ArgumentEighteenth-century Montpellerian vitalism and contemporaneous French “vitalist” materialism, exemplified by the medical and biological materialism of La Mettrie and Diderot, differ in some essential aspects from some later forms of vitalism that tended to postulate immaterial vital principles or forces. This article examines the arguments defending the existence of vital properties in living organisms presented in the context of eighteenth-century French materialism. These arguments had recourse to technological metaphors and analogies, mainly clockworks, in order to claim (...) that just as machines can have functional properties which its parts do not possess, so living organisms can, as material entities, also have organic or vital properties which its material parts do not possess. Such arguments, with the help of a healthy dose of epistemological scepticism, tend to strike a balance between two positions concerning the ontology of life which we now tend to label “vitalism” and “emergentism.” Although there is nothing inconsistent in viewing vital properties as emergent, some ambiguity results if one does not draw a clear distinction between properties and functions. The philosophical problems related to these ambiguities are revealed in Diderot's apparent hesitation concerning sentience as “a general property of matter or the product of organization.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I explore Margaret Cavendish’s engagement with mid-seventeenth-century debates on spirits and spiritual activity in the world, especially the problems of incorporeal substance and magnetism. I argue that between 1664 and 1668, Cavendish developed an increasingly robust form of materialism in response to the deficiencies which she identified in alternative philosophical systems – principally mechanical philosophy and vitalism. This was an intriguing direction of travel, given the intensification in attacks on the supposedly atheistic materialism of Hobbes. (...) While some scholars claim that Cavendish’s views were not formed out of extensive engagement with contemporary thinkers, I suggest that, on the contrary, Cavendish engaged very closely with the views of More, Hobbes and others – including the vitalist thinker Johannes Baptista van Helmont and the mechanical philosopher Henry Power – on the subject of spirits and... (shrink)

“It is less a matter of happiness and unhappiness than of darkness and light: one does not consist in a pure and simple privation of the other.” In contrast to Condillac, Diderot begins with the recognition of the mutually reflexive character of the state of suffering, which is independent of an alternation of pleasure and pain. Or rather, the painful state is spontaneously devalued without any invocation of a hypothetical state of constant happiness. The emergence of an affirmation of physical (...) pain belongs to the condition of the living being and assumes an immediate conceptualization of suffering, even in the imaginary state of an eternal suffering. For Diderot, questioning the meaning of existence goes hand in hand with this innate and unconditioned positing of an unhappy state. Such a postulate makes it more difficult to maintain the stereotypical view that the materialist attitude is one of indifference. Recognizing the necessary laws of matter and identifying disorders as rational productions does not amount to saying that whatever turns out to be necessary is in fact allowable. Matter conditions the constitution of morality, feelings, and thoughts. The human being, however, displays signs of revolt, as well as a capacity to adjust to his deficient states by drawing on the universal tendency of living beings to complicate the necessity of determining what is preferable and rejecting what is painful. To persevere in one’s being, and thereby lay down conditions for an assent to existence, is thus to weaken the pessimism of a blind necessitarianism. The establishment of a natural and material axiology then allows one to grasp the metaphysical implications of this medically grounded vitalism. (shrink)

In this article, I wish to engage in reflecting on the limits of affirmative and vitalist potentials visible in new materialist research. An enthusiastic note is clearly heard from within the new materialist perspective, for example in the important work of Rosi Braidotti. I offer an interpretation of her ‘The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible’ in hopes of reflecting on the limits of the affirmative approach. This interpretation is fuelled by more hesitant notes also heard within new materialist research, tones (...) expressing doubts, tracing the limits of materialist, vitalist, affirmative takes and offering perspectives that turn to ‘a matter that fails to come to life’, ‘unproductive and devoid of relations’. This turn – according to my reading – is an effort to respond to the need to recognise ‘our today’ in its complexity. To fully grasp the landscapes of ‘our today’, I offer a concept of bare death (in dialogue with bare life as coined by Giorgio Agamben and as used by Braidotti) as a concept that relates to instances where something has died but cannot enter into the ‘generative powers of a Life’. It is depicted with references to the nuclear and plastic landscapes of the Anthropocene. Relating to those landscapes, I make use of an art installation by Pinar Yoldas, The Ecosystem of Excess, as a kind of companion for thinking about becoming and the transformation of life and death in order to respond to the ambivalent landscapes of ‘our today’ and to understand how death matters beyond the human self. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

According to the current scientific paradigm, what we call ‘life’, ‘mind’, and ‘consciousness’ are considered epiphenomenal occurrences, or emergent properties or functions of matter and energy. Science does not associate these with an inherent and distinct existence beyond a materialistic/energetic conception. ‘Life’ is a word pointing at cellular and multicellular processes forming organisms capable of specific functions and skills. ‘Mind’ is a cognitive ability emerging from a matrix of complex interactions of neuronal processes, while ‘consciousness’ is an even more elusive (...) concept, deemed a subjective epiphenomenon of brain activity. Historically, however, this has not always been the case, even in the scientific and academic context. Several prominent figures took vitalism seriously, while some schools of Western philosophical idealism and Eastern traditions promoted conceptions in which reality is reducible to mind or consciousness rather than matter. We will argue that current biological sciences did not falsify these alternative paradigms and that some forms of vitalism could be linked to some forms of idealism if we posit life and cognition as two distinct aspects of consciousness preeminent over matter. However, we will not argue in favor of vitalistic and idealistic conceptions. Rather, contrary to a physicalist doctrine, these were and remain coherent worldviews and cannot be ruled out by modern science. (shrink)

This is the introduction to a special issue of 'Science in Context' on vitalism that I edited. The contents are: 1. Guido Giglioni — “What Ever Happened to Francis Glisson? Albrecht Haller and the Fate of Eighteenth-Century Irritability” 2. Dominique Boury— “Irritability and Sensibility: Two Key Concepts in Assessing the Medical Doctrines of Haller and Bordeu” 3. Tobias Cheung — “Regulating Agents, Functional Interactions, and Stimulus-Reaction-Schemes: The Concept of “Organism” in the Organic System Theories of Stahl, Bordeu and Barthez” 4. (...) Charles T. Wolfe & Motoichi Terada — “The Animal Economy as Object and Program in Montpellier Vitalism” 5. Timo Kaitaro — “Can Matter Mark the Hours? – Eighteenth-Century Vitalist Materialism and Functional Properties” 6. Elizabeth Williams —“Of Two Lives One? Jean-Charles-Marguerite-Guillaume Grimaud and the Question of Holism in Vitalist Medicine” 7. Philippe Huneman — “Montpellier Vitalism and the Emergence of Alienism in France (1750-1800): The Case of the Passions” 8. Elke Witt —“Form – A Matter of Generation. The Relation of Generation, Form and Function in the Epigenetic Theory of C.F. Wolff” . (shrink)

Mikhail Bakhtin’s 1926 essay, “Contemporary Vitalism,” includes Bergson alongside Driesch in a short list of “the most published representatives of vitalism in Western Europe,” and, indeed, Bakhtin’s critique of Driesch is intended to undermine what he calls the “conceptual framework” of “contemporary vitalism” as a whole (The crisis of modernism: Bergson and the vitalist controversy. Eds. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1992, p 81). The conceptual framework that Driesch and Bergson are supposed to have (...) shared in common consists at bottom, for Bakhtin, in the ontological commitment to the autonomy of life, “its independence, its disconnectedness from physical-chemical phenomena” (81). This has long been understood as the defining mark of vitalism, at least in the mind of its critics: the contention that matter and the mechanical models that track it are insufficient to the reality of biological forms, and that the explanation of life therefore requires the postulation of a non-mechanical, possibly immaterial, uniquely vital principle, force, substance, or property. Recent scholarship has made considerable headway in complicating these pictures by attending to earlier and subtler forms of materialism, and by distinguishing between different types of vitalism and drawing out the heuristic or scientific utility of some of them (Wolfe, Eidos 14: 212–235, 2011, Antropol Exp 17(13): 215–224, 2017; cf. Wolfe and Normandin, Vitalism and the scientific image in post-enlightenment life science, 1800–2010. Springer, Dordrecht, 2013). The focus of some of this work has been on the critical revaluation of Driesch himself (Bognon et al., Kairos J Philos Sci 20(1): 113–140, 2018). Yet the status of Bergson’s commitment to the existence of a vital principle remains underdeveloped. In the midst of what some are calling a “Bergson renaissance,” I think that it calls for the same kind of critical reappraisal (Ansell-Pearson, Bergson: thinking beyond the human condition. Bloomsbury, New York, 2018: 1; cf. Lundy, Deleuze’s Bergsonism. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, p 5, 2018). The aim of this paper is to attempt the outline of an answer to that call. I begin with a brief summary of Driesch’s vitalism, then I reconstruct Bergson’s underappreciated critique of internal finality, or what Kant called inner purposiveness, and locate in it a subterranean criticism of vital principles of the Drieschian variety as well. Two consequences follow: first, if Bergson is to be considered a vitalist, it cannot be in the Drieschian sense and we are therefore wrong to associate the two; and second, if Bergson is to be considered a vitalist, then his vitalism has to be understood—somewhat counterintuitively, and certainly contra Driesch—on the basis of a principle external to the ostensible individuality of biological forms. (shrink)

This book reveals how, when, where and why vitalism and its relationship to new scientific theories, philosophies and concepts of energy became seminal from the fin de siècle until the Second World War for such Modernists as Sophie Tauber-Arp, Hugo Ball, Juliette Bisson, Eva Carrière, Salvador Dalì, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini and John Cage. For them Vitalism entailed the conception of life as a constant process of metamorphosis impelled by the free flow of (...) energies, imaginings, intuition and memories, unconstrained by mechanistic materialism and chronometric imperatives, to generate what the philosopher Henri Bergson aptly called Creative Evolution. Following the three main dimensions of Vitalist Modernism, the first part of this book reveals how biovitalism at the fin de siècle entailed the pursuit of corporeal regeneration through absorption in raw nature, wholesome environments, aquatic therapies, electromagnetism, heliotherapy, modern sports, particularly rugby; water sports, the Olympic Games and physical culture to energize the human body and vitalize its life force. This is illuminated by artists as geoculturally diverse as Gustave Caillebotte, Thomas Eakins, Munch and Albert Gleizes. The second part illuminates how simultaneously vitalism became aligned with anthroposophy, esotericism, magnetism, occultism, parapsychology, spiritism, theosophy and what Bergson called "psychic states", alongside such new sciences as electromagnetism, radiology and the Fourth Dimension, as captured by such artists as Juliette Bisson, Giacomo Balla, Albert Besnard, Umberto Boccioni, Eva Carrière, John Gerrard Keulemans, László Mohology-Nagy, James Tissot, Albert von Schrenck Notzing and Picasso. During and after the devastation of the First World War, the third part explores how Vitalism, particularly Bergson's theory of becoming, became associated with Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist and Surrealist notions of amorality, atemporality, dysfunctionality, entropy, irrationality, inversion, negation and the nonsensical captured by Hans Arp, Charlie Chaplin, Theo Van Doesburg, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin alongside Cage's concept of Nothing. After investigating the widespread engagement with Bergson's philosophies, Vitalism and art by Anarchists, Marxists and Communists during and after the First World War, it concludes with the official rejection of Bergson and any form of Vitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This book will be of vital interest to gallery, exhibition and museum curators and visitors plus readers and scholars working in art history, art theory, cultural studies, modernist studies, occult studies, European art and literature, health, histories of science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport studies, heritage studies, museum studies and curatorship. (shrink)

TOC -/- 0. Introduction (SN/CW) -/- I. Revisiting vitalist themes in 19th-century science -/- 1. Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute) – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Place of Irritability 2. in the History of Life and Death 3. Joan Steigerwald (York) – Rethinking Organic Vitality in Germany at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century 4. Juan Rigoli (Geneva) –The “Novel of Medicine” 5. Sean Dyde (Cambridge) – Life and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Somaticism in the Wake of Phrenology. -/- II. (...) Twentieth century debates on vitalism in science and philosophy -/- 6. Brian Garrett (McMaster) – Vitalism versus Emergent Materialism 7. Christophe Malaterre (Paris) – Life as an Emergent Phenomenon: from an Alternative to Vitalism to an Alternative to Reductionism 8. Sebastian Normandin (Montreal) – Wilhelm Reich: Vitalism and Its Discontents 9. Chiara Elettra Ferrario (Wellington) and Luigi Corsi (Pisa) – Kurt Goldstein: Vitalism and the Organismic Approach 10. Giuseppe Bianco (Paris/Warwick) – The Origins of Canguilhem’s “Vitalism”. Against the Anthropology of Irritation -/- III. Vitalism and contemporary biological developments -/- 11. William Bechtel (UCSD) — Dynamic Mechanistic Explanation: Addressing the Vitalists’ Objections to Mechanistic Science 12. John Dupré and Maureen O’Malley (Exeter) – Varieties of living things: Life at the intersection of lineage and metabolism 13. J. Scott Turner (Syracuse) – Homeostasis and the forgotten vitalist roots of adaptation -/- . (shrink)

According to the current scientific paradigm, what we call ‘life’, ‘mind’, and ‘consciousness’ are considered epiphenomenal occurrences, or emergent properties or functions of matter and energy. Science does not associate these with an inherent and distinct existence beyond a materialistic/energetic conception. ‘Life’ is a word pointing at cellular and multicellular processes forming organisms capable of specific functions and skills. ‘Mind’ is a cognitive ability emerging from a matrix of complex interactions of neuronal processes, while ‘consciousness’ is an even more elusive (...) concept, deemed a subjective epiphenomenon of brain activity. Historically, however, this has not always been the case, even in the scientific and academic context. Several prominent figures took vitalism seriously, while some schools of Western philosophical idealism and Eastern traditions promoted conceptions in which reality is reducible to mind or consciousness rather than matter. We will argue that current biological sciences did not falsify these alternative paradigms and that some forms of vitalism could be linked to some forms of idealism if we posit life and cognition as two distinct aspects of consciousness preeminent over matter. However, we will not argue in favor of vitalistic and idealistic conceptions. Rather, contrary to a physicalist doctrine, these were and remain coherent worldviews and cannot be ruled out by modern science. (shrink)

Anne Conway’s philosophy has been categorized as “vitalism,” “vital monism,” “spiritualism,” “monistic spiritualism,” “immaterial vitalism,” and “antimaterialism.” While there is no doubt that she is a monist and a vitalist, problems arise with the categories of “spiritualism,” “immaterial vitalism,” and “antimaterialism.” Conway conceives of created substances as gross and fixed spirit, or rarefied and volatile matter. While interpreters agree that Conway’s “spirit” shares characteristics traditionally attributed to matter (e.g., extension, divisibility, impenetrability), and that she is critical of Henry More’s (...) immaterial spirit, Conway’s spirit is still conceived as an immaterial soul-like or mind-like entity. I argue that Conway’s vitalism is material, and is best understood in the tradition of Renaissance vital naturalism. First, Conway does not criticize materialism per se, only mechanical materialism, which characterizes matter as lifeless. Her vitalism has to be materialistic in some sense, since only God is an immaterial substance. Second, Conway’s conceptions of matter and spirit, the language she uses, and the fact that she attributes thinking to extended, divisible, and impenetrable substances all place her within the tradition of Renaissance vital naturalism, wherein Bernardino Telesio, Tommaso Campanella, and Francis Bacon used “spirit” to account for all natural processes. (shrink)

New materialism challenges conventional theories of understanding human being and subjectivity, which it regards as shaped by mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: the body, the role of affect and the emotions, gender, temporality, agency and vitalism. This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature and science, is the first to ask what is 'new' about the (...) new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary perspective. Against current theories of new materialism it argues for a deeper engagement with materialism's history; questions whether matter can be 'lively'; and asks whether new materialism's wish to revitalize of politics and the political lives up to its promise. (shrink)

The materialist approach to the body is often, if not always understood in ‘mechanistic’ terms, as the view in which the properties unique to organic, living embodied agents are reduced to or described in terms of properties that characterize matter as a whole, which allow of mechanistic explanation. Indeed, from Hobbes and Descartes in the 17th century to the popularity of automata such as Vaucanson’s in the 18th century, this vision of things would seem to be correct. In this paper (...) I aim to correct this inaccurate vision of materialism. On the contrary, the materialist project on closer consideration reveals itself to be, significantly if not exclusively, (a) a body of theories specifically focused on the contribution that ‘biology’ or rather ‘natural history’ and physiology make to metaphysical debates, (b) much more intimately connected to what we now call ‘vitalism’ (a case in point is the presence of Théophile de Bordeu, a prominent Montpellier physician and theorist of vitalism, as a fictional character and spokesman of materialism, in Diderot’s novel D’Alembert’s Dream), and ultimately (c) an anti-mechanistic doctrine which focuses on the unique properties of organic beings. To establish this revised vision of materialism I examine philosophical texts such as La Mettrie’s Man a Machine and Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream; medical entries in the Encyclopédie by physicians such as Ménuret and Fouquet; and clandestine combinations of all such sources (Fontenelle, Gaultier and others). (shrink)

The universe as a whole.--Matter and energy.--Life and consciousness.--The fallacy of vitalism.--Materialism.--Idealism.

From Hegel to Engels, Sartre and Ruyer (Ruyer, 1933), to name only a few, materialism is viewed as a necropolis, or the metaphysics befitting such an abode; many speak of matter’s crudeness, bruteness, coldness or stupidity. Science or scientism, on this view, reduces the living world to ‘dead matter’, ‘brutish’, ‘mechanical, lifeless matter’, thereby also stripping it of its freedom (Crocker, 1959). Materialism is often wrongly presented as ‘mechanistic materialism’ – with ‘Death of Nature’ echoes of de-humanization (...) and hostility to the Scientific Revolution (which knew nothing of materialism!), also a powerful Christian theme in Cudworth, Clarke and beyond (Overhoff, 2000). Here I challenge this view, building on some aspects of Israel’s Radical Enlightenment concept (Israel, 2001), which has been controversial but for my purposes is a useful claim about the dissemination of a home-grown Spinozism, sometimes reformulated as an ontology of the life sciences, an aspect Israel does not address (compare Secrétan et al., eds., 2007; Citton, 2006). First, I examine some ‘moments’ of radical Enlightenment materialism such as La Mettrie and Diderot (including his Encyclopédie entry “Spinosiste”), but also anonymous, clandestine texts such as L’Âme Matérielle, to emphasize their distinctive focus on the specific existence of organic beings. Second, I show how this ‘embodied’, non-mechanistic character of Enlightenment ‘vital materialism’ makes it different from other episodes, and perhaps more of an ethics than is usually thought (also via the figure of the materialist as ‘laughing philosopher’). Third, I reflect on what this implies for our image of the Enlightenment – no longer a Frankfurt School and/or Foucaldian vision of ‘discipline’, regimentation and order (as in Mayr, 1986) – but ‘vital’, without, conversely, being a kind of holist vitalism “at odds with the universalizing discourse of Encyclopedist materialism, with its insistence on the uniformity of nature and the universality of physical laws” (Williams, 2003): vital materialism is still materialism. Its ethics tends towards hedonism, but its most radical proponents (Diderot, La Mettrie and later Sade) disagree as to what this means. (shrink)

New materialism challenges conventional theories of understanding human being and subjectivity, which it regards as shaped by mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: the body, the role of affect and the emotions, gender, temporality, agency and vitalism. This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature and science, is the first to ask what is 'new' about the (...) new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary perspective. Against current theories of new materialism it argues for a deeper engagement with materialism's history; questions whether matter can be 'lively'; and asks whether new materialism's wish to revitalize of politics and the political lives up to its promise. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to bring to light the importance of the notion of économie animale in Montpellier vitalism, as a hybrid concept which brings together the structural and functional dimensions of the living body – dimensions which hitherto had primarily been studied according to a mechanistic model, or were discussed within the framework of Stahlian animism. The celebrated image of the bee-swarm expresses this structural-functional understanding of living bodies quite well: “One sees them press against each other, (...) mutually supporting each other, forming a kind of whole, in which each living part, in its own way, by means of the correspondence and directions of its motions, enables this kind of life to be sustained in the body” (Encyclopédie, article “Observation,” by Ménuret de Chambaud). What is important here is that every component part is always a living part, i.e., every structural unit is always functional. Interestingly, while the twin notions of ‘animal economy’ and organisation are presented as improvements over a mechanistic perspective, they are nonetheless compatible with an expanded sense of mechanism and by extension, with materialism as reflected notably in the writings of Ménuret and Bordeu. We thus propose both a revision and reconstruction of the historical status of the ‘animal economy’, and a reflection on its conceptual status. (shrink)

The attribute of living is due either to a specific state of matter or to a distinctive kind of energy. All possible interpretations of these two concepts are materialistic with one exception. There is said to be a kind of energy apart from this world. Such an assumption is vitalistic.

In this paper, I examine Anne Conway’s ‘argument from love’ in her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. This argument, supported by a further argument, the ‘argument from pain’, undermines the dualist dichotomy between mind and matter by appealing to a vitalist similarity principle. My goal is two-fold: first, to contribute to a close systematic reconstruction and analysis of Conway’s arguments, which so far is largely lacking in the literature; second, to show that these arguments are richer (...) and more compelling than commentators have thought. (shrink)

Fascism, according to the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective and new materialist viewpoints, can be conceived of in terms of desire. In mediating desire’s pure flows, the schizoanalytical programme attempts to bypass what Deleuze calls ‘the strange detour of the other’ (B, 356). In this respect, concepts developed in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia cycle are critical to the project of the problematic of desire, the other and (neo-)fascism. In this chapter, we explore how Deleuzo-Guattarian anti-fascist concepts, such as the (...) Body without Organs (BwO), together with new materialist approaches towards vital materialism, may help us to ‘keep an eye on all that is fascist, even [the fascist] inside us’ (TP, 165). Such a critical-creative analysis, we argue, is needed to distinguish contemporary vitalist new materialisms from so-called Lebensphilosophien (philosophies of life) and frame the rise of neoliberal capitalism-supported regimes of neo-fascism. (shrink)

In biology the term “vitalism” is usually associated with Hans Driesch’s doctrine of the entelechy: entelechies were nonmaterial, bio-specific agents responsible for governing a few peculiar biological phenomena. Since vitalism defined as such violates metaphysical materialism, the received view refutes the doctrine of the entelechy as a metaphysical heresy. But in the early twentieth century, a different, non-metaphysical evaluation of vitalism was endorsed by some biologists and philosophers, which finally led to a logical refutation of the doctrine of the (...) entelechy. In this non-metaphysical evaluation, first, vitalism was not treated as a metaphysical heresy but a legitimate response to the inadequacy of mechanistic explanations in biology. Second, the refutation of vitalism was logically rather than metaphysically supported by contemporary biological knowledge. The entelechy was not a valid concept, because vitalists could neither formulate vital laws, nor offer convincing examples of experimental indeterminism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn an early modern context, ‘vitalistic’ natural philosophies had been associated with antiauthoritarian political theories. Whilst mechanical philosophy has been characterized as amenable to conservative politics on account of the structural analogies between passive and inert particles that can only be organized by externally imposed strict mechanical laws on the one hand, and similarly passive citizens, on the other, vitalism understood as a monistic, dynamic materialism purportedly implicated alternative modes of agency and organization. This alternative model incorporated inherently active, (...) self-organizing agents allegedly capable of bringing about higher structures in a bottom-up fashion both in the natural and in political realm. In this paper, I focus on James Harrington’s appropriation of William Harvey’s physiology and examine whether the republican philosopher actually made use of the political potential said to be inherent in vitalistic discourse. I intend to show that Harrington, rather than boldly capitalizing on vitalism’s decentralizing and democratic potential, adapts his physiological imagery to his wider set of ideas concerning human nature and moral psychology underpinning his politics. Simple analogy between vitalism and antiauthoritarianism is then lost in Harrington’s writings, pointing to a more complex relationship between early modern natural and political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues that the vitalist monisms of Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish. Even though Conway is often cited as a proponent of a thoroughgoing ‘spiritualist’ ontology and Cavendish as the advocate of a similarly thoroughgoing materialism, their views turn out to be much closer than they may initially seem. Apart from highlighting the more radical nature of Conway’s position, such a reframing also has the added advantage of bringing the similarities between her own ‘spiritual’ monism and the (...) vitalist ‘materialisms’ of her time into sharper relief. As F. Wunderlich emphasizes, the notion of subtle matter pervaded the natural sciences of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The chapter provides a brief sketch of Cavendish’s ‘materialism’ and compares it to Conway’s view of created substance, drawing out a number of relevant similarities. It asks what may have motivated Conway and Cavendish to move beyond the materialism-immaterialism divide by ‘spiritualizing’ matter in this way. (shrink)

Iceland has not been known as a contributor to the history of science. This small nation in the North-Atlantic has only in recent decades made its mark on international science. But the Icelandic naturalist Thorvaldur Thoroddsen (1855-1921) is an exception to this generalisation, for he was well known at the turn of the 20th century in Europe and America for his research on the geography and geology of Iceland. Though Thoroddsen's contribution to these sciences is of great interest there is (...) another very interesting side to his career. This is his transformation from "mechanist" to "vitalist," which is the main focus of this paper. Thoroddsen, who began his career as a follower of Darwinism and Haeckelian monism, started to express his worries about materialism in society in 1902 culminating in a full-fledged denial of materialism in politics and science in 1910. Thoroddsen's transformation is in its nature a very complex process, but overall it can be traced to his view that materialism was destroying the Danish and Icelandic societies. In the years before 1902 Thoroddsen was a monistic atheist, relatively liberal in his politics, a firm believer in the power of the natural sciences, and considered the laws of physics the key to human progress. His views were strikingly similar to the ones Haeckel expounded in "The Riddle of the Universe" (1899), whose reception in Germany is explored in this paper in order to contextualise Thoroddsen's transformation. Between 1902 and 1910, however, Thoroddsen rejected this worldview in favour of conservative politics and ontological dualism, becoming a staunch believer in a higher, godly, authority. The theories of Darwin and Haeckel were now obsolete and needed to be replaced by the idea of purpose, direction and the final goal of life (Teleology). In order to understand Thoroddsen's transformation, I focus on the interaction of scientific knowledge, politics and other cultural issues in his writings. This is done by looking at Thoroddsen's views on biology, on the natural sciences in general, and on politics as published in Icelandic articles, manuscripts and letters in the period 1872 to 1910. I show that the transformation was due to influences from the German holistic movement, Thoroddsen's engagement with the Royal elite in Denmark and its political concerns, new developments in physics, and from personal traumas and professional disappointments. I also show that Thoroddsen's transformation seems to be a good example of the social shaping of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

So-called ‘new materialism’ enables feminist theorists to emphasize the agential quality of matter, thereby challenging the notion that matter, particularly the biological body, is passive and inert – a notion that is gendered given the traditional association of passive matter with the feminine. While appreciating the materialist turn increasingly evident in feminist theory, Claire Colebrook warns feminist thinkers against an uncritical appeal to the vitalist tradition, which continues to privilege action, creativity and productivity over that materiality which remains (...) unactualized potential. After outlining the new materialist re-conception of matter, this paper considers the idea of a ‘passive vitalism’, which Colebrook develops in light of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's co-authored works. This paper shares Colebrook's contention that the new materialist emphasis on the agency of matter simply extends the model of the human person to the rest of nature. However, the final part of this paper begins to indicate how a theological materialism is able to affirm both the agency and patiency of matter in ways that challenge the view that the avowal of divine transcendence is inevitably opposed to the integrity of material immanence. (shrink)

Though most neomaterialists share a commitment to the Copernican decentring of humans from the world stage, there is disagreement on the purposes of such an endeavour. The polemic stems from a fundamental discrepancy about what the return to materiality entails: is matter the principle of the non-thinking as such, or is it always already imbued with some sort of subjectivity? Is the new materialism’s goal to come to terms with the non-living origin of life? Or is it rather to (...) recognize that seemingly dead materials are always in some sense incipiently alive? For convenience, we can think of two neomaterialist perspectives: the rationalist or eliminative neomaterialism, and the vitalist or panpsychist neomaterialism. I explore some of the conceptual problems faced by both camps and, drawing from the recently developed theory of consciousness as integrated information, as well as its quantum physical construal by Max Tegmark, I suggest some provisional ways to address those issues. (shrink)

The Well-Ordered Universe argues that Cavendish's natural philosophy, social and political philosophy, and medical theory share an underlying concern with order. This reveals interesting connections among Cavendish's natural philosophy and her views on gender, animals and the environment, and human health, and explains her commitment to monarchy and social hierarchy.

Margaret Cavendish is a vitalist, materialist, and monist. She holds that human beings and other natural kinds are parts of the one material entity she calls “nature.” While she thinks that human beings may not be superior to other animals in many ways, she does argue that human beings have a type of knowledge and perception that is unique to their kind, that they strive for the continuance of their being, and that they join together into societies in order (...) to achieve a more peaceful existence. In what follows, we will give a brief overview of Cavendish’s metaphysics of nature, and then turn to her metaphysics of human beings. We will consider the formation of human beings, how their perception and knowledge differ from other nonhuman animals, how human beings are individuated, and in what sense they can be immortal. Finally, we will turn to her social and political views of human beings. In the end, we will argue, contra current scholarship, that Cavendish’s views about the social nature of the human beings mirror her views about the metaphysical structure of nature. In particular, we show that Cavendish embraces both natural and social hierarchy as well as a form of sexual equality that we dub “Platonic feminism.”. (shrink)

This thesis is a study of the relationship between Schopenhauer and the biology in the early nineteenth century. Schopenhauer improved Kant’s epistemology based on the findings of the brain physiology of the time and extended the area of the apriority and rationality. The brain paradox is based on the interpretation that Schopenhauer insists on both materialism and idealism. But what Schopenhauer received in French physiology is not materialism but vitalism. This view of Schopenhauer is also revealed by his (...) suggesting primordial animal, which is not mechanistically explained, to Lamarck’s physicalism. Schopenhauer’s ethics does not presuppose mechanistic materialism or idealism. Schopenhauer sets the limits of natural science only to criticize the mechanical materialism. One identical being presupposed by his ethics is accepted by natural sciences. (shrink)

Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The book's ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book's posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories. They are (...) analysed through the lens of a posthuman, queerfeminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material). Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queerfeminine "I", who contemplates the relationship with her dead beloved lesbian life partner. She reflects on her enactment of processes of co-becoming with the phenomenal and material traces of the deceased body, and the new assemblages with which it has merged through death's material metamorphoses: becoming-ashes through cremation, and becoming-mixed-with-algae-sand when the ashes were scattered across a seabed made of fiftyfive million-year-old, fossilized algae. It is argued that the mourning "I"'s intimate bodily empathizing (theorized as symphysizing) with her deceased, queermasculine beloved life partner facilitates the processes of vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming, and the rethinking of death from a new and different perspective than that of the sovereign, philosophical subject. (shrink)

'John Toland's Letters to Serena' is one of the most important texts of the early Enlightenment. Synthesizing an array of European thought, the Letters was not only significant for Toland's own 'freethinking' cause, but also provided crucial foundations for the 'vitalist' materialism characterising later Enlightenment thought.

The early modern period is arguably the most pivotal of all in the study of the mind, teeming with a variety of conceptions of mind. Some of these posed serious questions for assumptions about the nature of the mind, many of which still depended on notions of the soul and God. It is an era that witnessed the emergence of theories and arguments that continue to animate the study of philosophy of mind, such as dualism, vitalism, materialism, and idealism. (...) -/- Covering pivotal figures in philosophy such as Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, Leibniz, Cavendish, and Spinoza, Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages provides an outstanding survey of philosophy of mind of the period. Following an introduction by Rebecca Copenhaver, sixteen specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors discuss key topics, thinkers, and debates, including: -/- Hobbes, Descartes’ philosophy of mind and its early critics, consciousness, the later Cartesians, Malebranche, Cavendish, Locke, Spinoza, Descartes and Leibniz, perception and sensation, desires, mental substance and mental activity, Hume, and Kant. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, enlightenment philosophy, and the history of philosophy, Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as religion, history of psychology, and history of science. (shrink)

In this paper I will examine Vandana Shiva’s ecofeminist thought with two goals: on the one hand, I will argue that her ecofeminism defines a vitalist materialist approach of feminine roots, since Shiva concedes an epistemological value to the practices and knowledge historically originated from the sustainability tasks that women have carried out. On the other hand and as a consequence, I will defend that she presents a political proposal, which entails a suggestive and radical redefinition of the traditional (...) concept of politics. Finally, I will try to show that the ability of attributing political meaning to experiences and actions of specific women allows for a change in perspective that Shiva accomplishes in an extremely fruitful double movement: the recognition of the existing and the affirmation of politics as present. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish is a very difficult thinker to place in context. Given her stern critique of the “experimental philosophy” in the Observations on the Experimental Philosophy, one might be tempted to place Cavendish among the opponents of Francis Bacon and his experimental thought. But, I argue, her rela­tion to Baconianism is much more subtle than that would suggest. I begin with an overview of Cavendish’s philosophical program, focusing mainly on her later natural philosophical thought in Philosophical and Physical Opinions, Philosophical (...) Letters, Observations on the Experimental Philosophy and her Grounds of Natural Philosophy. I then turn to Francis Bacon, and talk about how he understood his philosophical program in the 1620s, and how it had been transformed by later Baconians in the 1650s and 1660s. While Bacon held a vitalistic natural philosophy, what was most visible, particularly in Royal Society propaganda, was his experimentalism. But Margaret Cavendish’s natural philosophical program is, in a way, the exact contrary. While she was skeptical of Bacon’s experimentalism, she was an enthusiastic advocate for a vitalistic materialism that may well have been inspired, at least in part, by Bacon’s thought. Because of her opposition to the experimental philosophy, her contemporaries may not have seen her as a Baconian. But even so I think that she was a philosopher whom Bacon himself would have recognized as a kindred spirit. (shrink)

In contrast to the conventional view of Ludwig Feuerbach as a left-wing Young Hegelian, this article argues that his primary contribution to philosophy is to be found in his later ethics, the basis of which may be discerned in his earlier writings. Over and above recent work on Feuerbach's aesthetics, his relation to Herder, and the relationship between aesthetics and ‘theological politics’ in his thought, Feuerbach's philosophy can re-evaluated, in relation to Epicurus and the French libertin tradition, as articulating an (...) ethics of hedonism. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), the Nachlass fragment ‘Elementary Aesthetics’ (1843), and his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) Feuerbach moves towards the vitalist materialist position that culminates in his (proto-Nietzschean) insight in ‘Against the Dualism of Body and Soul, Flesh and Spirit’ (1846) into the world as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’, thus laying the foundations for his recognition of the centrality of sensuous pleasure to the ethical life. (shrink)