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The concept of organism: historical philosophical, scientific perspectives
No full textContents
0. Philippe Huneman and Charles T. Wolfe: Introduction
1. Tobias Cheung, “What is an ‘organism’? On the occurrence of a new term and its conceptual transformations 1680-1850”
2. Charles T. Wolfe, “Do organisms have an ontological status?”
3. John Symons, “The individuality of artifacts and organisms”
4. Thomas Pradeu, “What is an organism? An immunological answer”
5. Matteo Mossio & Alvaro Moreno, “Organisational closure in biological organisms”
6. Laura Nuño de la Rosa, “Becoming organisms. The organisation of development and the development of organisation”
7. Denis Walsh, “Two Neo-Darwinisms”
8. Philippe Huneman, “Assessing the prospects for a return of organisms in evolutionary biology”
9. Johannes Martens, “Organisms in evolution”
10. Susan Oyama, “Biologists behaving badly: Vitalism and the language of language
Vitalism in Early Modern Medical and Philosophical Thought
No full textVitalism is a notoriously deceptive term. It is very often defined as the view, in biology, in early modern medicine and differently, in early modern philosophy, that living beings differ from the rest of the physical universe due to their possessing an additional ‘life-force’, ‘vital principle’, ‘entelechy’, enormon or élan vital. Such definitions most often have an explicit pejorative dimension: vitalism is a primitive or archaic view, that has somehow survived the emergence of modern science (the latter being defined in many different ways, from demystified Cartesian reductionism to experimental medicine, biochemistry or genetics: Cimino and Duchesneau eds. 1997, Normandin and Wolfe eds. 2013). Such dismissive definitions of vitalism are meant to dispense with argument or analysis.
Curiously, the term has gained some popularity in English-language scholarship on early modern philosophy in the past few decades, where it is used without any pejorative dimension, to refer to a kind of ‘active matter’ view, in which matter is not reducible to the (mechanistic) properties of size, shape and motion, possessing instead some internal dynamism or activity (see e.g. James 1999, Boyle 2018, Borcherding forthcoming). The latter meaning is close to what the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth termed ‘hylozoism’, namely the attribution of life, agency or mind to matter, and he implicitly targeted several figures I shall mention here, notably Margaret Cavendish and Francis Glisson, for holding this view. However, one point I shall make in this entry is that when vitalism first appears by name, and as a self-designation, in the Montpellier School (associated with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montpellier, in the second half of the eighteenth century; thus vitalisme appears first, followed shortly thereafter by Vitalismus in German, with ‘vitalism’ appearing in English publications only in the early nineteenth century: Toepfer 2011), it is quite different from both the more ‘supernatural’ view described above – chiefly espoused by its rather obsessive opponents – and from the more neutral, but also de-biologized philosophical view (that of e.g. Cavendish or Conway who are, broadly speaking naturalists). Rather than appealing to a metaphysics of vital force, or of self-organizing matter, this version of vitalism, which I shall refer to as ‘medical vitalism’, seems to be more of a ‘systemic’ theory: an attempt to grasp and describe top-level (‘organizational’, ‘organismic’, ‘holistic’) features of living systems (Wolfe 2017, 2019).
In this entry I seek to introduce some periodization in our thinking about early modern (and Enlightenment) vitalism, emphasizing the difference between the seventeenth-century context and that of the following generations – culminating in the ideas of the Montpellier School. This periodization should also function as a kind of taxonomy or at least distinction between some basic types of vitalism. As I discuss in closing, these distinctions can cut across the texts and figures we are dealing with, differently: metaphysical vs. non-metaphysical vitalism, philosophical vs. medical vitalism, medical vs. ‘embryological’ vitalism, and so on. A difference I can only mention but not explore in detail is that the more medically grounded, ‘organismic’ vitalism is significantly post-Cartesian while the more biological/embryological vitalism is, inasmuch as it is a dynamic, self-organizing matter theory, an extension of Renaissance ideas (chymiatry, Galenism and in general theories of medical spirits).
I examine successively vitalism’s Renaissance prehistory, its proliferation as ‘vital matter theory’ in seventeenth-century England (in authors such as Cavendish, Conway and Glisson, with brief considerations on Harvey and van Helmont), and its mature expression in eighteenth-century Montpellier (notably with Bordeu and Ménuret de Chambaud)
Canadian Klondike Mining Company gold mining dredge No. 2, partially landed with buckets trailing out of the front, Bear Creek, Yukon Territory, May 5, 1914
No full textCaption on Image: Canadian No. 2 at Bear Creek. May 5, 1914. Wolfe Photo. Dawson, Y. T. 70.
PH Coll 662.26Frank E. Wolfe owned and operated Wolfe Photo studio in Yukon Territory, Dawson from the late 1890s to around 1920. Wolfe Photo studio was one of the major photographers of the Yukon area gold rush.Scanned from a photographic print using a Microtek Scanmaker 9600XL at 100 dpi in JPEG format at compression rate 3 and resized to 768x600 ppi. 2008
Gold mining dredge on Upper Hunker Creek, Yukon Territory, June 28, 1913
No full textCaption on Image: Dredge on Upper Hunker Creek. June 28, 1913. Wolfe Photo. Dawson, Y. T. 111
PH Coll 662.18Frank E. Wolfe owned and operated Wolfe Photo studio in Yukon Territory, Dawson from the late 1890s to around 1920. Wolfe Photo studio was one of the major photographers of the Yukon area gold rush.Scanned from a photographic print using a Microtek Scanmaker 9600XL at 100 dpi in JPEG format at compression rate 3 and resized to 768x600 ppi. 2008
Canadian Klondike Mining Company's gold mining dredge No. 3 at work, Yukon Territory, August 22, 1913
No full textCaption on Image: Gold dredge at work. Aug. 22, 1913. Wolfe Photo. Dawson, Y. T.
Handwritten on verso: Wolfe 312
PH Coll 662.30Frank E. Wolfe owned and operated Wolfe Photo studio in Yukon Territory, Dawson from the late 1890s to around 1920. The Wolfe Photo studio was one of the major photographic studios of the Yukon area gold rush.Scanned from a photographic print using a Microtek Scanmaker 9600XL at 100 dpi in JPEG format at compression rate 3 and resized to 768x600 ppi. 2008
Ogilvie Bridge over Bonanza Creek with the Canadian Klondike Mining Company dredge No. 4 working in the basin in the background, Yukon Territory, July 18, 1913
No full textCaption on Image: Gold Dredging at Ogilvie Bridge. July 18, 1913. Wolfe Photo. Dawson, Y. T.
PH Coll 662.6Frank E. Wolfe owned and operated Wolfe Photo studio in Dawson from the late 1890s to around 1920. Wolfe was one of the major photographers of the Yukon area gold rush.Scanned from a photographic print using a Microtek Scanmaker 9600XL at 100 dpi in JPEG format at compression rate 3 and resized to 768x600 ppi. 2008
Letter, 1949 April 4, from T. G. Wolfe to Carson Robison
No full text1 page, Wolfe is head of the Wolfe Distributors
Blitzen Bean in his automobile with Canadian Klondike Mining Company's gold mining no. 2 dredge in the background, Yukon Territory, July 22, 1913
No full textCaption on image: Blitzen Bean, Holder of WhiteHorse to Dawson record. Photo taken July 22, 1913. Wolfe Photo. Dawson, Y. T. 221
Handwritten on verso: Canadian Klondyke Dredge on Lower Klondyke
PH Coll 662.27Frank E. Wolfe owned and operated Wolfe Photo studio in Yukon Territory, Dawson from the late 1890s to around 1920. Wolfe Photo studio was one of the major photographers of the Yukon area gold rush.Scanned from a photographic print using a Microtek Scanmaker 9600XL at 100 dpi in JPEG format at compression rate 3 and resized to 768x600 ppi. 2008
Jerry Wolfe: Cherokee Artist and Ballplayer
No full textIn this video interview, Jerry Wolfe, Cherokee artist and stickball player, cherishes the life lessons to be found in the traditional game of stickball. For Wolfe, stickball brought people together and built community. The transcript provided is an unedited version of the video
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