Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century

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 heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists

When Monkeys Were Humans: Narratives of the Relationship between Primates and Tobas (Qom) Peoples of the Gran Chaco of Argentina

En este trabajo analizaremos la relación entre los monos y los indígenas Qom (tobas) del Gran Chaco argentino. Nuestro objetivo consistirá en preguntarnos: ¿los monos aulladores en el este de Formosa son lo mismo para los indígenas que para los no-indígenas? Para dar respuesta a este interrogante nos dedicaremos, en un primer momento, a una relectura de la mitología Qom que vincula a los primates con los humanos. El fin será rastrear el origen de la humanidad, la animalidad y sus convergencias. En un segundo momento analizaremos escenarios actuales de relaciones entre primates humanos y no-humanos con el propósito de comprender dichas tramas en el contexto de la sociocosmología indígena. Guiados por el método de la 'equivocación controlada' nuestras conclusiones contrastarán maneras de componer mundos donde los monos y los humanos se relacionan.Fil: Medrano, María Celeste. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas. Sección de Etnología y Etnografía; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Suarez, Valentín. No especifíca

Size-dependent transformation from Ag templates to Au-Ag nanoshells via galvanic replacement reaction in organic medium

10.1007/s11051-012-1186-9Journal of Nanoparticle Research1410