The Lenoir thesis revisited: Blumenbach and Kant

Zammito, John H.

doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2011.05.011

Cited by 40 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…SB, whose name rightly evokes synthetic chemistry, inherited from artificial life 36 as well as from bioinformatics and was developed by scientists trained epistemological tools aiming at orienting research or real forces acting upon matter?is however disputed among historians. See Wolfe 2011, Richards 2000, Zammito 2012, Duchesneau 1997, Gambarotto 2018. Brooke 1968, Ramberg 2000, Tomic 2012 See for example Müller 1834.…”

Section: Synthetic Biology Vitalism and The Definition Of Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism

Bognon-Küss

Chen

Wolfe

2018

Kairos. Journal of Philosophy &Amp; Science

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Vitalism was long viewed as the most grotesque view in biological theory: appeals to a mysterious life-force, Romantic insistence on the autonomy of life, or worse, a metaphysics of an entirely living universe. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to present a revised, lighter version that was not weighted down by revisionary metaphysics: “organicism”. And mainstream philosophers of science criticized Driesch and Bergson’s “neovitalism” as a too-strong ontological commitment to the existence of certain entities or “forces”, over and above the system of causal relations studied by mechanistic science, rejecting the weaker form, organicism, as well. But there has been some significant scholarly “push-back” against this orthodox attitude, notably pointing to the 18th-century Montpellier vitalists to show that there are different historical forms of vitalism, including how they relate to mainstream scientific practice (Wolfe and Normandin, eds. 2013). Additionally, some trends in recent biology that run counter to genetic reductionism and the informational model of the gene present themselves as organicist (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000, Moreno and Mossio 2015). Here, we examine some cases of vitalism in the twentieth century and today, not just as a historical form but as a significant metaphysical and scientific model. We argue for vitalism’s conceptual originality without either reducing it to mainstream models of science or presenting it as an alternate model of science, by focusing on historical forms of vitalism, logical empiricist critiques thereof and the impact of synthetic biology on current (re-)theorizing of vitalism.

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Section: Synthetic Biology Vitalism and The Definition Of Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism

Bognon-Küss

Chen

Wolfe

2018

Kairos. Journal of Philosophy &Amp; Science

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“…Three decades ago, Timothy Lenoir claimed that Kant exerted a significant influence on late eighteenth and nineteenth-century biology by articulating the conceptual foundations of the "Göttingen School of biology", established by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (Lenoir 1980(Lenoir , 1981(Lenoir , 1989). Lenoir's argument has been rejected by Robert J. Richards and John Zammito (Richards 2002;Zammito 2012). Richards and Zammito emphasize that Kant's philosophy of biology is at odds with eighteenth-century biological practice.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kant and the scope of analogy in the life sciences

Berg

2018

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A

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“…In a series of careful and trenchant studies over the past three decades, John H. Zammito has demonstrated that the regulative theory of self‐organization Kant presented in his third Critique was not so much representative of epigenesis theory as a reaction formation against its radical ontological and naturalistic implications; see Zammito (, , , , , , ). On instrumentalism, see Jackson ().…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Whether Kant's theory of “self‐organization” is a theory of “epigenesis” is in fact a matter of dispute in the history and philosophy of science; see Roe (), Goldstein (), as well as Zammito (, , , , , , ) and note 3, above.…”

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confidence: 99%

Nerve poetry and fiber art: Biosemiosis and plasticity in Erasmus Darwin

Goldstein

2020

Literature Compass

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This essay explores the philosophy and poetry of the nervous system in Erasmus Darwin's late 18th-century science of life, arguing that Darwin's theory of animation constitutes an unrecognized chapter in the history of what is now called "biosemiotics." I show how Darwin's earlier modern approach to epigenesis and plasticity-concepts resurgent not only in present day developmental biology and neuroscience, but also in continental theory and philosophychallenges these present discourses to grasp mimesis, poiesis, and rhetoric as intrinsic to the logic of life and to any possible science of the biological sign. Uncovering this possibility means displacing Catherine Malabou's influential neo-Kantian approach to plasticity, which, like that of Kant himself, works to suppress the natural histories of meaning that epigenesis opened in the late 18th, as well as the late 20th, centuries. From the alternative, materialist perspective opened in Erasmus Darwin's work, rhetoric and poetics are implicated in the historical and actual conceptualization of epigenetic plasticity and biosemiosis not because biology is a fictive discourse, but because neural formation and communication actually comprise processes of transposition, association, double-meaning, part-for-whole substitution, and species-specific distortion for which metaphor, metonymy, allegory, synecdoche, and (anthropo-)morphism are technically correct and illuminating names. From this perspective, the most baffling and notorious feature of Erasmus Darwin's own use of words can also be conceived anew. His

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The Lenoir thesis revisited: Blumenbach and Kant

Cited by 40 publications

References 36 publications

Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism

Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism

Kant and the scope of analogy in the life sciences

Nerve poetry and fiber art: Biosemiosis and plasticity in Erasmus Darwin

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