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Introduction: Les raisons de ce livre
No full textNotre intention est de proposer une lecture alternative
des relations biopolitiques qui ne se fonde pas sur la simple négation
de la vie ou l’annulation de la subjectivité individuelle, mais
sur l’identification de points que nous pourrions appeler en termes
foucaldiens des « contrepouvoirs », qui nous permettent de réécrire
les pratiques politiques à partir d’une collectivité d’individus. Pour
cette raison, il nous semble essentiel de réaffirmer, au moyen d’un
« retour à Canguilhem », l’autonomie de la biologie et de la médecine,
car il est apparu évident que dans les lectures biopolitiques
susmentionnées, celles-ci avaient perdu leur autonomie, broyées par des mécanismes de pouvoir qui les réduisaient à de simples outils
de gestion de la vi
"Cabinet d'histoire naturelle," or: The interplay of nature and artifice in Diderot's naturalism
Full text linkIn selected texts by Diderot, including the Encyclopédie article “Cabinet d'histoire naturelle” (along with his comments in the article “Histoire naturelle”), the Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature and the Salon de 1767, I examine the interplay between philosophical naturalism and the recognition of the irreducible nature of artifice, in order to arrive at a provisional definition of Diderot's vision of Nature as “une femme qui aime à se travestir.” How can a metaphysics in which the concept of Nature has a normative status, also ultimately consider it to be something necessarily artificial? Historically, the answer to this question involves the project of natural history. A present-day reconstruction would have to make sense of this project and relate it to the vision of Nature expressed in Diderot's phrase. In addition, it would hopefully pinpoint the difference between this brand of Enlightenment naturalism and contemporary naturalism, and by extension, allow us to understand a bit more about what naturalism is in general.In selected texts by Diderot, including the Encyclopédie article "Cabinet d'histoire naturelle" (along with his comments in the article "Histoire naturelle"), the Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature and the Salon de 1767, I examine the interplay between philosophical naturalism and the recognition of the irreducible nature of artifice, in order to arrive at a provisional definition of Diderot's vision of Nature as "une femme qui aime à se travestir." How can a metaphysics in which the concept of Nature has a normative status, also ultimately consider it to be something necessarily artificial? Historically, the answer to this question involves the project of natural history. A present-day reconstruction would have to make sense of this project and relate it to the vision of Nature expressed in Diderot's phrase. In addition, it would hopefully pinpoint the difference between this brand of Enlightenment naturalism and contemporary naturalism, and by extension, allow us to understand a bit more about what naturalism is in general. © 2009 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
La biophilosophie de Georges Canguilhem
Full text linkGeorges Canguilhem's Biophilosophy
The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared «On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires»: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of “Life”. Certain influential French philosophers of science of the mid-century such as Georges Canguilhem would disagree, or at least seek to resist some of Jacob’s diagnosis. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences (particularly medicine, physiology and the cluster of activities that were termed “biology” in the early 1800s). Canguilhem speaks of «defending vitalist biology» and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic (or at least, «la vie déconcerte la logique»). Is this history and philosophy of biology? Is it vitalism? It definitely is a different project from current philosophy of biology. One short-lived term for it was “biophilosophy”. In this paper I explore the content of this term as it relates to the above questions
89: 'Diderot and materialist theories of the self'
Full text linkAbstract:The concept of self has preeminently been asserted (in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, anti-naturalistic philosophical positions, from Descartes to Husserl and beyond, with the exception of some hybrid or intermediate positions which declare rather glibly that, since we are biological entities which fully belong to the natural world, and we are conscious of ourselves as 'selves', therefore the self belongs to the natural world (this is characteristic e.g. of embodied phenomenology and enactivism). Nevertheless, from Cudworth and More’s attacks on materialism all the way through twentieth-century argument against naturalism, the gulf between selfhood and the world of Nature appears unbridgeable. In contrast, my goal in this paper is to show that early modern materialism could yield a theory of the self according to which (1) the self belongs to the world of external relations (Spinoza), such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) the self can be reconstructed as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality (a central text here is Diderot’s 1769 Rêve de D’Alembert); yet this should not lead us to espouse a Romantic concept of organism as foundational or even ineffable subjectivity (a dimension present in Leibniz and made explicit in German idealism); (3) what we call 'self' might simply be a dynamic process of interpretive activity undertaken by the brain. This materialist theory of the self should not neglect the nature of experience, but it should also not have to take at face value the recurring invocations of a better, deeper “first-person perspective” or “first-person science.
Genealogy of the sensation : physics, physiology and psychology in Europe, from Fernel to Locke
No full textDeterminism/Spinozism in the Radical Enlightenment: the cases of Anthony Collins and Denis Diderot
Full text linkIn his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. This case study should then shed some light on the intellectual and ideological (religious, political) ‘boundaries’ delimiting radical thought in two European countries in the first half of the eighteenth century
Entretien sur l’histoire du matérialisme
Full text linkCharles Wolfe has just published Lire le matérialisme (ENS Éditions, 2020), where he sketches a history of the different forms of materialism, including vitalist materialism and versions of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Pierre-François Moreau, who prefaced to the book, begins a discussion here on the problems and resources of such a history
“The Materialist Denial of Monsters”
Full text linkLocke and Leibniz deny that there are any such beings as ‘monsters’ (anomalies, natural curiosities, wonders, and marvels), for two very different reasons. For Locke, monsters are not ‘natural kinds’: the word ‘monster’ does not individuate any specific class of beings ‘out there’ in the natural world. Monsters depend on our subjective viewpoint. For Leibniz, there are no monsters because we are all parts of the Great Chain of Being. Everything that happens, happens for a reason, including a monstrous birth. But what about materialism? Well, beginning with the anatomical interest into ‘monstrous births’ in the French Académie des Sciences in the first three decades of the eighteenth century, there is a shift away from ‘imaginationist’ claims such as those of Malebranche, that if a woman gives birth to a monstrous child it is a consequence of something she imagined. Anatomists such as Lemery and Winslow try to formulate a strictly mechanical explanation for such events, rejecting moral and metaphysical explanations. Picking up on this work, materialist thinkers like Diderot are compelled to reject the very idea of monsters. We are all material beings produced according to the same mechanisms or laws, some of us are more ‘successful’ products than others, i.e. some live longer than others. In his late Eléments de physiologie he says “L’homme est un effet commun, le monstre un effet rare.” Ultimately he arrives at a materialist version of Leibniz’s position: there are no monsters, we are all monsters in each other’s eyes, at one time or another. This conclusion is a pregnant one in light of twentieth century interest in the problem of ‘the normal and the pathological’ (Canguilhem), and the broader question of how materialism relates to the biological world
Tlmo Kaitaro : Diderot's Holism. Philosophical Anti-Reductionism and its Medical Background., 1997
No full textWolfe Charles T. Tlmo Kaitaro : Diderot's Holism. Philosophical Anti-Reductionism and its Medical Background., 1997. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°33, 2001. L'Atlantique, sous la direction de Marcel Dorigny . pp. 695-696
Monique Castillo : L'Humanisme et les Lumières en question., 2001
No full textWolfe Charles T. Monique Castillo : L'Humanisme et les Lumières en question., 2001. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°34, 2002. Christianisme et Lumières, sous la direction de Sylviane Albertan-Coppola et Antony McKenna. p. 657
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