Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy

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 broad engagement with a variety of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century vitalisms and conceptions of life. In addition, it discusses important threads in the history of concepts in the United States and Europe, including charting new reception histories in eastern and south-eastern Europe. While vitalism, organicism and similar epistemologies are often the concern of specialists in the history and philosophy of biology and of historians of ideas, the range of the contributions as well as the geographical and temporal scope of the volume allows for it to appeal to the historian of science and the historian of biology generally.

1. Brooke Holmes (Princeton): The Two-Soul Problem: Aristotle, the Stoics, Galen. - 2. Hannah Landecker: Metabolic Materialism. - 3. Christopher Donohue (NIH): Concerning the Tenacious Adherence of Animal Spirit to Matter" . - 4. Crystal Hall (Bowdoin College) and Erik L. Peterson (University of Alabama): Who were the vitalists and where did they go? . - 5. Jane Maienschein (ASU): Early Twentieth Century Accounts of the Individuality of Organized Whole Organisms. - 6. Bohang Chen (Ghent): Hans Driesch and vitalism: the standpoint of logical empiricism. - 7. Mazviita Chirimuuta (Pittsburgh): The Critical Difference between Holism and Vitalism in Cassirer s Philosophy of Science. - 8. Tano S. Posteraro (Penn State): Vitalism and the Problem of Individuation: Another Look at Bergson s Élan Vital. - 9. Sebastjan Vörös (Ljubljana): Is there not a truth of vitalism? Transcendental vitalism in light of Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty, and Varela. - 10. Arantza Exteberria (IAS, San Sebastian) and Charles T. Wolfe (Ghent): Canguilhem and the logic of life. - 11. Phillip Honenberger (UNLV): All Knowing is Orientation: Marjorie Grene' s Ecological Epistemology. - 12. Alvaro Moreno (IAS, San Sebastian): What is life? The historical dimension of biological organization. - 13. Cécilia Bognon-Küss (Louvain-La Neuve): The concept of metabolism, biological identity and the challenges from microbiome research.