Summary The Italian naturalist F. Redi established in 1668 that insects are not produced by the way of equivocal generation, contrary to what was affirmed since the Antiquity. For that reason, many historians of sciences acknowledge his experiments, like those of Galileo, Boyle or Huygens, contributed to the scientific revolution that emerges in the seventeenth century in Western Europe. Based on the commentaries sparked off by the works of Redi, in his time and today, our contribution shows on the contrary (...) that nothing at all in his approach reveals such an intention. Questioning without arrogance the knowledge and the authority of the Ancients, careful interrogation of the literariness of the Scriptures, adoption of an experimental reasoning still dependent on the scholastic argumentation, those are the main characteristics of his work. But those also could be the ones of Harvey, Borelli or Swammerdam's works. To defend the idea of a scientific revolution in the life sciences similar in its conditions and tempo to the one described in the history of the physical sciences would be a mistake, not to say an anachronism. (shrink)

Summary The Italian naturalist F. Redi established in 1668 that insects are not produced by the way of equivocal generation, contrary to what was affirmed since the Antiquity. For that reason, many historians of sciences acknowledge his experiments, like those of Galileo, Boyle or Huygens, contributed to the scientific revolution that emerges in the seventeenth century in Western Europe. Based on the commentaries sparked off by the works of Redi, in his time and today, our contribution shows on the contrary (...) that nothing at all in his approach reveals such an intention. Questioning without arrogance the knowledge and the authority of the Ancients, careful interrogation of the literariness of the Scriptures, adoption of an experimental reasoning still dependent on the scholastic argumentation, those are the main characteristics of his work. But those also could be the ones of Harvey, Borelli or Swammerdam's works. To defend the idea of a scientific revolution in the life sciences similar in its conditions and tempo to the one described in the history of the physical sciences would be a mistake, not to say an anachronism. (shrink)

La Mettrie shows in his philosophical and medical works, and particularly in Ouvrage de Pénélope, a real interest in the natural sciences of his time and above all in the works of Linnaeus with whom he is the exact contemporary. Even if he speaks ironically about his botanical and zoological classification and criticizes his teleological conception of nature, La Mettrie appreciates the analogical reasoning of Linnaeus which is the fundamental method of the Linnaean apprehension of knowledge, as much as the (...) metaphoric language that he will use in L'homme-plante. From this point of view, La Mettrie is one of the first French popularizers of Linnaeus' works and, at the same time, his first critic. (shrink)