Life as concept and as science

This project, entitled Life as concept and as science: A reconstruction of modern vitalism, 17001950, aims to produce a philosophical counter-history of biology in which the focal point is vitalism. What is vitalism? In biology, and the disciplines in the humanities dealing with biology (history of biology, philosophy of biology, etc.), vitalism is generally understood as an almost mystically strong claim about the uniqueness of Life, living beings, organisms in relation to the rest of the physical universe. Vitalism has classically been taken to be the most extreme, even unscientific position regarding the uniqueness of biological entities, and as such has been rejected as a pre-scientific embarrassment in mainstream scientific discourse. But careful historical scholarship reveals the existence of different forms of vitalism, some of which are deeply interconnected with positive developments in medicine, physiology and experimental biology overall. Contrasting with usage of the term vitalism in English-language scholarship in early modern philosophy, where it is applied to early modern authors like Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway and sometimes Henry More, to mean something akin to panpsychism (namely, the presence of mind throughout matter), I make use of more precise contexts derived chiefly from the history and philosophy of the life sciences. Thereby I arrive both at a more careful (and nuanced) definition, and investigate how vitalism is actively present in three key episodes in the joint development of biology and a kind of philosophy of life (i.e. philosophical reflection on biological life, which exists actively in the early modern and Enlightenment periods, well prior to the specific constitution of philosophy of biology in the mid-20th century): 1) the emergence of the concept of organism in the early Enlightenment, coming out of the debate between Leibniz and Stahl; 2) the late 18th-century emergence of biology as a science and the development of (experimental) physiology in 19th-century France, with the great physiologist Claude Bernard; 3) the shift to a more philosophical and theoretical form of vitalism in the 20th century, with the philosopher of medicine and biology; Georges Canguilhem. This project is both philosophical and historical in character, and it yields both a new vision of biology as a science and a new understanding of metaphysical issues in early modern philosophy and beyond, concerning organism, biological individuality and the nature of Life. It is the first philosophical history of vitalism.