh): The Critical Difference between Holism and Vitalism
in Cassirers Philosophy of Science.- 8. Tano S. Posteraro (Penn State):
Vitalism and the Problem of Individuation: Another Look at Bergsons Élan
Vital.- 9. Sebastjan Vörös (Ljubljana): Is there not a truth of vitalism?
Transcendental vitalism in light of Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty, and Varela.-
10. Arantza Exteberria (IAS, San Sebastian) and Charles T. Wolfe (Ghent):
Canguilhem and the logic of life.- 11. Phillip Honenberger (UNLV): All
Knowing is Orientation: Marjorie Grene's Ecological Epistemology.- 12. Alvaro
Moreno (IAS, San Sebastian): What is life? The historical dimension of
biological organization.- 13. Cécilia Bognon-Küss (Louvain-La Neuve): The
concept of metabolism, biological identity and the challenges from microbiome
research.
Dr. Christopher Donohue is Historian of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health. He established the institutional archives at the NHGRI and currently manages the History of Genomics Program, which promotes the study of genomics and its integration into the 20th century life sciences. He has conducted over sixty oral history interviews which cover all aspects of modern biology and genetics. He is the editor of a special issue on Genomics and the Human Genome Project for the Journal of the History of Biology. He is an associate editor of the Ideology and Politics Journal, which publishes peer-reviewed scholarly work on post-Soviet ideas and politics. Dr. Donohue focuses on the history of population genetics as well as conceptual issues in contemporary biological science. His interests range from conceptual appropriation in the biological and the social sciences to the reception of various scientific ideologies (Darwinism, vitalism, materialism) in central and south-eastern Europe.
Charles T. Wolfe is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Université de Toulouse-2 Jean-Jaurès. He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (2016), La philosophie de la biologie: une histoire du vitalisme (2019) and Lire le matérialisme (2020), and has edited or coedited volumes on monsters, brains, empiricism, biology, mechanism and vitalism, including most recently (w. D. Jalobeanu) the Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences (2019-2022) and (w. J. Symons, in progress) The History and Philosophy of Materialism. He is co-editor of the book series History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences (Springer). Papers available at [ https://univ-tlse2.academia.edu/CharlesWolfe]
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