Download or read book Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy written by Christopher Donohue and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-02 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post Enlightenment Life Science 1800 2010 written by Sebastian Normandin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vitalism is understood as impacting the history of the life sciences, medicine and philosophy, representing an epistemological challenge to the dominance of mechanism over the last 200 years, and partly revived with organicism in early theoretical biology. The contributions in this volume portray the history of vitalism from the end of the Enlightenment to the modern day, suggesting some reassessment of what it means both historically and conceptually. As such it includes a wide range of material, employing both historical and philosophical methodologies, and it is divided fairly evenly between 19th and 20th century historical treatments and more contemporary analysis. This volume presents a significant contribution to the current literature in the history and philosophy of science and the history of medicine.
Download or read book On the Riddle of Life written by Bohang Chen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2024-10-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a historico-logical study of vitalism. It begins by uncovering previously unknown doctrines of vitalism from the history of science—encompassing biological, physical, and social sciences—and then subjects these doctrines to a thorough logical analysis. Through this process, the book offers a unified conceptual framework to understand the major doctrines of vitalism in the history of science, ultimately relating vitalism to the question of life. Following the classical methodological approach endorsed by Immanuel Kant, nineteenth-century philosopher-scientists like Ernst Mach, and early-twentieth-century logical analysts, including logical empiricists, British analysts, pragmatists, Husserlian phenomenologists, and neo-Kantians, this work provides unconventional and valuable perspectives on vitalism and the riddle of life, appealing to a broad audience, including scientists, historians, and philosophers of science, particularly those from biological backgrounds.
Download or read book On the Riddle of Life written by Bohang Chen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Structuralism and Form in Literature and Biology written by Peter McMahon and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-28 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book considers biology in parallel with philosophical structuralism in order to argue that notions of form in the organism are analogous to similar ideas in structuralist philosophy and literary theory. This analogy is then used to shed light on debates among biological scientists from the turn of the 19th century to the present day, including Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Dawkins, Crick, Goodwin, Rosen and West-Eberhard. The book critiques the endorsement of genetic manipulation and bioengineering as keys to solving agricultural and environmental problems, suggesting that alternative models have been marginalized in the promotion of this discourse. Drawing from the work of philosophers including Cassirer, Saussure, Jakobson and Foucault the book ultimately argues that methods based on agroecology, supported by molecular applications (such as marker-assisted selection, MAS), can both advance agricultural development and remain focused on the whole organism.
Download or read book The Riddle of Organismal Agency written by Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Riddle of Organismal Agency brings together historians, philosophers, and scientists for an interdisciplinary re-assessment of one of the long-standing problems in the scientific understanding of life. Marshalling insights from diverse sciences including physiology, comparative psychology, developmental biology, and evolutionary biology, the book provides an up-to-date survey of approaches to non-human organisms as agents, capable of performing activities serving their own goals such as surviving or reproducing, and whose doings in the world are thus to be explained teleologically. From an Integrated History and Philosophy of Science perspective, the book contributes to a better conceptual and theoretical understanding of organismal agency, advancing some suggestions on how to study it empirically and how to frame it in relation to wider scientific and philosophical traditions. It also provides new historical entry points for examining the deployment, trajectories, and challenges of agential views of organisms in the history of biology and philosophy. This book will be of interest to philosophers of biology; historians of science; biologists interested in analysing the active roles of organisms in development, ecological interactions, and evolution; philosophers and practitioners of the cognitive sciences; and philosophers and historians of philosophy working on purposiveness and teleology.
Download or read book Inventive Life written by Mariam Fraser and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2006-01-19 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates how and why vitalism - the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism - matters now. Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences whilst simultaneously addressing the object of life itself. The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life across the sciences, social sciences and humanities and questions about contingency, indeterminacy, relationality and change. All have special importance now, as the concepts of complexity, artificial life and artificial intelligence, information theory and cybernetics become increasingly significant in more and more fields of activity.
Download or read book Modernism Science and Technology written by Mark S. Morrisson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From quantum physics and genetics to psychology and the social sciences, from the development of atomic weapons to the growing mass media of film and radio, the early 20th century was a period of intense scientific and technological change. Modernism, Science, and Technology surveys the scientific contexts of writers from H.G. Wells and Gertrude Stein to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the ways in modernist writers responded to these paradigm shifts. Introducing key concepts from science studies and their implications for the study of modernist literature, the book includes chapters covering the physical sciences, mathematics, life sciences, social sciences and 'pseudosciences'. Including a timeline of key developments and guides to further reading, this is an essential guide to students and researchers studying the topic at all levels.
Download or read book Theology Science and Life written by Carmody Grey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a bold intervention in the ongoing debate about the relationship between 'theology' and 'science', Theology, Science and Life proposes that the strong demarcation between the two spheres is unsustainable; theology occurs within and not outside what we call 'science', and 'science' occurs within and not outside theology. The book applies this in a penetrating way to the most topical, contentious and philosophically charged science of late modernity: biology. Rejecting the easy dualism of expressions such as 'theology and science', 'theology or science', modern biology is examined so as to illuminate the nature of both. In making this argument, the book achieves two further things. It is the first major English-language reception and application of the thought of philosopher Hans Jonas in theology, and it makes a decisive contribution to the unfolding reception of 'Radical Orthodoxy', one of the most influential schools in contemporary Anglophone theology.
Download or read book Vital Forces Teleology and Organization written by Andrea Gambarotto and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-18 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive account of vitalism and the Romantic philosophy of nature. The author explores the rise of biology as a unified science in Germany by reconstructing the history of the notion of “vital force,” starting from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth century. Further, he argues that Romantic Naturphilosophie played a crucial role in the rise of biology in Germany, especially thanks to its treatment of teleology. In fact, both post-Kantian philosophers and naturalists were guided by teleological principles in defining the object of biological research. The book begins by considering the problem of generation, focusing on the debate over the notion of “formative force.” Readers are invited to engage with the epistemological status of this formative force, i.e. the question of the principle behind organization. The second chapter provides a reconstruction of the physiology of vital forces as it was elaborated in the mid- to late-eighteenth century by the group of physicians and naturalists known as the “Göttingen School.” Readers are shown how these authors developed an understanding of the animal kingdom as a graded series of organisms with increasing functional complexity. Chapter three tracks the development of such framework in Romantic Naturphilosophie. The author introduces the reader to the problem of classification, showing how Romantic philosophers of nature regarded classification as articulated by a unified plan that connects all living forms with one another, relying on the idea of living nature as a universal organism. In the closing chapter, this analysis shows how the three instances of pre-biological discourse on living beings – theory of generation, physiology and natural history – converged to form the consolidated disciplinary matrix of a general biology. The book offers an insightful read for all scholars interested in classical German philosophy, especially those researching the philosophy of nature, as well as the history and philosophy of biology.
Download or read book The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy written by Donna V. Jones and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making.
Download or read book The Vitalism of Hans Driesch written by Horst H. Freyhofer and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 1982 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first part of this century, many people in the western world and elsewhere adopted the view that immaterial agents shape the material world - more or less willfully and/or consciously - in accordance with principles whose nature admittedly was little understood, but for that reason needed much scrutiny. According to this view, the presence of these agents (souls, spirits) is manifest in all organic processes, animal life, and human culture - in the creation of artworks as much as in the organization of cells. The two most articulate advocates of this view, the philosopher Henri Bergson and the biologist Hans Driesch, became authors whose works were widely read during the 20es and 30es, but who fell into virtual oblivion since then. This book traces the development of Driesch's decidedly scientific theory of vitalism and tries to give an account of its success and eventual decline.
Download or read book The Encyclodedia of Christianity Vol 5 written by Erwin Fahlbusch and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2008-02-14 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by leading scholars from around the world, the articles in this volume range from sin, Sufism and terrorism to theology in the 19th and 20th centuries, Vatican I and II and the virgin birth.
Download or read book The History Theory Of Vitalism written by Hans Driesch and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the fascinating history and philosophy behind the study of vitalism with this groundbreaking work by Charles Kay Ogden and Hans Driesch. Vitalism, the belief that living organisms possess a unique life force that cannot be explained by physical or chemical processes alone, has a long and complex history. From the ancient Greeks to the modern era, The History & Theory of Vitalism traces the development of this important idea and analyzes its implications for science, philosophy, and medicine. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought Volume 2 The Twentieth Century written by Peter E. Gordon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought is an authoritative and comprehensive exploration of the themes, thinkers and movements that shaped our intellectual world in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century. Representing both individual figures and the contexts within which they developed their ideas, each essay is written in a clear accessible style by leading scholars in the field and offers both originality and interpretive insight. This second volume surveys twentieth-century European intellectual history, conceived as a crisis in modernity. Comprised of twenty-one chapters, it focuses on figures such as Freud, Heidegger, Adorno and Arendt, surveys major schools of thought including Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Conservatism, and discusses critical movements such as Postcolonialism, , Structuralism, and Post-structuralism. Renouncing a single 'master narrative' of European thought across the period, Peter E. Gordon and Warren Breckman establish a formidable new multi-faceted vision of European intellectual history for the global modern age.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought Volume 2 The Twentieth Century written by Warren Breckman and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the major themes, thinkers, and movements in modern European intellectual history.
Download or read book Legacy of Anne Conway 1631 1679 The written by Carol Wayne White and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-16 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the work of Anne Conway, whose philosophy of the natural world incorporated a spiritual vision.
