15 research outputs found
Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century
There is a familiar opposition between a âScientific Revolutionâ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a âvitalistâ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism â if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, âiatromechanismâ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines â or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the âOxford Physiologistsâ. 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 âanatomicalâ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call âvitalistâ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the EncyclopĂ©die. 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 â understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought â 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 âvital forceâ â which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists
Life as Concept and as Science in Early Modern Thought
What are early modern life sciences, the sciences of? What is the relation of philosophical considerations on living versus dead matter, or the possibility of animate matter, to such sciences? In this entry I examine such questions