“The difficulty of discussion between people brought up in different frameworks is to be admitted,” Karl Popper writes. “But nothing is more fruitful than such a discussion; than the culture clash which has stimulated some of the greatest intellectual revolutions.”71 Certainly Kirby and Darwin were brought up in different cultures — Kirby with his Anglican-Tory orientation, Darwin with his Whig-liberal background — and certainly the clash generated some interesting theories; but it also resulted in the revival of Lamarck's discredited habit (...) theory, which took another century of careful experimentation to weed out. (shrink)

For some fifteen years in his chemistry lectures in Edinburgh, Joseph Black taught that phlogiston possesses absolute levity. It was not an aberration on Black's part: he justified the notion on experimental grounds. Moreover, the existence of a nongravitating substance capable of entering the composition of bodies raised intriguing possibilities for uniting physical and chemical phenomena. The doctrine became something of a tradition in Edinburgh, but was subject to growing criticism, particulary with the growth of pneumatic chemistry. By the early (...) 1780s, Black found the hypothesis was no longer tenable and quietly dropped it, leaving a void in the explanation of weight relations in combustion which his students were quick to fill with Lavoisier's oxygen theory. (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)

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)

Although not universally accepted at the time, the atomic hypothesis during the 19th century provided a definite ordering scheme for certain relatively sophisticated chemical phenomena. As such, it was conceptually responsible for the formulation and precise articulation of important seminal ideas in chemical studies. In this paper we will explore this claim with regard to the views of the British chemist Alexander W. Williamson.