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Life as Concept and as Science in Early Modern Thought

Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences

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Introduction

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.

Life as Concept or as Scientific Object: The Problem

Hor: What is Life?

Cleo: Every body understands the Meaning of the Word, though, perhaps, no body knows the Principle of Life, that Part which gives Motion to all the rest. (Mandeville 1729/1924, II, 167)

Life is a polysemous notion. Early modern thinkers, no less than us, moved imperceptibly between usage in which “life” might be the life of a person, or the art of living well, or morally, and usage closer to what we might think of as a “scientific” sense of life, i.e., the object of a science like biology (which only comes into being in the late eighteenth century). Scholarship on early modern philosophy has had less difficulty in picking out the specific issues concerning “biological...

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To my knowledge the first person to raise the issue was Salomon-Bayet (1978, pp. 12, 15, 112, 334) and in the Anglophone literature Cook (1990, pp. 401–404). Smith (ed.) 2006 is a notable attempt in the latter tradition to redress the balance, without particular focus on the Scientific Revolution paradigm itself; see also Pyle (1987) (which stresses the “metaphysics of generation” more than the possible revision of a Scientific Revolution paradigm).

  2. 2.

    Fontenelle (1702), Preface, n.p. (translations are mine unless otherwise indicated). The section of the Académie for “physical sciences” (the non-mathematical, manipulable sciences) included anatomy, chemistry, metallurgy, mineralogy, botany, agriculture, and natural history; the absence of a section for physiology has led some commentators to assume that such researches were conducted outside the Académie: far from it.

  3. 3.

    de Richerand (1817), Prolégomènes, p. 1; the first edition of Richerand’s textbook appeared in 1801, but does not include this expression, even if it does include long discussions on the nature and scope of physiology, understood as the science that studies the entirety of properties of the animal economy, i.e., the science of life. See Toepfer, “Physiologie,” in Toepfer (2011).

  4. 4.

    On the history of the term “biology,” see Barsanti (2000); Toepfer, “Biologie,” in Toepfer (2011); Bognon-Küss and Wolfe, “Philosophy of biology before biology: a methodological provocation,” in Bognon-Küss and Wolfe (eds) (2019).

  5. 5.

    Foucault (1966, pp. 139, 173). For an excellent, less tendentious discussion of the shifting meanings of “biology” and its predecessors, “physiology” and “natural history,” and an analysis of the relation between “philosophy” and these terms, see Gayon (1998). For the newer view that the eighteenth century was significantly concerned with “vital” matters, see Reill (2005) and Bognon-Küss and Wolfe (eds) 2019.

  6. 6.

    I quote from a draft translation of De Vita Naturae by Guido Giglioni, which he was kind enough to share with me. Thanks also to Jonathan Regier for helpful comments.

  7. 7.

    Nutrition will become an increasingly important topic, with authors including Bonnet insisting that nutrition and organic development (including embryogenesis) are the products of forces different from mechanical forces (Bonnet 1779, vol. V, p. 192).

  8. 8.

    Bourguet (1729), fourth letter; Linnaeus, Introduction to the Philosophia botanica: “Stones grow, plants grow, and live, animals grow, live and feel” (I, §3, in Linnaeus (1751), p. 3)

  9. 9.

    Hobbes 1651/1996, p. 9; Pitcairn, “A Dissertation Upon the Circulation of the Blood Through the Minutest Vessels of the Body,” in Pitcairn (1727, p. 99)

  10. 10.

    Vitalism in this context refers to doctrines in medicine and other life sciences which seek to grasp the particular nature of vitality, in some cases (but not all) positing a kind of “vital force” or “vital principle” to explain the difference between a living and a dead body in general and processes such as digestion, assimilation, and self-preservation in particular. The word “vitalist” appears at much the same time as does the word “biology,” a fact that has not so far been discussed much, if it all. On the history of the former, see Wolfe (2017) and, on the interrelation of the two, Wolfe (2019).

  11. 11.

    Fontenelle (1730, p. 16). In the early nineteenth century, William Cullen is still using this language: the body is both a chemical mixt and a hydraulic machine (and, he adds, an “animated nervous frame”): Cullen (1827, vol. 1, p. 409), cit. in Demeter (2016, p. 44).

  12. 12.

    Descartes speaks of the “office” of the liver, e.g., in a letter to Elisabeth, May 1646 (AT IV, p. 407); on health, he asserts, for instance, in a letter to the Marquis of Newcastle of October 1645 that “the preservation of health has always been the principal end of my studies” (AT IV, p. 329).

  13. 13.

    For the older, somewhat Whiggish version of the pro-mechanist view, see Schiller (1978); for the newer, more subtle version, see Bertoloni Meli (2011) and Andrault (2016). For more pro-organismic views, often apparent in scholars whose narrative gives an important place to Kant, see, e.g., McLaughlin (1990) and Mensch (2013).

  14. 14.

    Lack of space means I cannot go into detail into another celebrated case in which life science (here, anatomy as well as embryology) and metaphysics become, so to speak, conjoined, namely, monsters.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Sarton Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Charles T. Wolfe

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  1. Charles T. Wolfe
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

  2. Dept. of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University Dept. Philosophy & Moral Sci, Ghent, Oost-Vlaanderen, Belgium

    Charles T. Wolfe

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  1. Département Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences, Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France

    Justin E.H. Smith

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Wolfe, C.T. (2019). Life as Concept and as Science in Early Modern Thought. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_171-1

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    Life as Concept and as Science in Early Modern Thought
    Published:
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    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_171-2

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    Life as Concept and as Science in Early Modern Thought
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    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_171-1

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