There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly (...) heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists. (shrink)

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus, and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models (...) of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore curious to turn to the ‘passion play’ of the Scientific Revolution – whether in its early, canonical definitions or its more recent, hybridized, reconstructed and expanded versions: from Koyré to Biagioli, from Merton to Shapin – and find there a conspicuous absence of worry over what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe. Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this paper I seek to establish how ‘Life’ became a source of contention in early modern thought, and how the Scientific Revolution missed the controversy. (shrink)

This is the introduction to a special issue of 'Science in Context' on vitalism that I edited. The contents are: 1. Guido Giglioni — “What Ever Happened to Francis Glisson? Albrecht Haller and the Fate of Eighteenth-Century Irritability” 2. Dominique Boury— “Irritability and Sensibility: Two Key Concepts in Assessing the Medical Doctrines of Haller and Bordeu” 3. Tobias Cheung — “Regulating Agents, Functional Interactions, and Stimulus-Reaction-Schemes: The Concept of “Organism” in the Organic System Theories of Stahl, Bordeu and Barthez” 4. (...) Charles T. Wolfe & Motoichi Terada — “The Animal Economy as Object and Program in Montpellier Vitalism” 5. Timo Kaitaro — “Can Matter Mark the Hours? – Eighteenth-Century Vitalist Materialism and Functional Properties” 6. Elizabeth Williams —“Of Two Lives One? Jean-Charles-Marguerite-Guillaume Grimaud and the Question of Holism in Vitalist Medicine” 7. Philippe Huneman — “Montpellier Vitalism and the Emergence of Alienism in France (1750-1800): The Case of the Passions” 8. Elke Witt —“Form – A Matter of Generation. The Relation of Generation, Form and Function in the Epigenetic Theory of C.F. Wolff” . (shrink)

my introduction to special issue of Science in Context on 18c vitalism.

During the mid-18th century, when electricity was coming into its own, natural philosophers began to entertain the possibility that electricity is the mysterious nerve force. Their attention was first drawn to several species of strongly electric fish, namely torpedoes, a type of African catfish, and a South American "eels." This was because their effects felt like those of discharging Leyden jars and could be transmitted along known conductors of electricity. Moreover, their actions could not be adequately explained by popular mechanical (...) theories. Many of the early documents supportive of the hypothesis of animal electricity were associated with the Dutch colonies in South America. This article presents and examines those documents, and shows how Dutch scientists on both sides of the Atlantic conducted experiments and communicated with each other in the 1750s and 1760s. It reveals the important roles played by inquisitive physicians and lovers of nature in South America, and by natural philosophers and collectors of exotic specimens in the Netherlands—learned men who began to make a credible case for animal electricity in some exciting places at a pivotal moment in time. (shrink)

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is widely known as the father of German vitalism and his notion of Bildungstrieb, or nisus formativus, has been recognized as playing a key role in the debates about generation in German-speaking countries around 1800. On the other hand, Caspar Friedrich Wolff was the first to employ a vitalist notion, namely that of vis essentialis, in the explanatory framework of epigenetic development. Is there a difference between Wolff’s vis essentialis and Blumenbach’s nisus formativus? How does this difference (...) influence their overall understanding of the epigenetic process? The paper aims to provide an answer to these questions through the analysis of a little-known document, which contributes to shed light on a crucial chapter of the German life sciences in the late eighteenth-century, namely the decisive phase of the process that led to the formalization of biology as a unified field of inquiry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

During the mid-18th century, when electricity was coming into its own, natural philosophers began to entertain the possibility that electricity is the mysterious nerve force. Their attention was first drawn to several species of strongly electric fish, namely torpedoes, a type of African catfish, and a South American "eels." This was because their effects felt like those of discharging Leyden jars and could be transmitted along known conductors of electricity. Moreover, their actions could not be adequately explained by popular mechanical (...) theories. Many of the early documents supportive of the hypothesis of animal electricity were associated with the Dutch colonies in South America. This article presents and examines those documents, and shows how Dutch scientists on both sides of the Atlantic conducted experiments and communicated with each other in the 1750s and 1760s. It reveals the important roles played by inquisitive physicians and lovers of nature in South America, and by natural philosophers and collectors of exotic specimens in the Netherlands—learned men who began to make a credible case for animal electricity in some exciting places at a pivotal moment in time. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article addresses the doctrinal controversy over the various characterizations of irritability and sensibility. In the middle of the eighteenth century, this scientific debate involved some encyclopaedist physicians, Albrecht von Haller (1709–1777), Jean-Jacques Ménuret de Chambaud (1733–1815), and Théophile de Bordeu (1722–1776). The doctor from Bern described irritability as an experimental property of the muscle fibers and made it the basis of a neo-mechanism in which organic reactions are related to the degree of irritation of the fibers. The practitioners from (...) Montpellier considered sensibility, a property of living matter, to be a spontaneous activity of the organ and developed around this notion an original conception of the organism as the sum of the specific lives of each part. Beyond conceptual divergences, two ways of thinking whose philosophical presuppositions (conception of living matter, mechanism, and organicism), were in opposition, while their epistemological principles (experience versus observation) and their medical practices (active medicine and expectant medicine) went on to evolve in different directions. The privileged place granted to experimentation and assessment enabled physiology to be articulated as an autonomous scientific discipline; the pre-eminence of observation and attention to the radical specificity of the living being constituted the bases of clinical medicine. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article investigates the reasons behind the disappearance of Francis Glisson's theory of irritability during the eighteenth century. At a time when natural investigations were becoming increasingly polarized between mind and matter in the attempt to save both man's consciousness and the inert nature of theres extensa, Glisson's notion of a natural perception embedded in matter did not satisfy the new science's basic injunction not to superimpose perceptions and appetites on nature. Knowledgeofnature could not be based on knowledgewithinnature, i.e., on (...) the very knowledge that nature has of itself; or – to look at the same question from the point of view of the human mind – man's consciousness could not be seen as participating in forms of natural selfhood. Albrecht Haller played a key role in this story. Through his experiments, Haller thought he had conclusively demonstrated that the response given by nature when irritated did not betray any natural perceptivity, any inner life, anysentiment interiéur. In doing so, he provided a less bewildering theory of irritability for the rising communities of experimental physiology. (shrink)

ArgumentIn this essay, I sketch a problem-based framework within which I locate the concept of “organism” in the system theories of Georg Ernst Stahl, Théophile Bordeu, and Paul-Joseph Barthez. Around 1700, Stahl coins the word “organism” for a certain concept of order. For him, the concept explains the form of order of living bodies that is categorically different from the order of other bodies or composites. At the end of the century, the “organism” as a specific form of order becomes (...) a major topos in many discourses. I will not so much focus on experiments and objects as on basic problems that contribute to the general framework of the concept of organism as a key concept of the vitalist movement between 1700 and 1800. For this purpose, I will investigate the combination of three explanatory tools. These tools refer to regulating agents, functional interactions, and stimulus-reactions-schemes within individual organic systems of forces. They are related to various themes – especially to energy, sensibility, and sympathy. I will retrace some aspects of these relations. (shrink)

For Kant, the main aim of teleology in nature is to identify or to segregate as a particular class of objects certain types of causal systems, specifically, systems of interdependent parts.With the development of physiology as a distinct science at the beginning of the 18th century, the idea of interdependence or reciprocity of parts in a system was well-established as a fundamental principle for the specification of organisms. Kant combined the ideas of teleology and causal reciprocity in his systems-theoretical foundation (...) of organized beings in nature. In the analysis of such systems teleological thinking, i.e. the focus on end states or outcomes, is prevalent because the outcome of each process is relevant for the perpetuation of the system as a whole. Teleological thinking thus plays a methodological role in Kant’s philosophy of nature. Its status ismerely reflective, in that it neither postulates a separate ontological category for living beings nor does it constrain mechanical explanations. But at the same time, teleology is constitutive for a particular class of objects and their scientific study. In Kants Philosophie der Naturwissenschaften kommt der Teleologie eine wesentliche Rolle in der Identifikation und Ausgliederung einer bestimmten Klasse von kausalen Systemen zu: den Systemen aus wechselseitig voneinander abhängigen Teilen. Die Vorstellung der wechselseitigen Abhängigkeit zwischen den Teilen eines Ganzen entwickelt sich mit der Etablierung der Physiologie als einer besonderen Wissenschaft zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts zu einem grundlegenden Prinzip, das der Spezifizierung von Organismen dient. Kant verbindet diese Vorstellung der Wechselseitigkeit mit der Teleologie in seiner systemtheoretischen Fundierung des Begriffs eines organisierten Wesens der Natur. In der Analyse dieser Systeme spielt die Teleologie im Sinne der Konzipierung eines Prozesses ausgehend von seinem Resultat eine wichtige Rolle, weil die Wirkung eines physiologischen Vorgangs für die Erhaltung des ganzen organischen Systems entscheidend ist. Da das System in seiner Einheit und Ganzheit erst in der teleologischen Beurteilung erkannt wird, kommt dem teleologischen Denken in Kants Philosophie der Naturwissenschaften eine methodologische Funktion zu. Die teleologische Beurteilung hat allerdings einen bloß reflektierenden Status, insofern über sie keine neue ontologische Kategorie für Lebewesen begründet wird und die Reichweite mechanistischer Erklärungen durch sie nicht beschränkt wird. Trotzdem ist die Teleologie konstitutiv für die Erkenntnis einer bestimmten Klasse von Gegenständen und deren wissenschaftliche Untersuchung. (shrink)

This paper seeks to characterize how the study of nutrition processes contributed to revisit the problem of vital organization in the late eighteenth century. It argues that focusing on nutrition leads to reformulate the problem of the relation between life and organization in terms of processes, rather than static or given structures. This nutrition-centered approach to life amounts to acknowledge the specific strategic role nutrition played in the development of a materialist approach to the generation of vital organization. The paper (...) proposes a clarification of the multiple meanings of the concept of organization in the context of Enlightenment physiology and nascent biology, before focusing on the century long analogy between nutrition and generation. It shows how, by contrasting different uses of this analogy, nutrition was employed as a key vital phenomenon in the development of epigenetic theories of generation, i.e. how a nutritive modeling of generation was used in the undermining of preformationism. To this purpose I contrast two seemingly opposite theories of generation, Buffon’s and Bonnet’s, and show that despite the obvious metaphysical discontent, their views of generation share a common mechanical conceptual frame in which nutrition is conflated with growth and repair. I then turn to the role nutrition played in the epigenetic conception of generation in C. F. Wolff’s embryology and analyze this rival understanding of nutrition as an organizing process. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to bring to light the importance of the notion of économie animale in Montpellier vitalism, as a hybrid concept which brings together the structural and functional dimensions of the living body – dimensions which hitherto had primarily been studied according to a mechanistic model, or were discussed within the framework of Stahlian animism. The celebrated image of the bee-swarm expresses this structural-functional understanding of living bodies quite well: “One sees them press against each other, (...) mutually supporting each other, forming a kind of whole, in which each living part, in its own way, by means of the correspondence and directions of its motions, enables this kind of life to be sustained in the body” (Encyclopédie, article “Observation,” by Ménuret de Chambaud). What is important here is that every component part is always a living part, i.e., every structural unit is always functional. Interestingly, while the twin notions of ‘animal economy’ and organisation are presented as improvements over a mechanistic perspective, they are nonetheless compatible with an expanded sense of mechanism and by extension, with materialism as reflected notably in the writings of Ménuret and Bordeu. We thus propose both a revision and reconstruction of the historical status of the ‘animal economy’, and a reflection on its conceptual status. (shrink)

ArgumentHere I analyze the anatomical thought of the French physician and naturalist Félix Vicq d'Azyr (1748–1794) in order to bring to light its importance in the development of comparative anatomy at the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that his work and career can be understood as an ambitious program for a radical reform of all biomedical sciences and a reorganization of this whole field around comparative anatomy, on the conceptual as well as the institutional level. In particular, he (...) recommended a close connection between anatomical and physiological studies, and a generalization of the comparative approach towards organs and functions in man and animals. This conception led him not only to reform the scope, the methods, the style of description, and the vocabulary in anatomy, but also to construct a new classification of living beings and to pursue a quest for laws of organization. This strategy was successful, since Vicq d'Azyr was able to promote his thought as well as his institutional position efficiently. The Revolution and his untimely death prevented him from achieving his program, but his attempt would serve as an example for younger scientists like Cuvier. (shrink)

ArgumentMontpellier vitalists upheld a medical perspective akin to modern “holism” in positing the functional unity of creatures imbued with life. While early vitalists focused on the human organism, Jean-Charles-Marguerite-Guillaume Grimaud investigated digestion, growth, and other physiological processes that human beings shared with simpler organisms. Eschewing modern investigative methods, Grimaud promoted a medically-grounded “metaphysics.” His influential doctrine of the “two lives” broke with Montpellier holism, classifying some vital phenomena as “higher” and others as “lower” and attributing the “nobility” of the human (...) species to the predominance of the former. In place of Montpellier teaching that attributed health to the holistic equilibration of vital activities, Grimaud embraced spiritualist dualisms of soul and body, Creator and created. Celebrating the divinely-ordained “wisdom” evident in involuntary physiological processes, he argued that such life functions were incomprehensible to human investigators. While Grimaud's work encouraged inquiry into the division between the central and “vegetative” nervous systems that became paradigmatic in nineteenth-century neuroscience, it also opened Montpellier vitalism to charges of conservatism and obscurantism that are still lodged against it to the present day. (shrink)

In diesem Artikel geht es um die historische und konzeptuelle Entwicklung von Charles Bonnets (1720-1793) allgemeiner Systemtheorie organismischer Ordnung. Hierfür wird der Kontext von Bonnets Ansatz in Naturgeschichte und Philosophie rekonstruiert. Leitfaden zur Analyse von Bonnets Systemtheorie bildet das Problem der doppelten Verortung des Organischen: Zum einen unterscheiden sich organisierte Körper durch ihre Ordnungsform von allen nicht organisierten Körpern, und zum anderen reihen sie sich zusammen mit den nicht-organisierten Körpern in eine Stufenleiter der Wesen ein, die von den Elementen bis (...) zum Menschen reicht und Mineralien, Pflanzen und Tiere umfasst. Anhand dieser Problemstellung wird eine Interpretationsebene entwickelt, die es erlaubt, Bonnets Ansatz einer bestimmten Transformation zwischen klassischer Metaphysik und Naturgeschichte zuzuordnen. The article focuses on the historical and conceptual development of Charles Bonnet's (1720-1793) general system theory of organismic order. The context of Bonnet's work will be reconstructed in natural history and philosophy. The problem of the double position of organic bodies is central for the understanding of Bonnet's theory: On the one hand, organized bodies are different from all non-organized bodies, and on the other hand, organized and non-organized beings form a single scale of beings that reaches from the elements to minerals, plants, animals and humans. This problematic setting will be characterized as a specific transformation between classical metaphysics and natural history. (shrink)

Several problems with Hegel’s conception of the organism in the Encyclopaedia are due to the separation between individual life in Nature and the universal life of the Concept. This discontinuity between ontogenesis and phylogenesis in his dialectics of organic life will be studied here by following his presentation of physiological development, especially reproduction, and by reconstructing the historical model he criticizes—Leibniz’s organic machines and their development in Buffon’s Natural History—a model that was also of crucial importance to the philosophy of (...) nature of Schelling and his followers. (shrink)