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Charles T. Wolfe [102]Charles Wolfe [27]
  1.  47
    Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy.Christopher Donohue & Charles T. Wolfe (eds.) - 2022 - Springer Verlag.
    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 (...)
  2. Do organisms have an ontological status?Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3):195-232.
    The category of ‘organism’ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” trend, which has been perceived (...)
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  3.  74
    Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction.Charles T. Wolfe - 1st ed. 2016 - Cham: Springer.
    This book provides an overview of key features of (philosophical) materialism, in historical perspective. It is, thus, a study in the history and philosophy of materialism, with a particular focus on the early modern and Enlightenment periods, leading into the 19th and 20th centuries. For it was in the 18th century that the word was first used by a philosopher (La Mettrie) to refer to himself. Prior to that, ‘materialism’ was a pejorative term, used for wicked thinkers, as a near-synonym (...)
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  4. On the role of Newtonian analogies in eighteenth-century life science:Vitalism and provisionally inexplicable explicative devices.Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - In Zvi Biener Eric Schliesser (ed.), Newton and Empiricism. New York: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 223-261.
    Newton’s impact on Enlightenment natural philosophy has been studied at great length, in its experimental, methodological and ideological ramifications. One aspect that has received fairly little attention is the role Newtonian “analogies” played in the formulation of new conceptual schemes in physiology, medicine, and life science as a whole. So-called ‘medical Newtonians’ like Pitcairne and Keill have been studied; but they were engaged in a more literal project of directly transposing, or seeking to transpose, Newtonian laws into quantitative models of (...)
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  5.  67
    The Animal Economy as Object and Program in Montpellier Vitalism.Charles T. Wolfe & Motoichi Terada - 2008 - Science in Context 21 (4):537-579.
    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, (...)
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  6. “Was Canguilhem a biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the project of ‘biophilosophy’".Charles Wolfe - 2015 - In Darian Meacham (ed.), Medicine and Society, New Continental Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, Philosophy and Medicine Series, 2015). Springer. pp. 197-212.
    Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the main (...)
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  7. Holism, organicism and the risk of biochauvinism.Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - Verifiche: Rivista Trimestrale di Scienze Umane 43 (1-3):39-57.
    In this essay I seek to critically evaluate some forms of holism and organicism in biological thought, as a more deflationary echo to Gilbert and Sarkar's reflection on the need for an 'umbrella' concept to convey the new vitality of holistic concepts in biology (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000). Given that some recent discussions in theoretical biology call for an organism concept (from Moreno and Mossio’s work on organization to Kirschner et al.’s research paper in Cell, 2000, building on chemistry to (...)
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  8. “The ‘physiology of the understanding’ and the ‘mechanics of the soul’: reflections on some phantom philosophical projects”.Charles T. Wolfe - 2016 - Quaestio 16:3-25.
    In reflecting on the relation between early empiricist conceptions of the mind and more experimentally motivated materialist philosophies of mind in the mid-eighteenth century, I suggest that we take seriously the existence of what I shall call ‘phantom philosophical projects’. A canonical empiricist like Locke goes out of his way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (...)
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  9. The organism as ontological go-between. Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history.Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 1:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shps.
    The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles – sometimes overt, sometimes masked – throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of Life, (...)
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  10. Sensibility as vital force or as property of matter in mid-eighteenth-century debates.Charles T. Wolfe - 2013 - In Henry Martyn Lloyd (ed.), The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment. Springer Cham. pp. 147-170.
    Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is (...)
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  11. (1 other version)Vital anti-mathematicism and the ontology of the emerging life sciences: from Mandeville to Diderot.Charles T. Wolfe - 2017 - Synthese:1-22.
    Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scientific field or cluster of (...)
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  12. (1 other version)From Locke to Materialism: Empiricism, the Brain and the Stirrings of Ontology.Charles Wolfe - 2018 - In A. L. Rey S. Bodenmann (ed.), 18th-Century Empiricism and the Sciences.
    My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall (...)
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  13. Epigenesis as Spinozism in Diderot’s biological project (draft).Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - In Ohad Nachtomy & Justin E. H. Smith (eds.), The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy. New York, NY: Oup Usa. pp. 181-201.
    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 (...)
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  14. Forms of materialist embodiment.Charles T. Wolfe - 2012 - In Matthew Landers & Brian Muñoz (eds.), Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge, 1500-1850. Pickering & Chatto.
    The materialist approach to the body is often, if not always understood in ‘mechanistic’ terms, as the view in which the properties unique to organic, living embodied agents are reduced to or described in terms of properties that characterize matter as a whole, which allow of mechanistic explanation. Indeed, from Hobbes and Descartes in the 17th century to the popularity of automata such as Vaucanson’s in the 18th century, this vision of things would seem to be correct. In this paper (...)
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  15. From substantival to functional vitalism and beyond: animas, organisms and attitudes.Charles T. Wolfe - 2011 - Eidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad Del Norte 14:212-235.
    I distinguish between ‘substantival’ and ‘functional’ forms of vitalism in the eighteenth century. Substantival vitalism presupposes the existence of a (substantive) vital force which either plays a causal role in the natural world as studied scientifically, or remains an immaterial, extra-causal entity. Functional vitalism tends to operate ‘post facto’, from the existence of living bodies to the search for explanatory models that will account for their uniquely ‘vital’ properties better than fully mechanistic models can. I discuss representative figures of the (...)
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  16.  19
    Introduction.Giuseppe Bianco, Charles T. Wolfe & Gertrudis Van de Vijver - 2023 - In Giuseppe Bianco, Charles T. Wolfe & Gertrudis Van de Vijver (eds.), Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology. Springer. pp. 1-9.
    In this Introduction we lay out the context of a ‘Continental philosophy of biology’ and suggest why Georges Canguilhem’s place in such a philosophy is important. There is not one single program for Continental philosophy of biology, but Canguilhem’s vision, which he referred to at one stage as ‘biological philosophy’, is a significant one, located in between the classic holism-reductionism tensions, significantly overlapping with philosophy of medicine, philosophy of technology and other themes moving away from the more common existential and (...)
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  17.  42
    The organism as ontological go-between: Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history.Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48:151-161.
    The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles, sometimes masked, often normative, throughout the history of biology. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and its ‘theorization’, but conversely has also been the target of influential rejections: as just an instrument of transmission for the (...)
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  18. Why was there no controversy over Life in the Scientific Revolution?Charles T. Wolfe - 2011 - In Victor Boantza Marcelo Dascal (ed.), Controversies in the Scientific Revolution. John Benjamins.
    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 (...)
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  19. The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science.Charles T. Wolfe & Ofer Gal (eds.) - 2010 - Springer.
  20.  33
    From the logic of ideas to active-matter materialism: Priestley’s Lockean problem and early neurophilosophy.Charles T. Wolfe - 2020 - Intellectual History Review 30 (1):31-47.
    Empiricism is a claim about the contents of the mind: its classic slogan is nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, ‘there is nothing in the mind (intellect, understanding) which is not first in the senses’. As such, it is not a claim about the fundamental nature of the world as material. I focus here on in an instance of what one might term the materialist appropriation of empiricism. One major component in the transition from a purely epistemological (...)
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  21.  38
    (1 other version)Materialism and ‘the soft substance of the brain’: Diderot and plasticity.Charles T. Wolfe - 2016 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (5):963-982.
    ABSTRACTMaterialism is the view that everything that is real is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot was one of the first to notice that any self-respecting (...)
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  22.  71
    Models of Organic Organization in Montpellier Vitalism.Charles T. Wolfe - 2017 - Early Science and Medicine 22 (2-3):229-252.
    The species of vitalism discussed here is a malleable construct, often with a poisonous reputation (but one which I want to rehabilitate), hovering in between the realms of the philosophy of biology, the history of medicine, and the scientific background of the Radical Enlightenment (case in point, the influence of vitalist medicine on Diderot). This is a more vital vitalism, or at least a more ‘biologistic,’ ‘embodied,’ medicalized vitalism. I distinguish between what I would call ‘substantival’ and ‘functional’ forms of (...)
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  23. “Empiricism contra Experiment: Harvey, Locke and the Revisionist View of Experimental Philosophy”.Alan Salter & Charles T. Wolfe - 2009 - Bulletin d'histoire et d'épistémologie des sciences de la vie 16 (2):113-140.
    In this paper we suggest a revisionist perspective on two significant figures in early modern life science and philosophy: William Harvey and John Locke. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is often named as one of the rare representatives of the ‘life sciences’ who was a major figure in the Scientific Revolution. While this status itself is problematic, we would like to call attention to a different kind of problem: Harvey dislikes abstraction and controlled experiments (aside from (...)
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  24.  39
    La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie : une histoire du vitalisme.Charles Wolfe - 2019 - Paris, France: Classiques Garnier.
    -/- Table des matières Remerciements 1 -/- INTRODUCTION 2 -/- PREMIERE PARTIE LE VIVANT ET LA REVOLUTION SCIENTIFIQUE 7 -/- ONTOLOGIE DU VIVANT OU BIOLOGIE ? LE CAS DE LA RÉVOLUTION SCIENTIFIQUE 8 -/- Introduction 8 La vie et le vivant sont-ils des thèmes de controverse explicites dans la philosophie naturelle de l’âge classique ? 18 Machines de la nature, ferments et métaphysique chimique 28 Crisis, what crisis ? 42 Conclusion 45 -/- LE MÉCANIQUE FACE AU VIVANT 49 -/- Introduction (...)
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  25.  65
    Philosophy of Biology Before Biology.Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe (eds.) - 2019 - London: Routledge.
    Philosophy of biology before biology -/- Edited by Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe -/- Table of contents -/- Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe. Introduction -/- 1. Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe. The idea of “philosophy of biology before biology”: a methodological provocation -/- Part I. FORM AND DEVELOPMENT -/- 2. Stéphane Schmitt. Buffon’s theories of generation and the changing dialectics of molds and molecules 3. Phillip Sloan. Metaphysics and “Vital” Materialism: The Gabrielle Du Châtelet Circle and French (...)
  26.  24
    The Embodied Descartes: Contemporary Readings of L’Homme.Charles Wolfe, Christoffer Eriksen & Barnaby Hutchins - 2016 - In Stephen Gaukroger & Delphine Antoine-Mahut (eds.), Descartes' Treatise on Man and Its Reception. Springer.
    A certain reading of Descartes, which we refer to as ‘the embodied Descartes’, is emerging from recent scholarship on L’Homme, in keeping with the interpretive trend which emphasizes Descartes’s identity as a natural philosopher. This reading complicates our understanding of Descartes’s philosophical project: far from strictly separating human minds from bodies, the embodied Descartes keeps them tightly integrated, while animal bodies behave in ways quite distinct from those of other pieces of extended substance. Here, we identify three categories of embodiment (...)
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  27.  51
    Introduction: sketches of a conceptual history of epigenesis.Antonine Nicoglou & Charles T. Wolfe - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (4):64.
    This is an introduction to a collection of articles on the conceptual history of epigenesis, from Aristotle to Harvey, Cavendish, Kant and Erasmus Darwin, moving into nineteenth-century biology with Wolff, Blumenbach and His, and onto the twentieth century and current issues, with Waddington and epigenetics. The purpose of the topical collection is to emphasize how epigenesis marks the point of intersection of a theory of biological development and a theory of active matter. We also wish to show that the concept (...)
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  28. “Determinism/Spinozism in the Radical Enlightenment: the cases of Anthony Collins and Denis Diderot”.Charles T. Wolfe - 2007 - International Review of Eighteenth-Century Studies 1 (1):37-51.
    In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...)
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  29.  92
    “Cabinet d'Histoire Naturelle,” or: The Interplay of Nature and Artifice in Diderot's Naturalism.Charles T. Wolfe - 2009 - Perspectives on Science 17 (1):pp. 58-77.
    In selected texts by Diderot, including the Encyclopédie article “Cabinet d’histoire naturelle” (along with his comments in the article “Histoire nat-urelle”), the Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature and the Salon de 1767, I examine the interplay between philosophical naturalism and the recognition of the irreducible nature of artifice, in order to arrive at a provisional definition of Diderot’s vision of Nature as “une femme qui aime à se travestir.” How can a metaphysics in which the concept of Nature has (...)
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  30. The concept of organism: historical philosophical, scientific perspectives.Phillipe Huneman & Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3):147.
    0. Philippe Huneman and Charles T. Wolfe: Introduction 1. Tobias Cheung, “What is an ‘organism’? On the occurrence of a new term and its conceptual transformations 1680-1850” 2. Charles T. Wolfe, “Do organisms have an ontological status?” 3. John Symons, “The individuality of artifacts and organisms” 4. Thomas Pradeu, “What is an organism? An immunological answer” 5. Matteo Mossio & Alvaro Moreno, “Organisational closure in biological organisms” 6. Laura Nuño de la Rosa, “Becoming organisms. The organisation of development and the (...)
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  31.  33
    (1 other version)Endowed Molecules and Emergent Organization: The Maupertuis-Diderot Debate.Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - Early Science and Medicine 15 (1-2):38-65.
    In his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and a natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of 'genetic' information, described living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence.” Now, Maupertuis was a Leibnizian of sorts; his molecules possessed higher-level, 'mental' properties, recalling La Mettrie's statement in L'Homme-Machine, that Leibnizians have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul.” (...)
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  32. A happiness fit for organic bodies: La Mettrie's medical Epicureanism.Charles T. Wolfe - 2009 - In Neven Leddy & Avi Lifschitz (eds.), Epicurus in the Enlightenment. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. pp. 69--83.
    A chapter on the specifically 'medical' Epicureanism of La Mettrie, connecting his materialist approach to mind-body issues and his hedonistic ethics.
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  33. Vitalism and the scientific image: an introduction.Sebastian Normandin & Charles T. Wolfe - 2013 - In Sebastian Normandin & Charles T. Wolfe (eds.), Vitalism and the scientific image, 1800-2010. Springer.
    Introduction to edited volume on vitalism and/in the life sciences, 1800-2010.
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  34. “The Materialist Denial of Monsters”.Charles T. Wolfe - 2005 - In Monsters and Philosophy. College Publications. pp. 187--204.
    Locke and Leibniz deny that there are any such beings as ‘monsters’ (anomalies, natural curiosities, wonders, and marvels), for two very different reasons. For Locke, monsters are not ‘natural kinds’: the word ‘monster’ does not individuate any specific class of beings ‘out there’ in the natural world. Monsters depend on our subjective viewpoint. For Leibniz, there are no monsters because we are all parts of the Great Chain of Being. Everything that happens, happens for a reason, including a monstrous birth. (...)
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  35. Vitalism and the resistance to experimentation on life in the eighteenth century.Charles T. Wolfe - 2013 - Journal of the History of Biology 46 (2):255-282.
    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 (...)
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  36.  31
    Empiricist heresies in early modern medical thought.Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - In Charles T. Wolfe & Ofer Gal (eds.), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science. Springer. pp. 333--344.
    Vitalism, from its early modern to its Enlightenment forms (from Glisson and Willis to La Caze and Barthez), is notoriously opposed to intervention into the living sphere. Experiment, quantification, measurement are all ‘vivisectionist’, morally suspect and worse, they alter and warp the ‘life’ of the subject. They are good for studying corpses, not living individuals. This much is well known, and it has disqualified vitalist medicine from having a place in standard histories of medicine, until recent, post-Foucauldian maneuvers have sought (...)
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  37.  34
    La catégorie d' « organisme » dans la philosophie de la biologie.Charles Wolfe - 2004 - Multitudes 2 (2):27-40.
    The category of« organism » has an ambiguous status: scientific or philosophical? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific « bolstering » for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the « mechanistic » or « reductionist » trend, which is seen as dominant since the 17th century, whether in the case of Stahlian animism, Leibnizian monadology, the neo-vitalism of Hans Driesch, or, lastly, of the « phenomenology of organic life » in the (...)
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  38. (1 other version)Canguilhem and the Logic of Life.Arantza Etxeberria & Charles T. Wolfe - 2018 - Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science 4:47.
    In this paper we examine aspects of Canguilhem’s philosophy of biology, concerning the knowledge of life and its consequences on science and vitalism. His concept of life stems from the idea of a living individual, endowed with creative subjectivity and norms, a Kantian view which “disconcerts logic”. In contrast, two different approaches ground naturalistic perspectives to explore the logic of life and the logic of the living individual in the 1970s. Although Canguilhem is closer to the second, there are divergences; (...)
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  39. The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem and French Biophilosophy in the 1960s.Charles T. Wolfe - manuscript
    The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared “On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires”: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of ‘Life’. Nowadays, as David Hull puts it, “both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted… Organisms are ‘nothing but’ atoms, and that is that.” In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon (...)
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  40. DIDEROT AND MATERIALIST THEORIES OF THE SELF.Charles T. Wolfe - 2015 - Journal of Society and Politics 9 (1):37-52.
    The concept of self has preeminently been asserted (in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, antinaturalistic philosophical positions, from Descartes to Husserl and beyond, with the exception of some hybrid or intermediate positions which declare rather glibly that, since we are biological entities which fully belong to the natural world, and we are conscious of ourselves as 'selves', therefore the self belongs to the natural world (this is characteristic e.g. of embodied phenomenology and enactivism). Nevertheless, from Cudworth (...)
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  41.  18
    A Note on the Situation of Biological Philosophy.Charles Wolfe - 2024 - Revue Internationale de Philosophie 307 (1):95-110.
    Dans un court article rarement discuté intitulé « Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique » (publié en 1947 dans la Revue de métaphysique et de morale ), Canguilhem dénonce la « situation » de ce qu’il appelle la philosophie biologique en France, par rapport à une tradition germanique plus développée. Il explique que la réflexion française sur les questions biologiques est à l’arrêt, à la fois en raison de son héritage cartésien et d’une sorte de (...)
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  42.  43
    The idea of 'philosophy of biology before biology' : a methodological provocation.Charles Wolfe & Cécilia Bognon-Küss - 2019 - In Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe (eds.), Philosophy of Biology Before Biology. London: Routledge. pp. 4-23.
    We argue for a conception of ‘philosophy of biology before biology’ which is neither internalist study of biological doctrines, nor a reconstruction of the role philosophical concepts might have played in the constitution of biology as science, but rather a kind of interplay between metaphysical and empirical issues. This should have an impact both on our present understanding of philosophy of biology, given that it is necessarily conditioned by a very specific history and historiography, and on our understanding of how (...)
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  43.  40
    (2 other versions)Introduction: Vitalism without Metaphysics? Medical Vitalism in the Enlightenment.Charles T. Wolfe - 2008 - Science in Context 21 (4):461-463.
    my introduction to special issue of Science in Context on 18c vitalism.
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  44.  17
    Materialism from Hobbes to Locke, written by Duncan, Stewart.Charles Wolfe - forthcoming - Hobbes Studies:1-6.
  45. Monsters and Philosophy.Charles T. Wolfe (ed.) - 2005 - College Publications.
    Table of contents for MONSTERS AND PHILOSOPHY, edited by Charles T. Wolfe (London 2005) -/- List of Contributors iii Acknowledgments vii List of Abbreviations ix -/- Introduction xi Charles T. Wolfe The Riddle of the Sphinx: Aristotle, Penelope, and 1 Empedocles Johannes Fritsche Science as a Cure for Fear: The Status of Monsters in 21 Lucretius Morgan Meis Nature and its Monsters During the Renaissance: 37 Montaigne and Vanini Tristan Dagron Conjoined Twins and the Limits of our Reason 61 Annie (...)
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  46. Monsters in early modern philosophy.Silvia Manzo & Charles T. Wolfe - 2020 - Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences.
    Monsters as a category seem omnipresent in early modern natural philosophy, in what one might call a “long” early modern period stretching from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, when the science of teratology emerges. We no longer use this term to refer to developmental anomalies (whether a two-headed calf, an individual suffering from microcephaly or Proteus syndrome) or to “freak occurrences” like Mary Toft’s supposedly giving birth to a litter of rabbits, in Surrey in the early eighteenth-century (Todd (...)
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  47. Locke and Projects for Naturalizing the Mind in the 18th Century.Charles T. Wolfe - 2021 - In Jessica Gordon-Roth & Shelley Weinberg (eds.), The Lockean Mind. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 152-163.
    How does Locke contribute to the development of 18th-century projects for a science of the mind, even though he seems to reject or at least bracket off such an idea himself? Contrary to later understandings of empiricism, Locke goes out of his way to state that his project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2). Locke further specifies that this (...)
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    Eliminating Life: From the early modern ontology of Life to Enlightenment proto-biology.Charles T. Wolfe - forthcoming - In Stephen Howard & Jack Stetter (eds.), The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press.
    Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus (and lesser-known figures in the decades prior), and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz and Stahl 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 (...)
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  49. (1 other version)Vital materialism and the problem of ethics in the Radical Enlightenment.Charles T. Wolfe - 2013 - Philosophica 88 (1):31-70.
    From Hegel to Engels, Sartre and Ruyer (Ruyer, 1933), to name only a few, materialism is viewed as a necropolis, or the metaphysics befitting such an abode; many speak of matter’s crudeness, bruteness, coldness or stupidity. Science or scientism, on this view, reduces the living world to ‘dead matter’, ‘brutish’, ‘mechanical, lifeless matter’, thereby also stripping it of its freedom (Crocker, 1959). Materialism is often wrongly presented as ‘mechanistic materialism’ – with ‘Death of Nature’ echoes of de-humanization and hostility to (...)
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  50. review of Lucretius and the Early Modern.Charles T. Wolfe - forthcoming - The Classical Review.
    long version of review forthcoming in much shorter version in Classical Review.
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