It is beyond the scope of this paper to describe in detail the rise to popularity of the emboîtement theories during the last decades of the seventeenth century.51 Eventually the theories did gain great influence, but some points emerging from the above discussion indicate that the rise to popularity was not, perhaps, quite as rapid as has sometimes been assumed.52 Although the earlier preformation theories were sometimes regarded as the ancestors of the later ideas,53 there was little intellectual continuity (...) between the two movements, based as they were upon such divergent motivations. Nor can the preformation theories be regarded as the origin of the belief that a miniature can actually be seen within the egg, since the existence of metamorphosis as a perfectly valid alternative to epigenesis meant that the work of Malpighi and others, usually described as “preformationist,” was not always taken in this latter sense at the time it was published. The pre-existence theories developed in response to particular philosophical problems, and were themselves responsible for the reinterpretation of the observations. In France, the thoughts of Malebranche and Perrault were probably already exerting influence before their written support for pre-existence appeared, but elsewhere the idea was not taken up so rapidly, and ovism, for instance, could develop without associating itself with emboîtement. Malpighi always seems to have remained opposed to pre-existence,54 but by the last decade of the century, the idea had become sufficiently powerful to influence Ray and Garden in Britain, and was receiving support from as influential a thinker as Leibniz.55 But Garden and Hartsoeker were responsible for dividing emboîtement between two schools, just as the concept itself was becoming popular. The work of both Malpighi and Leeuwenhoek served as the basis of the animalculist version, illustrating how the microscopic discoveries served as much to disrupt the intellectual development of the emboîtement concept as they did to promote it. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402051 00002. (shrink)

The 17th and 18th centuries were the theatre of the fight between two main theories concerning the development of organisms: preformationism (or preformism) and epigeneticism (or epigenesis). According to the first, the formation of new features during organisms’ development can be seen as the result of a mere unfolding of features that were preformed in the sperm, the egg, or the zygote. According to epigeneticism, there is no pre-existing form, and development is a process where genuinely new characters emerge from (...) formless matter. The debate involved naturalists, anatomists, physiologists, microscopists, medical doctors, and philosophers as well. Current developmental biology is, according to some, still inspired (or haunted) by the age-old controversy. The aim of this contribution is twofold. First, to discuss in which guise, if any, the old controversy is still shaping the contemporary debate in biology and philosophy of biology; and, second, to sketch Schelling’s position on that debate, suggesting that it may contain some still valuable philosophical insight. (shrink)

Most patterns of an organism develop reproducibly and predictably. Thus, most biological patterns are largely predetermined by the nature of the zygote and by the nature of the surrounding world. Some ontogenetic patterns can also be considered to be preformed. Eighteenth and nineteenth century definitions of 'preformation' suggested that all aspects of a precursor pattern--its elements and its configuration--are preserved during development. Today, the idea of preformed configurations has been lost. To revive this lost idea, we offer the following (...) biologically contemporary definition for preformed ontogenetic patterns: preformed patterns are those patterns with topologies that have been conserved during their ontogenies. This definition is presented in precise mathematical language, and its application is demonstrated in a system of developing, abstract patterns. (shrink)

For the mature Leibniz, a living being is a created substance composed of an infinitely complex organic body and a simple, immaterial soul. Soul and body do not interact directly, but rather their states correspond according to a harmony preestablished by God. I show that Leibniz’s theory faces challenges with respect to the question of whether substances need to possess knowledge of how they bring about their effects, and I argue that, to address these challenges, Leibniz turns to a concept (...) of “divine preformation” that he attributes to both soul and body. Insofar as divine preformation provides Leibniz with an explanation for how soul and body can both act without possessing explicit knowledge of what they are doing, it serves as a key tool for justifying the theory of preestablished harmony. (shrink)

Malebranche is both an occasionalist and an advocate of the preformationist theory of generation. One might expect this given that he is a mechanist: passive matter cannot be the source of its own motion and so requires God to move it (occasionalism); and such matter, moving according to a few simple laws of motion, could never fashion something as complex as a living being, and so organisms must be fashioned by God at Creation (preformationism). This expectation finds a challenge in (...) Kant's depiction of the relation between causation and generation. According to Kant, preformation is the generation theory one would expect the advocate of the pre-established harmony to endorse, while the occasionalist would endorse a theory whereby God directly forms the organism upon every insemination. I make sense of Malebranche's position in light of Kant's suggestion by examining the relation Malebranche sees between science and metaphysics, the roles that he believes empirical investigations and final causes have in scientific practice and explanation, and the role of the supernatural in Malebranche's philosophy. (shrink)

In eighteenth-century French natural history, the notion of preformation was not only a model for a small preexisting embryo that gradually extended its shape through the influx of particles, but also for an order that coordinated the dynamic relation between organic parts. Preformation depended therefore also on a hidden order behind the continuity of visible forms. Louis Bourguet, Charles Bonnet, and Georges Cuvier distinguished three organizational levels: First, the synchronic or functional order of organic systems; second, the diachronic (...) order of the initiation of mechanical processes; and third, the hierarchical order that regulates the interaction of organic parts. In this essay, I reconstruct and compare the three organizational levels in the writings of Bourguet, Bonnet and Cuvier, relate their models of organic unity to the principle of perfection, and contrast these models with Georges Buffon's critique of system theories. (shrink)

In recent years a certain emphasis has been put by some scholars on Leibniz’s concern about empirical sciences and the relations between such concern and the development of his mature metaphysical system. In this paper I focus on Leibniz’s interest for the microscope and the astonishing discoveries that such instrument made possible in the field of the life sciences during the last part of the Seventeenth century. The observation of physical bodies carried out by the “magnifying glasses” revealed a matter (...) swarming everywhere with life and activity, contrary to the cartesian and atomistic view of matter as something sterile and passive. Moreover, the discovery of uncountable complete “animalcula” living in the smallest drop of water provided evidence for the idea of the preformation of every organism. During his lifetime, Leibniz was extremely watchful about the new microscopical discoveries and came into contact with some of the major “observers” of his time, such as Hooke, Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam and Malpighi. Relying both on some passages in Leibniz’s texts and on recent critical studies, I will argue that important aspects of his metaphysics have been strongly affected by the empirical observation of the “invisible world” which the microscope made possible. In the last part of the paper I show how the concept of “preformation”, originally drawn from the context of the life sciences, comes to play in Leibnizʼs philosophy a very general role, going far beyond the scope of biology and shaping important aspects of his overall philosophical system. (shrink)

Some central ideas associated with developmental systems theory (DST) are outlined for non-specialists. These ideas concern the nature of biological development, the alleged distinction between "genetic" and "environmental" traits, the relations between organism and environment, and evolutionary processes. I also discuss some criticisms of the DST approach.

It would be useful to have a category of extensive-form games whose isomorphisms specify equivalences between games. Since working with entire games is too large a project for a single paper, I begin here with preforms, where a “preform” is a rooted tree together with choices and information sets. In particular, this paper first defines the category \, whose objects are “functioned trees”, which are specially designed to be incorporated into preforms. I show that \ is isomorphic to the full (...) subcategory of \ whose objects are converging arborescences. Then the paper defines the category \, whose objects are “node-and-choice preforms”, each of which consists of a node set, a choice set, and an operator mapping node-choice pairs to nodes. I characterize the \ isomorphisms, define a forgetful functor from \ to \, and show that \ is equivalent to the full subcategory of \ whose objects are perfect-information preforms. The paper also shows that many game-theoretic entities can be derived from preforms, and that these entities are well-behaved with respect to \ morphisms and isomorphisms. (shrink)

Some central ideas associated with developmental systems theory are outlined for non-specialists. These ideas concern the nature of biological development, the alleged distinction between “genetic” and “environmental” traits, the relations between organism and environment, and evolutionary processes. I also discuss some criticisms of the DST approach.

Kant describes logic as “the science that exhaustively presents and strictly proves nothing but the formal rules of all thinking”. (Bviii-ix) But what is the source of our cognition of such rules (“logical cognition” for short)? He makes no concerted effort to address this question. It will nonetheless become clear that the question is a philosophically significant one for him, to which he can see three possible answers: those representations are innate, derived from experience, or originally acquired a priori. Although (...) he gives no explicit argument for the third answer, he seems committed to it—especially given his views on the source of pure concepts of the understanding and on the nature of logic. It takes careful preparatory work to gather all the essential materials for motivating and reconstructing Kant’s “original acquisition” account of logical cognition. I shall proceed in two sections. In section 1, I analyze Kant’s argument that pure concepts of the understanding (or intellectual concepts)—as one kind of pure cognition—must be acquired originally and a priori. My analysis partly concerns his varied attitudes toward Crusius’s and Leibniz’s versions of the nativist account of such concepts. I give special attention to how Kant characterizes the nativist account and his own “original acquisition” account in terms of “preformation” and “epigenesis”. My goal is, firstly, to tease out the sense in which Kant grants that there must be an innate ground (or preformation) for the derivation of pure concepts and, secondly, to introduce—and pave the way for answering—the question about the source of logical cognition. In section 2, in light of Kant’s reference to Locke and Leibniz as the greatest reformers of philosophy (including logic) in their times (Log, AA 9: 32), I examine the Lockean and Leibnizian approaches to logic, respectively. Both approaches are “physiological” by Kant’s standard and are directly opposed to his own strictly critical method. I explain how this methodological move shapes Kant’s view that representations of logical rules must be originally acquired a priori. This acquisition involves a kind of radical epigenesis of pure reason: unlike the acquisition of pure concepts, it presupposes no further innate ground (or preformation). This view will have important consequences for issues such as the ground of the normativity of logical rules and the boundaries of their rightful use. (shrink)

Kant criticizes the so-called ‘preformation’ hypothesis – a nativist account of the origin of the categories – at the end of the B-Deduction on the ground that it entails scepticism. I examine the historical context of Kant's criticism, and identify the targets as both Crusius and Leibniz. There are two claims argued for in this paper: first, that attending to the context of the opposition to certain forms of nativism affords a way of understanding Kant's commitment to the so-called (...) ‘discursivity thesis’, by contrasting the possession conditions for the categories with those for innate ideas; secondly, it provides an insight with regard to Kant's understanding of the dialectic with scepticism. Kant's claim is that a certain explanatory lacuna that attaches to Humean empiricism can be seen to apply equally to any nativist theory. The lacuna concerns the explanation of the modal purport of a priori necessity, i.e. how it is that our consciousness can even distinguish contents that are represented as necessary features of objects.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Kant on Nativism, Scepticism and NecessityVolume 18, Issue 1John Callanan DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S136941541200026XYour Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Kant on Nativism, Scepticism and NecessityVolume 18, Issue 1John Callanan DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S136941541200026XAvailable formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Kant on Nativism, Scepticism and NecessityVolume 18, Issue 1John Callanan DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S136941541200026XAvailable formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

This is an epistemologically-driven history of the concept of evolution. Starting from its inception, this work will follow the development of this pregnant concept. However, in contradistinction to previous attempts, the objective will not be the identification of the different meanings it adopted through history, but conversely, it will let the concept to be unfolded, to be explicated and to express its own inner potentialities. The underlying thesis of the present work is, therefore, that the path that leads to the (...) development of the concept of evolution is the path that studies the possibilities of the evolution of concepts, and that the historical reconstruction of its conceptual trajectory will shed light into potential and unexploited possibilities. This methodology will provide useful tools and resources for future developments of the concept. For example, it will define the concept of transmutation as a different conceptual trajectory deviating from the one corresponding to evolution, at the onset of the 19th century. Moreover, epigenesis will not be the opposing concept to evolution, but only to simultaneous and instantaneous generation. It will demonstrate that every important system of epigenesis drew upon some kind of formative power to explain development. More importantly, it will show that the problem of preformation cannot be overlooked, and that some kind of virtual preformation must be considered in order to address the problems of generation and development. (shrink)

In this work I propose a theory of evolution as a process of unfolding. This theory is based on four logically concatenated principles. The principle of evolutionary order establishes that the more complex cannot be generated from the simpler. The principle of origin establishes that there must be a maximum complexity that originates the others by logical deduction. Finally, the principle of unfolding and the principle of actualization guarantee the development of the evolutionary process from the simplest to the most (...) complex. These logical principles determine the existence of a virtual ideological matrix that contains the sequence of the preformed and folded morphogenetic fields. In this manner, the evolutionary process consists of the sequential unfolding and actualization of these fields, which is motorized by a process of teleologization carried out by the opening consciousness of the forms included in the fields of the ideological matrix. This theory leads to a radical change of perspective regarding the materialist worldview, and places life at the center of the evolutionary process as an activity carried out by a consciousness that seeks to fulfill a purpose by actualizing its own potentialities. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Kant adopted, throughout his career, a position that is much more akin to classical accounts of epigenesis, although he does reject the more radical forms of epigenesis proposed in his own time, and does make use of preformationist sounding terms. I argue that this is because Kant thinks of what is pre-formed as a species, not an individual or a part of an individual; has no qualm with the idea of a specific, teleological principle (...) or force underlying generation, and conceives of germs and predispositions as specific constraints on such a principle or force. Neither of these conceptions of what is “preformed”, I argue, is in strict opposition to classical epigenesis. I further suggest that Kant’s lingering use of preformationist terminology is due to his belief that this is required to account for the specificity of the specific generative force; his resistance towards the unrestricted plasticity of the generative force in radical epigenesis, which violates species-fixism; and his insistence on the internal, organic basis of developmental plasticity and variation within species. I conclude by suggesting that this terminological and interpretative peculiarity is partly due to a larger shift in the natural philosophical concerns surrounding the debate on epigenesis and preformation. Specifically, it is a sign that the original reasons for resisting epigenesis, namely its use of specific, teleological principles and its commitment to the natural production of biological structure, became less of a concern, whereas unrestricted plasticity and its undermining of fixism became a real issue, thereby also becoming the focal point of the debate. (shrink)

Was Aristotle the ‘father’ and founder of the epigenesis doctrine? Historically, I will argue, this question must be answered with ‘no’. Aristotle did not initiate and had no access to a debate that described itself in terms of ‘epigenesis’ and ‘preformation’, and thus cannot be considered the ‘father’ or founder of the epigenesis-preformation controversy in a literal sense. But many ancient accounts of reproduction and embryological development contain analogies to what early modern scientist called ‘epigenesis’ and ‘preformation’, (...) and, in this analogous sense, Aristotle can be considered a precursor of the epigenesis-preformation controversy. But is Aristotle’s position actually epigenetic, as most of the traditional interpreters hold, or preformationist, as some of the recent scholars believe? I will argue against the one-sidedness of both readings that Aristotle’s account of reproduction and heredity contains mainly epigenetic, but also a few preformationist characteristics. Whereas, for instance, Aristotle’s idea of a successive development of the embryo’s parts is doubtlessly epigenetic, Aristotle’s idea that the development of the embryo is an actualization and enlargement of potential parts, which are simultaneously present in the semen, can be considered a preformationist feature. (shrink)

It has long been thought that transmembrane cell‐surface receptors, such as receptor tyrosine kinases and cytokine receptors, among others, are activated by ligand binding through ligand‐induced dimerization of the receptors. However, there is growing evidence that prior to ligand binding, various transmembrane receptors have a preformed, yet inactive, dimeric structure on the cell surface. Various studies also demonstrate that during transmembrane signaling, ligand binding to the extracellular domain of receptor dimers induces a rotation of transmembrane domains, followed by rearrangement and/or (...) activation of intracellular domains. The paper here describes transmembrane cell‐surface receptors that are known or proposed to exist in dimeric form prior to ligand binding, and discusses how these preformed dimers are activated by ligand binding. (shrink)

"Au cœur de la Révolution scientifique, philosophes et naturalistes tentent de concevoir les modèles les plus aptes à rendre compte du vivant. Les schèmes hérités de l'Antiquité médicale et philosophique sous-tendent encore les théories originales de Van Helmont et de Harvey. Si le mécanisme s'instaure avec le modèle de l'animal-machine chez Descartes, les audaces et les limites du projet cartésien infléchiront toute démarche ultérieure, comme en témoigne la notion spinoziste d'intégration corporelle. Gassendi suggère, pour sa part, d'associer la modélisation mécaniste (...) et la téléologie immanente des processus. Les néo-platoniciens More et Cudworth évoquent le 'principe hylarchique' ou la 'nature plastique', afin de traduire, por delà les insuffisances du mécanisme, l'émergence des organisations vitales. Lorsque le débat se transpose aux microstructures, Malpighi promeut l'analyse physiologique selon le modèle de 'petites machines' diversement combinées et emboîtées ; Glisson attribue la perception et la réactivité aux fibres élémentaires. Les phénomènes de la génération, que l'on a d'abord expliqués par l'épigenèse, s'interprètent principalement en termes de préformation et de préexistence des germes. Mais, à l'encontre de toute construction hypothétique, Locke privilégie une médecine limitée à l'observation des seuls phénomènes vitaux. La critique de mécanisme suscite en outre les modèles 'animistes' de Perrault et de Stahl. En une remarquable tentative, Leibniz repense alors les concepts fondamentaux de la théorie physiologique et suggère les voies d'analyse pur une science de l'organisme'."--taken from back cover. (shrink)

Phillip R. Sloan - Performing the Categories: Eighteenth-Century Generation Theory and the Biological Roots of Kant's A Priori - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 229-253 Preforming the Categories: Eighteenth-Century Generation Theory and the Biological Roots of Kant's A Priori Phillip R. Sloan Situating Kant's philosophical project in relation to the natural sciences of his day has been of concern to several scholars from both the history of science and the history of (...) philosophy. Historians of philosophy have displayed an expanded awareness of, and interest in, the importance of the scientific context of the period in which Kant carried out his "Copernican" revolution. Most commonly among philosophers, this interest has been analyzed in relation to Kant's concerns with the foundations of mechanics, matter theory, and the epistemology of Newtonian science, with the central text of interest being the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe. On the other hand, historians of philosophy and historians of science, interested in the issues of the third Critique and in the several papers of Kant dealing with biological and anthropological issues, have emphasized the unified nature of Kant's inquiries into the natural sciences, and the importance of his continued interest in the life and human sciences alongside his interests in the foundations of the physical sciences. The effort to understand the unity of Kant's.. (shrink)

This paper offers both a criticism of and a novel alternative perspective on current ontologies that take race to be something that is either static and wholly evident at one’s birth or preformed prior to it. In it I survey and critically assess six of the most popular conceptions of race, concluding with an outline of my own suggestion for an alternative account. I suggest that race can be best understood in terms of one’s experience of his or her body, (...) one’s interactions with other individuals, and one’s experiences within particular cultures and societies. This embeddedness of human experience has been left out of most discussions of race which tie race to a set of characteristics (either biologically or sociologically defined). To rectify this omission, I articulate what I call the “physiosocial” view of race. This emphasizes the situatedness of human experience, the reciprocal and dynamic nature of the racial identities of individuals and groups. Approaching racial identity in this way entails a union of two historically uncomfortable partners: biological and sociological conceptions of race. If successful, this philosophical stance may illuminate the process of racial self-ascription as well as provide an explanation for the potential changeability of an individual’s racial identity at different times and at different places. (shrink)

Developmental systems theory (DST) is a wholeheartedly epigenetic approach to development, inheritance and evolution. The developmental system of an organism is the entire matrix of resources that are needed to reproduce the life cycle. The range of developmental resources that are properly described as being inherited, and which are subject to natural selection, is far wider than has traditionally been allowed. Evolution acts on this extended set of developmental resources. From a developmental systems perspective, development does not proceed according to (...) a preformed plan; what is inherited is much more than DNA; and evolution is change not only in gene frequencies, but in entire developmental systems. (shrink)

Does language limit the moral thoughts we can have? To answer that, I distinguish between two kinds of limits: Boundaries or barriers fence things out. Identification and erection of linguistic barriers, defines, diagnoses, or places restrictions on what language can in principle grasp or be, and often involves abstraction from actual linguistic behavior. This is typically preformed by remarks I call ‘theses’; Contours or outlines give real-life portrayals. Drawing the contours of a linguistic activity involves a certain attention to reality: (...) to detail and particularity, and we typically draw contours by using remarks I call ‘helpers’. I examine the possibility that confusion can be diagnosed in Sabina Lovibond's attempt to apply the idea that moral language has necessary boundaries, and explain the alternative of drawing linguistic contours. I then examine Richard Rorty's position according to which the fact that we can shape our language indicates that the boundaries of language do not encompass all possible sense, and compare Rorty's discussion with Sarah Bachelard's discussion of euthanasia. My claim here is that trying to improve on the language we have might be part of drawing its contours, rather than redefining its boundaries. The discussion reveals a difference between two kinds of contour drawing, and thus between two kinds of helpers: ones that help to draw the contours of the actuality of linguistic activities, and ones that help to draw the contours of their potentiality. Finally, I argue that the value of drawing contours instead of barriers is that the former better reveal the fact that we care about our ways of making sense. (shrink)

In what follows, I shall focus on what may be defined as the engineering of hu- mans from a philosophical perspective. More precisely, I shall reflect upon the way in which our language increasingly changes when we define our relationship with emerging technologies, specifically human digital twins, which, as our tech- nological replica, can serve as privileged standpoints to try to understand the meaning of the shift from using distinguishable words to define humans and technologies (for instance, when we happen (...) to talk about our health in terms of self-perception) to using indistinguishable words to define humans and technol- ogies (for instance, when we happen to talk about our health in terms of human digital twins’ diagnoses and prognoses). The change of our language shows a kind of optimisation that is taken to the extreme, starting with the optimisation of human bodies’ performances: the more engineered humans are (in that they identify their purpose not with feeling good, for instance, but with preforming in faster and more profitable ways), the better they are (in that they measure themselves not against typically human values, such as feeling good, for in- stance, but against typically engineering values, such as efficiency). But a re- markable paradox emerges, whose meaning shall be the core of my philosophical reflection: the more humans work on optimising themselves, the more they (par- adoxically) work on moving optimisation from themselves, i.e. their capabilities as autonomous humans (starting with self-perception), to technologies, i.e. ways of engineering, specifically automating, themselves. (shrink)

Tarskian model theory is almost universally understood as a formal counterpart of the preformal notion of semantics, of the “linkage between words and things”. The wide-spread opinion is that to account for the semantics of natural language is to furnish its settheoretic interpretation in a suitable model structure; as exemplified by Montague 1974.

This essay seeks to bring into focus the latent political theory of CLR James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936, and to show, on this basis, how World Revolution explains certain difficult aspects of The Black Jacobins. The core of James’s theory is the thesis that social classes are organically and internally identified, and that each has a preformed and unitary interest, which can be articulated as a set of political principles. A class is called to act by the voice that expresses the (...) class’s interest in the terms of its political principles. Once these points are made clear, several problems regarding the interpretation of The Black Jacobins disappear. First, James’s claim that the slaves of San Domingo were “closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time” follows from his organic concept of the proletariat. Second, James’s revision of his account of the Haitian Revolution over the decades does not signify a move in the direction of “history from below” but a changed estimation of the conditions under which the mirroring operation he assigned to political leadership might take place. What seems to be James’s inordinate interest in the individual leader, finally, is more properly understood to be his antipathy to institutions and organizations. (shrink)

This essay seeks to bring into focus the latent political theory of CLR James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936, and to show, on this basis, how World Revolution explains certain difficult aspects of The Black Jacobins. The core of James’s theory is the thesis that social classes are organically and internally identified, and that each has a preformed and unitary interest, which can be articulated as a set of political principles. A class is called to act by the voice that expresses the (...) class’s interest in the terms of its political principles. Once these points are made clear, several problems regarding the interpretation of The Black Jacobins disappear. First, James’s claim that the slaves of San Domingo were “closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time” follows from his organic concept of the proletariat. Second, James’s revision of his account of the Haitian Revolution over the decades does not signify a move in the direction of “history from below” but a changed estimation of the conditions under which the mirroring operation he assigned to political leadership might take place. What seems to be James’s inordinate interest in the individual leader, finally, is more properly understood to be his antipathy to institutions and organizations. (shrink)

During the eighteenth century, the specter of atheism was a major concern among many intellectuals in Europe. Many of the leading figures of the period such as François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire refuted atheism at every turn. These debates centered on living organisms, particularly questions about generation. Efforts to explain the process of generation raised biological, religious, and political questions. One popular theory put forward to address the question of generation was preformation, the belief that “germs” had been in existence (...) since God created the world. This chapter first discusses the rise of preformationist thinking in the late seventeenth century before turning to the biological evidence that challenged preexistence in the mid-eighteenth century and analyzing the reaction it triggered among the preformationists. It also examines the work of Voltaire and Denis Diderot to illustrate how the generation debates are linked to the materialism question. The chapter concludes by showing how these controversies about nature and biology became entangled with politics in eighteenth-century France. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Patient's Perspective:Engaging With the OtherGiovanni Stanghellini*, MD, DPhil Honoris Causa (bio)Homo homini salusOne century after the first conference gathering first-generation clinical phenomenologists in Zurich in 1922, today's psychiatry is far from exploring phenomena from the patient's perspective—that is, "letting-be" the Other, and "giving or compromising"—that is, engaging with the Other (Doerr-Zegers, 2022).The motto of phenomenology has been since its beginning "To things themselves!". Edmund Husserl—the founder of (...) phenomenology in the field of philosophy—exhorted to go back to the things themselves, that is, to render self-evident in fully fledged intuitions that what is usually given in preformed abstractions like "concepts," "judgments," "truths," and so on (Husserl, 1970).Clinical phenomenology has taken up Husserl's motto and added another: "To understand is to cure." Put together, the result is: "To cure is to understand the things themselves." But what does exactly mean "To the things themselves"? And what does it mean "to understand"? What is the use of understanding in the clinical setting? And, ultimately, what does the "cure" consist of?What Are the "Things Themselves" in PsychiatryIn the clinical setting, the "things themselves" (Stanghellini & Ikkos, in press) are the patients' own experiences, that is the patient's psychopathological world as experienced in the first person's perspective—what clinical phenomenology calls the "phenomena." Clinical phenomenology's very conception of the object of psychiatry, that is the patient's abnormal experiences lived in the first-person perspective and embedded in anomalous forms of consciousness and existential patterns, has been vastly oversimplified by current assessment procedures (Stanghellini, 2013). Today, there is a risk that clinical blinkering results in clinicians being only able to view the symptoms relevant to diagnosis and classification and excludes the scrutiny of the diverse and varied nature of what is really there in the patient's experience—the essential prerequisite to understanding his/her condition (Stanghellini & Broome, 2014). This oversimplification has been reinforced by reliance on techniques (e.g., an emphasis on behavioral symptoms and on reliability rather than validity) that are unable to capture the subtle distinctions [End Page 287] in experience that constitute the essentials of the "things themselves" in psychopathology, and to acknowledge that what the patient manifests is not a series of mutually independent, isolated symptoms, but rather certain meaning-structures of interwoven experiences, beliefs, and actions, all permeated by biographical details (Nordengaard & Parnas, 2013).The Problem of the Causes and Meanings of PhenomenaTo go to the "things themselves"—to "let them be"—we should acknowledge that to understand is neither to interpret nor to explain. It is not to interpret, i.e. to attribute a meaning, that is, to replace a manifest content, considered superficial and misleading, with a latent content, considered profound and authentic. Psychiatry as a branch of bio-medicine (as it is known) does not principally deal with meanings, but certainly not because it aims to the "things themselves." Psychiatry first and foremost deals with the causes of phenomena, that is, it tries to explain (scire per causas)—not to understand. The dream of psychiatry is to trace the causes of the symptoms to neutralize the symptoms in statu nascendi. Psychiatry is (would like to be) a science of the mechanisms leading to the formation of mental symptoms.Compared with the intentions of psychiatry, the intentions of psychological hermeneutics, which deals with revealing the meanings of phenomena, may seem a relief and progress, at least if seen from a "humanitarian" angle. The dream of psychology—or at least of certain psychology (such as that of psychoanalytic inspiration)—is to bring to light the authentic meaning of a symptom. Hermeneutic psychology, for example, a psychoanalytic one, is (would like to be) an archaeology of the symptom, unearthing its profound significance.I am not arguing against explanations and interpretations per se, rather underscoring the way these may stand in the way of engaging with the patient in a third mode of approaching clinical phenomena, that is understanding. Both psychiatry's attempts at explanation and hermeneutic psychology's attempts at interpretation may suffocate... (shrink)

This is Michael Picard's translation of Gerd Achenbach’s _Philosophische Praxis_ Beset by life-problems you can neither get rid of nor solve? Stuck? Over- or under-burdened by reality? Not living up to your potential? Philosophical Praxis is the alternative to psychotherapy for people not satisfied to muddle through life or merely exist. Not a method or a teaching, not diagnosis, treatment, or therapy, not a ready-made rule of life for you to conform to. It is no preformed application, but the use (...) of philosophy to aid the individual, organization and society to come to self-understanding, so that people may thrive and live up to being themselves. Philosophical Praxis is not the prepossession of any trained philosopher, but a specialization in the practice of philosophy aimed to liberate guests (not ‘clients’) through sympathetic co-thinking toward their own fresh appraisals of their life and its circumstances. This book is the chief statement of German philosopher, Gerd Achenbach, founder of Philosophical Praxis, who in pioneering this revival of philosophy for life spawned a global movement. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt's Political Theology, recycled into The Concept of the Political, was meant to be to political theory what the Book of Job has been to Judaism, and through Judaism to Christianity. It was intended/designed/ hoped to answer one of the most notoriously haunting of the born-in-Jerusalem questions: a sort of question with which the most famous of the born-in-Jerusalem ideas, the idea of the one and only God, omnipresent and omnipotent creator, judge and saviour of the whole Earth and (...) the whole humanity, could not but be pregnant. The question, however, had to be born once the Hebrew Prophet Jesus declared the omnipotent God to be in addition the God of Love, and when his disciple, St Paul, brought the good tidings to Athens — a place where questions, once asked, were expected to be answered, and answered in tune with the rules of logic. Taking absolute power, the God of monotheistic religion took absolute responsibility for the blessings and blows of fate. The Book of Job recasts the frightening randomness of Nature as the frightening arbitrariness of its ruler: God speaks and gives commands. But just like numb Nature, he is not bound by what humans think or do. He can make exceptions. Indeed, the rule of norm is by definition irreconcilable with a true sovereignty — with the absolute power to decide. To be absolute, power must include the right to neglect/suspend/ abolish the norm. Schmitt's idea of sovereignty would engrave the preformed vision of divine order onto the ground of legislative order. Power to exempt founds simultaneously God's absolute power and the human's continuing, incurable fear born of insecurity. This is exactly what happens, according to Schmitt, in case of the human sovereign no longer handcuffed by norms. Thanks to that power of exemption, humans are, as they were in the pre-Law times, vulnerable and uncertain. (shrink)

Correspondant de Leibniz, philosophe professant à Neuchâtel, Louis Bourguet (1678-1742) se fit l’interprète des vues de Leibniz sur le rapport entre monade et corps organique. Dans ses Lettres philosophiques (1729), il ne se contente pas d’analyser et de critiquer les diverses hypothèses relatives à la génération telles qu’on les soutenait à l’époque, mais il repense à nouveaux frais les arguments en faveur de la préformation et il réinsère la doctrine de l’« organisme » dans un cadre théorique inspiré de la (...) monadologie. Il définit ainsi, sous le vocable de « mécanisme organique », des principes aptes à régir les recherches de philo­sophie expérimentale sur le vivant. Il adapte de diverses façons les thèses leibniziennes et ouvre ainsi la voie à des évolutions marquantes du concept de corps organique au xviii e siècle. (shrink)

In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. A CONTINUOUS ACT Nico Jenkins In Pierre Hadot’s extraordinary book, Philosophy as a Way of Life , the practices of philosophy—that is the exercise of what we can term pre-institionalized love of wisdom, what Philo of Alexandria described as a training towards wisdom—are described as, following the Stoics, “a continuous act, permanent and identical with life itself, which had to be renewed at each instant.” This renewal of thinking, this coming to be of being itself —meeting itself on its own ground, concerns the way philosophy is practiced, and more often, taught, or rather not taught. Hadot continues his thinking with a description of what happens to the structure of thought in the medieval ages as it becomes adopted—co-opted— by the university, and by extension, by the institution of the church. Philosophy becomes no longer a way of living, no longer a praxis as such but becomes a condition that is locked in a theoretical construct, one which was literally removed from life (and in life we read then love, wisdom, being etc, also the home, the market, the field, the street) and secured behind the high walls of the monastery (which were shortly replaced by the high walls of the Academy) where thinking unfortunately rests for the most part today. Hadot writes further that this dangerous movement of removal reduces thinking to a theoretical practice akin to the mythical Ouroborous; “education was thus no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to becoming fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in order that they might learn how to train other specialists.” Thought then is trapped behind the walls of the academy, and with the exception of such thinkers as Spinoza, Descartes, and Liebnitz as well as others who think from an outside in, thought remains, in the form of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, a practice reduced or removed from life and restricted to what Schopenhauer will call “mere fencing in front of the mirror.” This is of course the tendency today and philosophy remains, for the most part, a discourse produced and thought inside the academy and disseminated, in seminated through university presses and of course the academic journal. It seems necessary to me that we have to have a place, a return, to a thinking which is closer to the Stoics, closer to the pre-Socratics, to a thinking which is a practice of becoming, a training to think, to live, to die. this is not south romantic than imperative . This thinking is one of a deep ir responsibility because it is not known, it is not figured out. It requires a risk and what Heidegger calls a leap (for there is no bridge to it). I call it irresponsible because for too long sanctioned thought has had as its premise the idea that thinking has a goal, a direction, a telos ; that it is not an activity but a process which gives a product; that the responsibility of thinking in turn demand an answer. In my mind, only freed from that goal can thinking, in contrast, bask in its own thinking, bask in a state in which the unknown can remain unknown, that mystery can rest as mystery. This is not to say that the world needs no answers, or to promote a Whitmanesque “leaning and loafing” as the only valid practice. It is only to say that for too long, thinking has been validated by the academy, by the answerable, by the already decided. To me, this requires—as an answer— the ir responsibility of thought, what Nancy calls, “a world for which all is not already done (played out, finished, enshrined in a destiny), nor entirely still to do (in the future for always future tomorrows).” This is a thinking not sanctified by the academy, made sacred by the church or the palace but rather it takes place on the périphérie , beyond the ring road, in alleyways behind the marketplace, in cafes stained with the syphilitic patina of irresponsible talk, of loose talk, the kind of talk made loose not only by the tankard and the goblet by the practice and training of attuned thinking. continent. was formed as a collective of thinkers coming out of the European Graduate School (also known as the University of Disaster) three years ago, in an effort to combat, or challenge, the dominant paradigm which isolates thinking from the street, from life, from where perhaps wisdom tends to emerge. We feel that not only is the university herself no longer the privileged site of where true thinking takes place—and where only official thought can take place—but that the very artificiality of the academy denies thinking—at times—authentic, thought. Our goal at continent. is to create a media agnostic publication which is rigorous in its intellectual underpinnings but which will remain permanently beyond and out of reach of the academy. Though many of us butter our bread with academic paychecks (maid!) we attempt to keep continent. as a refuge—and a refugee—from the University in ruins, from the University as a site of preformed and institutionalized pre-set dialogues. In concert with other publications-both cyber and print—as well as various blogs we are attempting to re-dialogize the dialogue of thinking. We are attempting both to speak to— as well as with and against —the university as a site of accreted knowledge. We have not been utterly successful and continue to attempt to define what that role of being perpetually beyond is (while still trying to maintain rigorous intellectual standards) but it is just that, a goal, which is perpetually opening, perpetually unanswered, perhaps even by design, perpetually unanswerable. (shrink)

RESUMENEl desarrollo embriológico es un fenómeno que ha inspirado la especulación filosófica desde temprano en la historia del pensamiento. Desde los tiempos de Aristóteles dos modelos conceptuales antitéticos se han utilizado tradicionalmente para comprender la embriogénesis: o el embrión posee ya una forma o estructura, o ésta se forma de nuevo en cada generación. Nuestro objetivo en este artículo es mostrar que el contraste entre la posición preformacionista y epigenética persiste a pesar de los formidables avances teóricos y experimentales de (...) la biología del desarrollo contemporánea. El preformacionismo y la epigénesis han perfeccionado constantemente sus posiciones en el curso de la historia con el fin de responder a los retos conceptuales de la época. Este continuo proceso de transformación ha dado lugar a una convergencia parcial entre las dos posiciones. Sin embargo, vamos a argumentar que, a pesar de los esfuerzos por conciliar ambas posturas, esta antinomia, que se erige como una de las más fundamentales de la biología, no será fácil de superar. ABSTRACTThe process of development of the embryo has inspired philosophical speculation since the advent of Western thought. Since the time of Aristotle two antithetical conceptual models have traditionally been used to understand embryogenesis: either form or structure is preformed in the embryo or it is newly formed with each generation. Our aim in this article is to show that the contrast between the pre-formationist and epigenetic positions persists despite the formidable theoretical and experimental advances of contemporary developmental biology. Pre-formationism and epigenesis have constantly refined their positions in the course of history in order to answer the conceptual challenges of each epoch. This process of continuous transformation has resulted in a partial convergence of the two positions. However, we shall argue that, despite the partial successes of this process of continuous convergence, one of the most fundamental antinomies in biology persists. (shrink)

The cell is not only the structural, physiological, and developmental unit of life, but also the reproductive one. So far, however, this aspect of the cell has received little attention from historians and philosophers of biology. I will argue that cell theory had far-reaching consequences for how biologists conceptualized the reproductive relationships between germs and adult organisms. Cell theory, as formulated by Theodor Schwann in 1839, implied that this relationship was a specific and lawful one, that is, that germs of (...) a certain kind, all else being equal, would produce adult organisms of the same kind, and vice versa. Questions of preformation and epigenesis took on a new meaning under this presupposition. The question then became one of whether cells could be considered as autonomous agents producing adult organisms of a given species, or whether they were the product of external, organizing forces and thus only a stage in the development of the whole organism. This question became an important issue for nineteenth-century biology. As I will demonstrate, it was the view of cells as autonomous agents which helped both Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to think of inheritance as a lawful process. (shrink)

Denis Diderot’s natural philosophy is deeply and centrally ‘biologistic’: as it emerges between the 1740s and 1780s, thus right before the appearance of the term ‘biology’ as a way of designating a unified science of life (McLaughlin), his project is motivated by the desire both to understand the laws governing organic beings and to emphasize, more ‘philosophically’, the uniqueness of organic beings within the physical world as a whole. This is apparent both in the metaphysics of vital matter he puts (...) forth in works such as D’Alembert’s Dream (1769) and the more empirical concern with the mechanics of life in his manuscript Elements of Physiology, on which he worked during the last twenty years of his life. This ‘biologism’ obviously presents the interpreter of Diderot with some difficulties, notably as regards his materialism, given that contemporary forms of materialism have on the contrary strongly rejected notions of emergence, vitalism, teleology and any concepts appealing to unique, irreducible features of organisms. In response, some have described him as a ‘holist’ (Kaitaro) while others have emphasized his materialist, naturalist project (Bourdin, Wolfe). In what follows I examine a little-known aspect of Diderot’s articulation of his biological project: his statement in favour of epigenesis within the short but suggestive Encyclopédie article “Spinosiste.” Diderot was, of course, a partisan of epigenesis (the developmental-biological theory opposed to preformation, according to which beings develop by successive adjunction of layers of matter), but why include a statement in favour of a particular biological (or developmental) theory within an entry dealing with a philosopher, Spinoza, who does not seem to have been concerned at all with the specific properties of living beings, how they grow from embryonic to developed states, and so on? By trying to answer this question I also try and locate Diderot’s biological project in relation to what will become, in the years after his death, the project for a science called ‘biology’, with figures such as Treviranus and Lamarck. For it is not clear that the two can be easily correlated or causally linked: Diderot’s ‘epigenetic Spinozism’ is a different conceptual entity from what we find in histories of biology. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe claim that Jan Swammerdam's empirical research did not support his theory of biological preformation is shown to rest on a notion of evidence narrower than that used by many seventeenth-century natural philosophers. The principles of evidence behind the use of mechanical models are developed. It is then shown that the Cartesian theory of biological reproduction and embryology failed to gain acceptance because it did not meet the evidential requirements of these principles. The problems in this and other (...) mechanistic theories prior to Swammerdam are found to arise from certain difficulties and tensions in the mechanical conception of nature, which Swammerdam's theory is able to resolve. The relation between Swammerdam's empirical research and his theory is examined and shown to satisfy the required notion of evidence.Leibniz' puzzling appeals to Swammerdam's research in support of his metaphysical doctrine of the spontaneous development of individual substances are then examined and shown to fall within the parameters of the notion of evidence. (shrink)