A note on the situation of biological philosophy (Canguilhem) Charles Wolfe (Toulouse) ctwolfe1@gmail.com Forthcoming in Revue internationale de philosophie, special issue on Canguilhem ed. F. Testa Abstract In a short and rarely discussed paper published in 1947 in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, entitled “Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique” (untranslated), Canguilhem is quite blunt in denouncing the “situation” of what he calls biological philosophy in France, in favour of a more developed Germanic tradition. He explains that French thought on biological questions is in a state of arrest, both due to its Cartesian heritage and to a kind of unstated fear with respect to the Romantic lebenspphilosophisch tradition in Germany and its political outcomes. This is unusual enough in an essay appearing shortly after the war, authored by someone who had been an active resistant. But rather than reflect on the possible socio-historical juncture and set of influences that may have led to Canguilhem’s “Note,” I wish to reflect on and evaluate his claims. What would this biological philosophy be? A Germanic philosophy of life translated into French? In a sense, Canguilhem’s very enthusiastic reception of the work of Kurt Goldstein (the translation of which he was instrumental in enabling) is one part of such a translatio (if not translation). But in another sense, not all his work fits this program: in some ways, The Normal and the Pathological (1943, revised and expanded in 1966) does, but the various essays collected in volumes like Knowledge of Life (first edition 1952, expanded in 1965) do not, notably due to their more ‘historicist’ focus. The latter case makes this particularly clear: a historical epistemology of the life sciences is quite a different project from a Romantically inspired “biological philosophy” (or philosophy of life). In closing, I reflect on how these Canguilhemian projects might speak to us, including in the sense of the ‘prospects’ of a biological philosophy today. Abstract FR Dans un court article rarement discuté, publié en 1947 dans la Revue de métaphysique et de morale, intitulé « Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique », Canguilhem dénonce sans détour la « situation » de ce qu'il appelle la philosophie biologique en France, au profit d'une tradition germanique plus développée. Il explique que la réflexion française sur les questions biologiques est en état d'arrêt, à la fois en raison de son héritage cartésien et d'une sorte de crainte inavouée à l'égard de la tradition romantique lebenspphilosophisch en Allemagne et de ses résultats politiques. C'est assez inhabituel dans un essai paru peu après la guerre, écrit par quelqu'un qui a été un résistant actif. Mais plutôt que de réfléchir à la conjoncture socio-historique et à l'ensemble des influences qui ont pu conduire à cette « Note » de Canguilhem, je souhaite réfléchir à ses affirmations et les évaluer. Quelle serait cette philosophie biologique ? Une philosophie germanique de la vie traduite en français ? Dans un sens, l'accueil très enthousiaste que Canguilhem a réservé à l'œuvre de Kurt Goldstein (qu’il a fait traduire en français, lui et Merleau-Ponty) fait partie d'une telle translatio (sinon traduction). Mais dans un autre sens, tous ses travaux ne 1 correspondent pas à ce programme : d'une certaine manière, Le normal et le pathologique (1943, revu et augmenté en 1966) y correspond, mais les divers essais rassemblés dans des volumes comme La Connaissance de la vie (1ère édition 1952, augmentée en 1965) n'y correspondent pas, notamment en raison de leur orientation plus historiciste. Ce dernier cas est particulièrement clair : une épistémologie historique des sciences de la vie est un projet tout à fait différent d'une « philosophie biologique » (ou philosophie de la vie) d'inspiration romantique. En conclusion, je réfléchis à ce que ces projets canguilhemiens pourraient nous dire, y compris au sens des « perspectives » d'une philosophie biologique aujourd'hui. Keywords Canguilhem, biological philosophy, organicism, vitalism Biological life taken as a philosophical object has been discussed in various traditions over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some of these traditions, like that which crystallized in the 1960s to form the field we now know as ‘philosophy of biology’, are very much with us today (and are now being memorialized and prodded with Google NGrams and other devices1). Others, like ‘biophilosophy’, ‘biological philosophy’ (a phrase occurring in the title of Canguilhem’s 1947 article on which I shall focus here) or Lebensphilosophie (sometimes rendered ‘philosophy of life’), belong now to historically motivated research, although some hold-outs can insist that theirs is a minority current, an alternative and perhaps superior way of investigating biological phenomena. One typical faultline here is Darwinism. That is, defenders of a ‘philosophy of life’ typically distinguish themselves from the more ‘Darwinian’ and (in their view) more ‘reductionist’ approaches in mainstream philosophy of biology (despite the earlier pleas of Ernst Mayr)2. Another is naturalism, in the sense that some trends in “biological philosophy” refuse to take their “coordinates” from mainstream biology or indeed any biology, while others front-load the biological with concepts like subjectivity or “first-person science.” In a rarely discussed paper published shortly after the end of World War II (a time when Romantic biology in the Germanic tradition was not welcomed with open arms, so to speak), See T. Pradeu, “Thirty years of Biology & Philosophy: philosophy of which biology?” Biology and Philosophy 32(2) (2017): 149–167 and C. Malaterre et al., “Revisiting three decades of Biology and Philosophy: a computational topic-modeling perspective,” Biol Philos 35, 5 (2020), which extend the study of the genesis of the field begun in J. Gayon, “Philosophy of biology: an historico-critical characterization,” in Brenner A., Gayon J. (eds.) French studies in the philosophy of science: contemporary research in France (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), pp. 201–212. 2 E. Mayr, “How biology differs from the physical sciences,” In D. J. Depew and B H Weber, eds., Evolution at a Crossroads: The New Biology and the New Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 4363; “The autonomy of biology: the position of biology among the sciences,” Quarterly Review of Biology 71 (1996): 97–106. 1 2 entitled “Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique” (untranslated),3 the philosopher and historian of the life sciences Georges Canguilhem called for a ‘biological philosophy’ which he felt had been prevented from emerging by the predominant French Cartesian tradition. Similar calls for a non-reductionist, more Germanic-centred approach to the philosophy of biology were made in the English-speaking world some decades later, by Marjorie Grene.4 Grene occupied an unusual position as both a ‘co-founder’ of the discipline of philosophy of biology, and the chief representative in the English-speaking world of the more ‘Continental’ trend.5 A study of this mid-century version of what Canguilhem called “biological philosophy” and others a “philosophy of life” remains to be written.6 The present remarks focus on Canguilhem’s explicitly programmatic 1947 paper in order to understand what he was calling for and what form this genre or subdiscipline might have taken, had Canguilhem continued to work explicitly in this direction.7 It is important to note in this context that there is not one, monolithic form of ‘Continental philosophy of biology’. In the work of thinkers such as Canguilhem and Grene (it is difficult to call it a ‘tradition’), the concept of organism is crucial, inasmuch as it serves as a kind of biological analogue for the ‘self’ or ‘subjectivity’ (depending on which vocabulary one favors), and figures such as Jakob von Uexküll and Kurt Goldstein are very important (as they also were in Heidegger’s brief, unhappy foray into philosophy of biology, in his lecture course of 1929-1930, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics”8). Does Canguilhem wish to reintroduce the subject into biology? This might be a possible meaning for the rather undefined term, “biological philosophy”: that is, a reflection on biology which does not take its ‘coordinates’ from the more reductive forms of biology. But we should be careful not to G. Canguilhem, “Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 52(3-4) (1947): 322-332. Reprinted in vol. 4 of Canguilhem’s Œuvres Complètes (307-320). Unless otherwise indicated all translations are mine. As this essay is not widely available I will cite both versions. 4 M. Grene, Approaches to a Philosophical Biology (Basic Books, 1969); The Understanding of Nature: Essays in Philosophy of Biology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974). 5 P. Honenberger, “All Knowledge Is Orientation: Marjorie Grene’s Ecological Epistemology,” in Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology, eds. G. Bianco, G. Van de Vijver, C. Wolfe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2023) 6 For some initial attempts see the papers collected in Bianco, Van de Vijver and Wolfe eds., 2023. 7 The expression “biological philosophy” did not continue to be central in Canguilhem’s work, but some of his major other writings, like Le normal et le pathologique, should be seen as a contribution to this genre as well (including in his response to molecular biology). The expression itself, as Jean Gayon has noted, occurs in an author on whom Canguilhem also wrote, Auguste Comte, in volume 3 of the latter’s Cours de Philosophie positive (on “chemical philosophy and biological philosophy,” which appeared in 1838); see for discussion L. Clauzade, “Auguste Comte’s Positive Biology,” in Michel Bourdeau, Mary Pickering, & Warren Schmaus (eds.), Love, Order & Progress. The Science, Philosophy, & Politics of Auguste Comte (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), pp. 93-127. The question of how Canguilhem shifted from ‘biological philosophy’ to ‘historical epistemology’, or sometimes blended them, is a large interpretive question which I have sought to address in my papers on Canguilhem but that remains – perhaps necessarily – unresolved. See also P.-O. Méthot’s Introduction to the volume he recently edited, Vital Norms. Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological in the Twenty-First Century (Paris: Editions Hermann, 2020), and C. Limoges’ Introduction to volume IV of Canguilhem’s complete works (Canguilhem, Œuvres complètes, tome IV: Résistance, philosophie biologique et histoire des sciences (1940-1965), ed. C. Limoges [Paris: J. Vrin, 2015]). 8 M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. McNeill & N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 3 3 treat Canguilhem’s thought in overly subjectivist and/or anthropocentric terms, given that vital normativity is a property of living beings in general, not just sentient or self-reflexive beings. In his reflections on vitalism, Canguilhem emphasizes that “we should not expect much from a biology fascinated by the prestige of the physico-chemical sciences, a biology reduced or reducing itself to the role of a satellite of these sciences. A reduced biology has as its corollary the effacement of the biological object as such-in other words, the devaluation of its specificity.”9 Notice here that Canguilhem is not opposing biology in toto, as a reductionist science, to the more holistic sciences like medicine (an opposition we find quite explicitly in Le normal et le pathologique, notably targeting Claude Bernard); instead, he is contrasting ‘two biologies’, only one of which is “fascinated by the prestige of the physico-chemical sciences.” In the 1947 essay, Canguilhem does seem to be positioning the project of a biological philosophy in opposition (or at least in marked contrast) to what we might call mainstream biology: “Let's not even speak of most biologists, for whom the living (le vivant) is nothing but a physical object whose determinism is not in question even though its exact formula is still to be found.”10 In contrast to this treatment of life as somehow merely a physical (or physico-chemical) object, and thereby merely deterministic, Canguilhem in this essay11 wishes to articulate a more holist form of inquiry into life (and if one asks, holistic in what sense? the answer would be, placing the living subject – typically human although in Canguilhem’s case, less so12 – at the center of biological inquiry). As such, some commentators have spoken rather dismissively of “those twentieth-century biologists who wanted to reintroduce the subject into biology at all costs,” “infusing subjectivity into life?” naming Uexküll and Goldstein among others.13 But again, it is not clear that Canguilhem’s call for a biological philosophy which is somehow different from other approaches to ‘the phenomenon of life’, is at its core a plea for reinscribing subjectivity in life, à la Hegel, for whom the organism is the first real form of the Canguilhem, “Aspects du vitalisme,” in La connaissance de la vie, revised edition (1st edition 1952) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1980), p. 83; “Aspects of vitalism,” in Knowledge of Life, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 59. 10 Canguilhem, “Note sur la situation,” p. 324 / 311. 11 I specify ‘in this essay’ since some of Canguilhem’s work seems more intent on historicizing and contextualizing doctrines of Life (viz., as ‘historical epistemology’, see Wolfe 2023) rather than incorporating them in a normative and perhaps ontological discourse ‘on’ Life. 12 Canguilhem sometimes states that what concerns him is ‘the vital’, not ‘the human’ and indeed is quite deflationary when it comes to the objective status of human values and norms. In that sense, an earthworm or an axolotl are just as much the pivots of Canguilhem’s argument as a human being. 13 D. Tarizzo, Life: a modern invention, trans. M.W. Epstein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. 99, 179. An entirely different kind of Continental philosophy of biology is that undertaken by John Protevi (e.g. his book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)), which takes its bearings in good part from Deleuze, but also seeks to be much closer to actual work on evolution, development, plasticity and the like, unlike projects which place, say, Kant or Schelling on a fundamental plane and then judge the current situation accordingly (typically in antinaturalistic fashion). 9 4 “subject,” “the process of subjectivity, of self-relation in an outer world,”14 or à la Jonas.15 In order to come to a clearer idea on this question, let us turn to Canguilhem’s article in more detail. Canguilhem speaks of a “mistrust and hostility towards biological philosophy in France.”16 He first traces this hostility back to the rationalist tradition of Cartesian philosophy, particularly its mechanistic dimension: Descartes bequeathed to modernity and particularly to French thought, in Canguilhem’s view, a mechanistic theory that neglects the originality of life – what he terms its “ontological originality” – by assimilating living beings to mechanical and material objects: “Because of Descartes, rather than since Descartes, biological philosophy is [viewed] in our country as a rather suspicious kind of speculation. Life, in the Cartesian system, is not granted any ontological originality” (p. 324 / 311). Most of the 1947 article is constructed on the basis of a set of oppositions, or at least, a basic opposition between “biological philosophy” and a set of contraries, which first take the form of Cartesianism, then of rationalism in different forms, including the Marxism of the time. Rationalism is guilty of losing sight of the fact that we are first and foremost living beings: “Taken literally and in a strict sense (à la lettre et en toute rigueur), rationalism, the philosophy of the wise man, ends up making man lose sight of the fact that he is a living being.”17 In this series of oppositions, the positive content of the position Canguilhem is defending is often less developed than its negative, critical dimension. What it is not, is a rationalist approach to life which denies its specificity – its “ontological originality,” as quoted above, or its status as a “specific metaphysical object” (objet métaphysique propre).18 This opposition between a philosophy of 14 GWF Hegel, Philosophy of Nature. Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004), §§ 337, 352. Thanks to Cat Moir for this reference. Canguilhem is rarely so Hegelian (indeed, some commentators like to see him as a kind of Kantian constructivist), except in his very dense 1966 essay on “Le concept et la vie” (in Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences concernant les vivants et la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1968), pp. 335-364. On Kantian and Hegelian aspects of Canguilhem see Gayon, “The Concept of Individuality in Canguilhem’s philosophy of biology,” Journal of the History of Biology 31(3) (1998): 305325. 15 F. Michelini, Wunsch M., Stederoth D. “Philosophy of nature and organism's autonomy: on Hegel, Plessner and Jonas' theories of living beings.” Hist Philos Life Sci. 40(3) (2018). 16 Canguilhem, “Note sur la situation,” pp. 324, 326 / 311, 312. 17 Canguilhem, “Note sur la situation,” p. 327 / 313. I will not discuss the way Canguilhem extends his critique of Cartesianism and rationalism into what he seems to consider as the other dominant form of rationalism of the time, namely Marxism. Suffice it to say that he judges dialectics to be “insufficient as an explanation of life” (p. 330 / 317) and considers Marxism, in its reliance on technology, to be extending what he views as weaknesses in bourgeois society and science overall (p. 331 / 318). 18 “In the philosophies of Alain, Brunschvicg or Sartre, just like in Descartes, life is not acknowledged as a specific metaphysical object” (“Note sur la situation,” pp. 324, 327-331 / 311, 313-318). Canguilhem also uses the language of the “originality” of life or the biological when, in “Aspects du vitalisme,” he distinguishes between the mistaken and the more legitimate forms of vitalism, as he speaks of how one should (or should not) “defend the originality of biological phenomena and by extension, of biology” (La connaissance de la vie, p. 95; Knowledge of Life, p. 70) and similarly, in his study of the reflex concept, he writes that “Vitalism is simply the recognition of life as an original order of phenomena, and therefore of the specificity of biological knowledge” (La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2nd revised edition (first published 1955) (Paris: Vrin, 1977), p. 113, emphasis mine). As for his reading of Descartes, I do not seek to critically evaluate it here; for a different, innovative view of Descartes on life see B. Hutchins, “‘Everyone knows what life is’: Life as an irreducible in and outside of Descartes’s 5 life and a species of rationalism is presented in oddly (perhaps ironically?) national terms by Canguilhem, leading up to what one might term his own Godwin point: not only does he express some sarcasm about this fear of a “mystical irrationalism” (p. 330 / 317), he diagnoses a kind of fear of Germanic philosophy and by extension, Germanic romantic biology: “It was enough that German philosophy, especially in the nineteenth century, showed more complacency towards life than French philosophy has done since 1870, for biological philosophy to appear in France as an ominous growth (louche excroissance) on the surface of positive science, capable of serving the most shameful (moins avouables) political or social ends. I shall not mention anyone in particular. The informed reader will put names under this quick description of those thinkers – indeed quite different from one another – who are prompt to denounce in any work of biological philosophy an aberration to be located somewhere between mysticism, romanticism and fascism; a kind of naïve, unhealthy or criminal speculation whose typical representatives are named, according to the case, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson or Hitler” (pp. 324-325 / 311) I shall not repeat the well-known and admirable facts about Canguilhem’s discreet and extremely honorable wartime activities in the Resistance, or about his earlier pacifist phase under the influence of his mentor Alain, but it is worth keeping those in mind when taking in the fact that that author made such a bold statement in favor of a ‘Germanic’ lebensphilosophisch tradition and against a kind of dogmatic, complacent Cartesian-rationalist (and even Marxist) confort intellectuel characteristic of France, in 1947, that is, without hardly any distance of time, experience or reflection since the end of the War. The question I am interested in here is, what exactly is Canguilhem speaking in favor of? What does the embrace of Romanticism entail? Canguilhem can be seen here as anticipating the return to Naturphilosophie in recent scholarly works on the emergence of biology and Darwinism.19 The overall idea there is that rather than forcing Romantic philosophy of nature into a category of ‘bad science’, ‘mysticism’ or generally, doctrines incompatible with naturalistic commitments, that this project speaks in relevant ways to contemporary antireductionist trends in biology (and the conceptual reflections upon it). Romantic biology itself can be construed variously but overall, it is characterized by a “concern for reconciling the human-nature division”; that is, “the human subject, because it is an expression of Geist, does not have to see itself as necessarily divorced from nature in its self-legislative metaphysics and biology,” in Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Susan James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) and for an argument for seeing Descartes in ‘embodied’ terms (precisely what Canguilhem does not), see B. Hutchins, C.T. Wolfe, C.B. Eriksen, “The embodied Descartes: Contemporary readings of L’Homme.” In D. Antoine-Mahut and S. Gaukroger (eds.) Descartes’ Treatise on Man and its Reception, 287-304 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016). 19 R. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); J. Zammito, The Gestation of German Biology. Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 6 capacity’.”20 However, in Canguilhem’s case it is not so much a matter of taking one’s coordinates necessarily and durably from Hegel (or Schelling, or Oken, etc.). It is not a reassertion of teleology over and against mainstream modern science. But what is the positive content of this “biological philosophy,” then? What Canguilhem means by ‘biological philosophy’ is exemplified in works such as Kurt Goldstein’s Der Aufbau des Organismus (1934), and his own Le normal et le pathologique (1943, 1966).21 They are studies of vital phenomena which seek to take into account the subjective, or autopoietic, or world-making capacities of organisms rather than treating them simply as … mechanisms, as passive and merely receptive. For life, on this view, is a kind of creation, a transformation or sublimation of risks and catastrophic reactions.22 And Reason itself can be “disconcerted” by this capacity of Life; “life disconcerts logic.”23 In the 1947 article, Canguilhem writes, in more lyrical tones than we find elsewhere in his work (mostly), that it is “undeniable that life is a rather disturbing object of thought for reason. Reason is lucidity and rectitude. In the eyes of reason, life is murky; by the straight lines of reason, life is elusive. Reason is regular like an accountant; life, anarchic like an artist” (p. 326 / 313). Canguilhem also pushes back against the way “it was easy to mock vitalism and Bichat’s slogan that ‘Life is the sum of forces that resist death,” suggesting that such reactions are blind to the historical coincidence of such forms of vitalism with “the revolutionary explosion . . . when, in France, Reason took on a rather energetic form.”24 I shall not pronounce on the historical validity (or lack thereof) of Canguilhem’s claim (he of all people, who wrote harshly about the ‘transfer’ of biological concepts into the political sphere, should be careful with such identifications) but it seems fair to say that Enlightenment .vitalism, all the way to Bichat in the early 1800s, was an antihierarchical project.25 However, this language definitely sounds ‘vitalistic’ in the more cultural sense, that which indeed some more rationalist commentators would associate with Nietzsche and Bergson (not to mention worse names), namely, a doctrine of vitality, of the evaluation of cultural and social (and perhaps even moral) norms in terms of vitality and morbidity. Life is “like an artist” S. Lumsden, “The Rise of the Non-Metaphysical Hegel,” Philosophy Compass 3:1 (2008), p. 53. As mentioned earlier, there is not one monolithic version of Continental philosophy of biology. If we compare Canguilhem to, say, Hans Jonas, the latter’s explicit attempt to transfer a Heideggerian discourse on existence, facticity and temporality onto the realm of biological Life has no analog in Canguilhem; conversely, it is easier to see similarities between Canguilhem and a figure like Helmuth Plessner, as argued by T. Ebke, “La connaissance vitale de la vie : une parallaxe entre Canguilhem et Plessner,” Astérion [Online], 21 (2019). One could choose different possible fault lines: how strong is the author’s commitment to naturalism? (Canguilhem never seems to withdraw from the ‘truth’ of Darwinism or molecular biology); how strong is their relation to historical figures, like Aristotle (notably in the case of Marjorie Grene), Kant, or Hegel? 22 Canguilhem, “Note sur la situation,” p. 326 / 313. 23 Canguilhem, La formation du concept de réflexe, p. 1; Etxeberria and Wolfe, “Canguilhem and the logic of life.” 24 Canguilhem, “Note sur la situation,” pp. 329-330 / 317. 25 I do not engage with the issue of the ‘politics’ of Enlightenment vitalism in my works on the topic; one scholar who does so is P.H. Reill, “Anti-Mechanism, Vitalism and their Political Implications in Late Enlightened Scientific Thought,” Francia 16(2) (1989): 195-212. 20 21 7 here, and later in the same article he speaks of its “inventiveness” (“Ce que la vie contient d'invention,” p. 328). This language of vital upsurges is reminiscent of some of his more Nietzschean moments when he describes Life as creation, or as crucially defined by error (an aspect Foucault called attention to and perhaps overemphasized). We can then describe Canguilhem’s view as a kind of vitalism. But does that really answer our question about biological philosophy? Indeed, describing Canguilhem’s project for a biological philosophy in these terms risks either adding further ambiguity (describing one ambiguous term by means of another one!) or giving the illusion of having answered the question by the use of a familiar label. What do we mean when we speak of vitalism, in this context? In his essay on the topic, “Aspects of vitalism” (originally lectures given in 1946-1947, first published in La connaissance de la vie in 1952), Canguilhem offers this somewhat imagistic definition: “A vitalist, I would suggest, is someone who is led to reflect on the nature of life more because of the contemplation of an egg than because she has handled a hoist or a bellows.”26 He is alluding to the phenomena of generation (or in later parlance, development) and suggesting that the thinker whose reflections on life are motivated by these phenomena, rather than by mechanical analogies, is a vitalist. It is a broad and also demystifying definition, in the sense that he has effortlessly ruled out mysterious vital forces (albeit not entelechies, since Hans Driesch’s vitalism was precisely a reflection upon phenomena of embryo development and self-organization, leading him to posit the concept of entelechies as explanatory of such phenomena27). But it leaves out a lot. For instance, it leaves out his own reflections on what one might term an ‘existential vitalism’, that is, not a theory of biological entities but a theory about the mode of existence of such entities understood as reflexive, self-conscious agents – but that is not our concern here.28 If we turn back to “Note sur la situation…”, and remember that Canguilhem began his argument in defense of a ‘repressed’ biological philosophy by stating that one had not done justice to the ontological originality of Life, it seems that his definition in his essay on vitalism does not do it justice, precisely by skirting around the question of ontological originality. Recall, further, that biological philosophy was supposed to be independent in some degree of biology itself. While elsewhere Canguilhem warned against suspending the critical and experimental constraints of the scientific project and thus falling into a kind of subjectivist philosophy of life à la Merleau-Ponty (a bad Romanticism, as it were, as distinct from the good Canguilhem, “Aspects du vitalisme,” in La connaissance de la vie, p. 88 / Knowledge of Life, p. 64. On Driesch and vitalism see G. Bolduc on “The heuristic value of Hans Driesch’s vitalism” and B. Chen, “A historico-logical re-assessment of Hans Driesch’s vitalism,” both in Vitalism and its Legacies in 20th-century Life Science and Philosophy, eds. C. Donohue, C.T. Wolfe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2023). 28 On this sort of vitalism in Canguilhem see C.T. Wolfe, “From substantival to functional vitalism and beyond: animas, organisms and attitudes,” Eidos 14 (2011), 212-235 and the interesting reflections in G. Van de Vijver and L. Haeck, “Judging Organization. A Plea for Transcendental Logic in Philosophy of Biology,” in M. Mossio, ed., Organization in Biology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2023). 26 27 8 Romanticism he calls for in 1947), in “Note sur…” but also in “Aspects du vitalisme,” he seeks to distinguish biological philosophy from a kind of philosophy of biology that would (a) be a mere commentary on biology and (b) that would take its bearings from a reductionist biology, “fascinated by the prestige of the physico-chemical sciences.”29 Yet Canguilhem by no means seeks to conceptualize Life, organism, embodiment as somehow ‘other’ than physical nature or the one world studied by science. That would be the mistake of what he called “classical vitalism”30: a kind of naïve, ungrounded dualism which posits living entities as separate from the physical world; additionally, it would commit the further error of somehow unduly transcendentalizing the living subject (even if it is renamed ‘the body’ or ‘le corps propre’ as in Merleau-Ponty).31 In that sense, biological philosophy is not a species of classic vitalism, or of phenomenology of the body. If it is a species of vitalism, it is of a weaker kind, one which seeks to do justice to properties like (no surprise to the reader of Le normal et le pathologique) vital normativity, which are not found in galaxies or protons.32 It is more like what Ezequiel Di Paolo called a ‘biochauvinism’, that is, the view that living entities have properties which are unique33 – and, one might add, that as such, they require a specific science to investigate them. But in this essay I did not wish to return specifically to the question of Canguilhem’s possible ‘vitalism’, which I have tried to address elsewhere, or to the (related) question of how his notion of vital normativity is or is not in tension with his occasional ‘humanism’. I chose instead to take my Canguilhem, “Aspects du vitalisme,” p. 83 / “Aspects of vitalism,” 59. “the classical vitalist grants that living beings belong to a physical environment, yet asserts that they are an exception to physical laws. This is the inexcusable philosophical mistake, in my view. There can be no kingdom within a kingdom [empire dans un empire], or else there is no kingdom at all” (ibid., p. 95 / 70). 31 Thus in his late lecture on health, Canguilhem politely admits that he cannot follow Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the living body as “inaccessible to others, accessible only to its titular holder” (Canguilhem, “La santé, concept vulgaire et question philosophique” (1988), in Canguilhem, Écrits sur la médecine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), p. 65; Canguilhem, “Health: Crude Concept and Philosophical Question,” trans. T. Meyers and S. Geroulanos, Public Culture 20(3) (2008), p. 476). 32 Where Bichat had criticized the idea that physiology was a ‘physics of life’, Canguilhem extends the thought and states that “there is no [such thing as] physical, chemical, or mechanical pathology” (Le normal et le pathologique, revised edition (1966) (Paris: PUF, 1972), p. 78), and elsewhere, repeating the internally contradictory phrase “mechanical pathology,” that there are no monstrous machines, or monstrous minerals (respectively, “Machine et organisme” and “La monstruosité et le monstrueux,” in La connaissance de la vie, pp. 119, 171). On the idea that health and sickness are in fact ‘vital properties’, such that the ideas in Le normal et le pathologique would be tantamount to a type of vitalism, namely property vitalism, see M. Penoncelli, C.T. Wolfe, A. Wong, “Is The Normal and the Pathological Vitalist ?”, in P.-O. Méthot, ed.., Vital Norms. Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 219-250 (Paris: Editions Hermann, 2020). 33 E. Di Paolo, “Extended Life,” Topoi 28 (2009): 9-21. On Canguilhem’s position in relation to vitalism and organicism, see, in addition to my papers cited in the above notes, C.T. Wolfe and A. Wong, “The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem, Bergson and the Project of Biophilosophy,” in The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics. eds. G. Bianco, M. de Beistegui & M. Gracieuse (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014), 63-75; C.T. Wolfe, “Was Canguilhem a biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the project of ‘biophilosophy’,” in D. Meacham, ed., Medicine and Society, New Continental Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 197-212; A. Etxeberria and C.T. Wolfe, “Canguilhem and the Logic of Life,” Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science 4 (2018): 47-63. 29 30 9 bearings from the idea of “biological philosophy” as laid out, in surprisingly confrontational terms, in Canguilhem’s 1947 essay. Conclusion Biological philosophy sensu Canguilhem is not a strictly delimited field. But it clearly goes in a different direction from either the mainstream Continental denial of the relevance of biological issues to philosophy, or the more ‘heterodox’ Continental biophilosophy sensu Jonas, or what was to become, in the decades after his article appeared and, let us say, contemporary with the appearance of the revised edition of Le normal et le pathologique in 1966, the field of ‘philosophy of biology’ in the Anglophone world (and beyond), which takes its bearings chiefly from Darwinism and, at least in its first generations, was engaged primarily in an enterprise of conceptual clarification (of concepts like fitness, genetic reduction, units of selection, etc.), under the influence of biologists such as Ernst Mayr.34 Consider the familiar opposition between strong and weak conceptions of organism, where the weak conception simply holds that organisms are types of organisation with some specific features, like homeostasis, which are not found in storms or supernovas, whereas the strong conception insists on a real, irreducible uniqueness of organisms and challenges our entire scientific world-picture on the basis thereof. Thus the defender of the ‘strong concept’ of organism is an inheritor of the program of a Romantic science: not ‘anti-science’ like Heidegger, but claiming that modern, or ‘mainstream’, or ‘mechanistic’ science is somehow not enough (or sometimes, as in Jonas, that science is morally misguided, missing key features of meaning and value). This view, which we might term the ‘modern Romantic’ position in philosophy of biology, insists that there should be a science of the organism itself, a holistic science, a ‘new paradigm’, which would overcome or refute the excessively reductionist paradigm we have been saddled with since the Scientific Revolution. Julian Huxley conveyed something of this ironically in an anecdote on the theoretical biologist J.S Haldane: “Dr. Haldane called himself an organicist, which implied being anti-mechanist and yet not a mystic vitalist […] I never quite grasped what he really meant. […]. As I was describing some experiment which demanded a mechanistic explanation, he burst out with ‘But it’s a norganism, my dear young fellow, a norganism’!”35 Canguilhem’s idea of biological philosophy is clearly not an attempt at a metaphysics of Life or Organism, or a counter-science: he does not defend a strong concept of organism. But at the same time, unlike mainstream E.g. Mayr, “Cause and Effect in Biology,” Science 134 (1961): 1501-1506. See J. Gayon, “Philosophy of biology: an historico-critical characterization”; P.-O. Méthot, “Analytic and Continental Approaches to Biology and Philosophy: David Hull and Marjorie Grene on ‘What Philosophy of Biology is Not’.” In Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology, eds. G. Bianco, G. Van de Vijver, C.T. Wolfe. Dordrecht: Springer, 2023, as well as D. Nicholson, R. Gawne, “Neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but organicism: what the philosophy of biology was,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37(4) (2015): 345-381 for a more revisionist view of the discipline, arguing for placing organicism at centre stage. 35 J. Huxley, Memories (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 138. 34 10 philosophers of biology, Canguilhem is not content with a ‘weak’ concept of organism, a merely descriptive one. Why does “biological philosophy” not take its coordinates from biology sensu stricto? One answer, which is present in Canguilhem’s work although not really in the essay under discussion here, is a kind of humanism, that is, a suspicion towards an illegitimate authority or legitimacy of science at the expense of humanity. This response can be seen in some of his writings on health, on the doctor-patient relation, and on psychology. A slightly different response builds on the specificity of the medical focus, which yields, as it were, its own normativity, that cannot be found in the more impersonal, quantitative field of biology.36 But Canguilhem also sometimes insists that what matters to him is not ‘the human’ but ‘the vital’ (although admittedly, a lot hinges then on what one takes ‘the vital’ to mean). This need not be taken in the strongest sense, of a metaphysical vitalism, including because Canguilhem devised careful arguments to distinguish legitimate forms of vitalism from more naïve, dualistic forms. Canguilhem’s vitalism has something ‘Kantian’ about it, as I’ve suggested elsewhere37: rather than a metaphysics of vital forces, pseudo-scientific or falsifiably scientific, it is a ‘constructivist’ vitalism emphasizing that living organisms are entities engaged in continuous acts of cognitive construction,38 as in von Uexküll’s Umwelt, but also in Goldstein’s description of how both healthy and damaged organisms seek to construct a meaningful totality (their ‘world’), with the role of the therapist being to assist the latter, damaged organisms in the project of a restitutio ad integrum. But it is not merely a theory of cognitive construction, since this constructivist capacity is presented as a feature of living beings themselves: perhaps a weaker form of vitalism, with strong holistic overtones – a ‘biochauvinism’. In addition, this view, or project – for “biological philosophy” is clearly presented in programmatic terms in Canguilhem’s essay, whether or not his career should be seen as carrying out this ‘program’ in a linear fashion (it shouldn’t, including because Canguilhem’s work shows an impressive and unusual capacity to adapt and generate itself from changing ‘contingent’ circumstances, professional and other) – is not restricted to a kind of conceptual investigation of the properties of biological entities. Like Goldstein’s project and perhaps with greater ‘civilizational’ ambitions, it seeks to understand the human capacity to survive and adapt in terms of a vital normativity. The capacity we have to “institute normative relations in the experience of life” is not an irrational élan vital or life-force; it is in fact a kind of 36 On this perspective see the contributions of E. Giroux, Après Canguilhem. Définir la santé et la maladie (Paris: PUF, 2010) and P.-O. Méthot, ed., Vital Norms. 37 C.T. Wolfe, “Was Canguilhem a biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the project of ‘biophilosophy’”; A. Etxeberria and C.T. Wolfe, “Canguilhem and the Logic of Life.” 38 See the more strongly Kantian reading of Canguilhem in G. Van de Vijver and L. Haeck, “Canguilhem’s Divided Subject. A Kantian Perspective on the Intertwinement of Logic and Life,” in Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology, eds. G. Bianco, G. Van de Vijver, C. Wolfe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2023). 11 rationality, Canguilhem insists.39 The more civilizational emphasis, which we do not find maintained in the rest of Canguilhem’s work in the subsequent decades, although the critique of mechanism and technology was (at least) a prominent early motif, borrows a somewhat Bergsonian phrase, when Canguilhem calls for a “general organology”: he credits Bergson with having understood “the true relationship of organism and mechanism,” and calls for “a biological philosophy of machinism, treating machines as the organs of life, and laying the foundations of a general organology.”40 The latter term is not defined or even discussed in any detail in his work, but we can explicate it a minima, following the phrase that immediately precedes it (“a biological philosophy of machinism”), as an attempt to invert the order of priorities that is characteristic – on Canguilhem’s view – of both Cartesianism in particular and technological civilization in general, by inscribing mechanism within a more (ontologically) fundamental organology. This critique of mechanism and by extension ‘technoscience’ recurs in different forms elsewhere in Canguilhem’s writing, e.g. when criticizing psychology or the illegitimate extension of neuroscientific explanations in human life, but it is not my concern here. Even if we do not see the way to a “general organology” today (although with only mild revisions this could yield a certain kind of ecological position, the relevance of which seems hard to deny), or find the opposition between Life and Reason to be a bit dated (or at least quite historically located), Canguilhem’s 1947 essay should be seen as noteworthy. At the very least, because it calls so explicitly for a kind of disciplinary shift which could have significantly reshaped the face of ‘Continental philosophy of biology’. A shift of that kind did not take place, even if calls for different versions of organicism are now quite common, along with challenges to various versions of genocentric orthodoxy, invoking, inter alia, autopoiesis, morphology, development, organizational closure, etc. – all of which are loosely compatible with Canguilhem, although he remains a philosopher making philosophical claims, not a theoretical biologist making empirical claims. These philosophical claims yield, at points, what I might call an ‘existential vitalism’, a vitalism of construction and attitudes rather than one of vital forces and entelechies. In this vitalism, the history of biology plays a key role, but the key concern is reflecting on the ‘modes of existence’ of biological entities and processes, without reducing them to physico-chemical processes, with – at times – hints of a vital humanism. In “Si l’on entend par raison moins un pouvoir d'aperception de rapports essentiels inclus dans la réalité des choses ou de l'esprit qu'un pouvoir d'institution de rapports normatifs dans l'expérience de la vie, alors en ce sens nous voulons nous dire aussi rationaliste” (“Note sur la situation,” p. 332 / 320). 40 “Note sur la situation,” p. 332 / 319. Canguilhem credits Bergson for this insight in “Machine and Organism”: “Bergson is one of the few French philosophers, if not the only one, who treated mechanical invention as a biological function, as an aspect of life’s organization by matter; Creative Evolution is, in some sense, a treatise of general organology” (La connaissance de la vie, p. 125, n. 58; I did not use the translation in Knowledge of Life, p. 174). On Bergsonian organology in Canguilhem, see G. le Blanc, “La culture technique” in “Les usages de la culture,” in Canguilhem et la vie humaine (Paris: PUF, 2002), pp. 188-205 (thanks to Andy Wong for this reference). Again, I am neither claiming that this “biological philosophy” (with its Goldsteinian, Bergsonian, Kantian, Nietzschean…overtones) is Canguilhem’s central concept or Leitfaden, nor that it is restricted to his 1947 essay (the Normal and the Pathological shows clear signs of belonging to this project as well, as do a number of the essays in Knowledge of Life); but if we consider his project based on this essay the view is well, quite specific. 39 12 that sense, some of Canguilhem’s most important work, like his reflections on vital normativity, appears in a new light if we consider it in terms of the biological philosophy he was calling for in 1947. Acknowledgments Thanks to Pierre-Olivier Méthot and Federico Testa for helpful suggestions. Bibliography Bolduc, G. 2023. On the Heuristic Value of Hans Driesch’s Vitalism. In Vitalism and its Legacies in 20th-century Life Science and Philosophy, eds. C. Donohue, C.T. Wolfe. Dordrecht: Springer. Canguilhem, G. 1947. Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 52(3/4): 322-332. reprinted in vol. 4 of Canguilhem’s Œuvres Complètes (307-320)). Canguilhem, G. 1972. Le normal et le pathologique, édition revue (1966), Paris : PUF Canguilhem, G. 1977. La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2nd revised edition. Paris: Vrin. (First published 1955). Canguilhem, G. 1968. Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences concernant les vivants et la vie. Paris: Vrin Canguilhem, G. 1980. La connaissance de la vie, revised edition (1st edition 1952), Paris: J. Vrin. Canguilhem, G. 2002. La santé, concept vulgaire et question philosophique (1988), in Canguilhem, Écrits sur la médecine. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Canguilhem, G. 2008. Health: Crude Concept and Philosophical Question (translation of “La santé, concept vulgaire et question philosophique” (1988), by T. Meyers and S. Geroulanos). Public Culture 20(3): 467-477 Canguilhem, G. 2008. Knowledge of Life. Edited by Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers. Translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg. New York: Fordham University Press. 13 Canguilhem, G. 2015. Œuvres complètes, tome IV: Résistance, philosophie biologique et histoire des sciences (1940-1965), ed. C. Limoges, Paris: J. Vrin. Chen, B. 2023. A Historico-Logical Re-Assessment of Hans Driesch’s Vitalism. in Vitalism and its Legacies in 20th-century Life Science and Philosophy, eds. C. Donohue, C.T. Wolfe. Dordrecht: Springer. Clauzade, L. 2018. Auguste Comte’s Positive Biology. In Michel Bourdeau, Mary Pickering, & Warren Schmaus (eds.), Love, Order & Progress. The Science, Philosophy, & Politics of Auguste Comte, pp. 93-127. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Di Paolo, E. 2009. “Extended Life.” Topoi 28: 9-21 Ebke, T. 2019. La connaissance vitale de la vie : une parallaxe entre Canguilhem et Plessner. Astérion [Online] 21 http://journals.openedition.org/asterion/4464 Etxeberria, A., and Wolfe, C.T. 2018. Canguilhem and the Logic of Life. Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science 4: 47-63. Gayon, J. 1998. The Concept of Individuality in Canguilhem’s Philosophy of Biology. Journal of the History of Biology 31(3): 305-325. Gayon, J. 2009. Philosophy of Biology: An Historico-Critical Characterization. In Brenner A., Gayon J. (eds.) French Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Research in France (pp. 201–212), Dordrecht: Springer. Giroux, É. 2010. Après Canguilhem. Définir la santé et la maladie. Paris : PUF. Goldstein, K. 1934. Der Aufbau des Organismus: Einführung in die Biologie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Erfahrungen am kranken Menschen, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Grene, M. 1969. Approaches to a Philosophical Biology. Basic Books. Grene, M. 1974. The Understanding of Nature: Essays in Philosophy of Biology. Dordrecht: Reidel. Hegel, G.W.F. 2004. Philosophy of Nature. Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press Heidegger, M. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. McNeill & N. Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Honenberger, P. 2023. All Knowledge Is Orientation: Marjorie Grene’s Ecological Epistemology. In Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology, eds. G. Bianco, G. Van de Vijver, C. Wolfe. Dordrecht: Springer. 14 Hutchins, B., Wolfe, C.T., Eriksen, C.B. 2016. The Embodied Descartes: Contemporary Readings of L’Homme. In Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Stephen Gaukroger (eds.) Descartes’ Treatise on Man and its Reception, 287-304. Dordrecht: Springer Hutchins, B.R. 2021. ‘Everyone Knows What Life Is’: Life as An Irreducible In and Outside of Descartes’s Metaphysics and Biology. in Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Susan James, 263-276. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huxley, J. 1971. Memories. New York: Harper & Row. Jonas, H. 1966. The Phenomenon of Life. Towards a Philosophical Biology, New York: Harper & Row. le Blanc, G. 2002. Canguilhem et la vie humaine. Paris: PUF. Lumsden, S. 2008. The Rise of the Non-Metaphysical Hegel. Philosophy Compass 3:1: 51-65 Malaterre, C., Pulizzotto, D. & Lareau, F. 2020. Revisiting Three Decades of Biology and Philosophy: a Computational Topic-Modeling Perspective. Biol Philos 35, 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9729-4 Mayr, E. 1961. Cause and Effect in Biology. Science 134: 1501-1506. Mayr, E. 1985. How Biology Differs From the Physical Sciences. In D. J. Depew and B H Weber, eds., Evolution at a Crossroads: The New Biology and the New Philosophy of Science, 43-63. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mayr, E. 1996. The Autonomy of Biology: The Position of Biology Among The Sciences. Quarterly Review of Biology 71: 97–106 Méthot, P.-O. 2023. Analytic and Continental Approaches to Biology and Philosophy: David Hull and Marjorie Grene on ‘What Philosophy of Biology is Not’. In Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology, eds. G. Bianco, G. Van de Vijver, C.T. Wolfe. Dordrecht: Springer Michelini F., Wunsch M., Stederoth D. 2018. Philosophy of nature and organism's autonomy: on Hegel, Plessner and Jonas' theories of living beings. Hist Philos Life Sci. 40(3): 56. doi: 10.1007/s40656-018-0212-3. Nicholson, D., Gawne, R. 2015. Neither Logical Empiricism nor Vitalism, But Organicism: What the Philosophy of Biology Was. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 37(4): 345-381 Penoncelli, M., C.T. Wolfe, A. Wong, 2020. Is The Normal and the Pathological Vitalist ? in P.O. Méthot, ed.., Vital Norms. Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological in the TwentyFirst Century, 219-250. Paris: Editions Hermann. 15 Pradeu, T. 2017. Thirty years of Biology & Philosophy: philosophy of which biology? Biology and Philosophy 32(2): 149–167. Protevi, J. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reill, P.H. 1989. Anti-Mechanism, Vitalism and their Political Implications in Late Enlightened Scientific Thought. Francia 16(2): 195-212 Richards, R. 2002. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shapiro, L. 2003. The Health of the Body-Machine? Or Seventeenth Century Mechanism and the Concept of Health. Perspectives on Science, 11(4): 421-442. Tarizzo, D. 2017. Life: A Modern Invention, trans. Mark William Epstein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Van de Vijver, G. and Haeck, L. 2023. Judging Organization. A Plea for Transcendental Logic in Philosophy of Biology. In M. Mossio, ed., Organization in Biology. Dordrecht: Springer. Wolfe, C.T. 2011. From Substantival to Functional Vitalism and Beyond: Animas, Organisms and Attitudes. Eidos, 14: 212-235. Wolfe, C.T, Wong, A. 2014. The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem, Bergson and the Project of Biophilosophy. in The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics. eds. G. Bianco, M. de Beistegui & M. Gracieuse, 63-75. Rowman & Littlefield International Wolfe, C.T. 2015. Was Canguilhem a Biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the Project of ‘Biophilosophy’. In D. Meacham, ed., Medicine and Society, New Continental Perspectives, 197-212. Dordrecht: Springer Wolfe, C.T. 2019. La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie : une histoire du vitalisme, Paris: Garnier, coll. Histoire et philosophie des sciences. Wolfe, C.T. 2023. Vitalism and the Construction of Biology: A Historico-Epistemological Reflection. In P.-O. Méthot, ed., Philosophy, History, and Biology: Essays in Honor of Jean Gayon. Dordrecht: Springer Zammito, J. 2018. The Gestation of German Biology. Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 16