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41Critical Review: Critical Review: On Catherine Wilson'S Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (review)Journal of Scottish Philosophy 8 (1): 91-100. 2010.review essay on C Wilson, Epicureanism
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9The Creation of the Modern World (review)Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 24 (1): 227-231. 2003.There are books which, in the manner of a legal brief, seek to present a case by marshalling evidence around a central thesis or ‘claim’. Then there are books which are more like canvases: they assemble a wide variety of elements into a hitherto unknown or at least unseen pattern. Roy Porter’s thesis, which can be pieced together from a few half-sentences repeated at the beginning, middle and end of this book, is that there was a British Enlightenment—which was general enough that he dispenses w…Read more
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22The eminent French biologist and historian of biology François Jacob once notoriously declared, “On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires” : 20-25): laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of ‘Life’. In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon returned to Jacob’s statement with an odd kind of pathos: they were determined to reverse course. N…Read more
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Aram Vartanian: Science and Humanism in the French EnlightenmentBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (1): 175-178. 2001.
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1029Chance between holism and reductionism: tensions in the conceptualisation of LifeProgress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. 2012.In debates between holism and reductionism in biology, from the early 20th century to more recent re-enactments involving genetic reductionism, developmental systems theory, or systems biology, the role of chance – the presence of theories invoking chance as a strong explanatory principle – is hardly ever acknowledged. Conversely, Darwinian models of chance and selection (Dennett 1995, Kupiec 1996, Kupiec 2009) sit awkwardly with reductionist and holistic concepts, which they alternately challen…Read more
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25Généalogie de la sensation. Physique, physiologie et psychologie en Europe, de Fernel à Locke (review)Journal of Early Modern Studies 4 (2): 165-171. 2015.review of R de Calan's book Généalogie de la sensation, on Fernel, Locke et al.
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880The organism as ontological go-between. Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual historyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 1. 2014.The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles – sometimes overt, sometimes masked – throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of Life,…Read more
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85“Cabinet d'Histoire Naturelle,” or: The Interplay of Nature and Artifice in Diderot's NaturalismPerspectives on Science 17 (1). 2009.In selected texts by Diderot, including the Encyclopédie article “Cabinet d’histoire naturelle” (along with his comments in the article “Histoire nat-urelle”), 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 con…Read more
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893Rethinking empiricism and materialism: the revisionist viewAnnales Philosophici 1 101-113. 2010.There is an enduring story about empiricism, which runs as follows: from Locke onwards to Carnap, empiricism is the doctrine in which raw sense-data are received through the passive mechanism of perception; experience is the effect produced by external reality on the mind or ‘receptors’. Empiricism on this view is the ‘handmaiden’ of experimental natural science, seeking to redefine philosophy and its methods in conformity with the results of modern science. Secondly, there is a story about mate…Read more
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801“Was Canguilhem a biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the project of ‘biophilosophy’"In Darian Meacham (ed.), Medicine and Society, New Continental Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, Philosophy and Medicine Series, 2015), Springer. pp. 197-212. 2015.Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934…Read more
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13Review of Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition (review)Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 19 (1): 183-185. 1996.Richard Vitzthum, a Professor of English at the University of Maryland, has sought to write a book aimed at specialists and nonspecialists alike, in praise of the materialist tradition which he believes to require a new assessment at the present time. In his view, Lange’s History of Materialism suffered from an excessive neo-Kantian bias, contained too many historical digressions, and focused on figures like Gassendi, Hobbes and David Friedrich Strauss at the expense of figures that he, Vitzthum…Read more
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320Review of S. Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility (review)Intellectual History Review 26 (4): 561-564. 2016.
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1885Forms of materialist embodimentIn Matthew Landers & Brian Muñoz (eds.), Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge, 1500-1850, Pickering & Chatto. 2012.The materialist approach to the body is often, if not always understood in ‘mechanistic’ terms, as the view in which the properties unique to organic, living embodied agents are reduced to or described in terms of properties that characterize matter as a whole, which allow of mechanistic explanation. Indeed, from Hobbes and Descartes in the 17th century to the popularity of automata such as Vaucanson’s in the 18th century, this vision of things would seem to be correct. In this paper I aim to co…Read more
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17L'anomalie du vivantMultitudes 33 (2): 53. 2008.Philosophy first encounters the figure of the monster as a challenge to order – whether natural or moral, the distinction is in fact secondary. This challenge can also be a bearer of meaning, as in a curse. Then philosophy « naturalises » this figure, either to erase any potentially chaotic dimension from the universe, or to construct an ontology of Life and its unpredictability, of which the monster is the prime case. But there is a third moment, a third « encounter » between philosophy and the…Read more
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93Vitalism and the resistance to experimentation on life in the eighteenth centuryJournal of the History of Biology 46 (2): 255-282. 2013.There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologis…Read more
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3137Vitalism and the scientific image: an introductionIn Sebastian Normandin & Charles T. Wolfe (eds.), Vitalism and the scientific image, 1800-2010., Springer. 2013.Introduction to edited volume on vitalism and/in the life sciences, 1800-2010
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47Endowed molecules and emergent organization : the Maupertuis-Diderot debateIn Tobias Cheung (ed.), Transitions and borders between animals, humans, and machines, 1600-1800, Brill. pp. 38-65. 2010.At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur …Read more
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18The Deleuze Connections (review)Multitudes 4 (4): 236-241. 2001.review of Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections
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51Vitalism and the scientific image, 1800-2010. (edited book)Springer. 2013.TOC 0. Introduction (SN/CW) I. Revisiting vitalist themes in 19th-century science 1. Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute) – Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Place of Irritability 2. in the History of Life and Death 3. Joan Steigerwald (York) – Rethinking Organic Vitality in Germany at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century 4. Juan Rigoli (Geneva) –The “Novel of Medicine” 5. Sean Dyde (Cambridge) – Life and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Somaticism in the Wake of Phrenology. II. Twentieth cen…Read more
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38Paolo Quintili, Matérialismes et lumières: philosophies de la vie, autour de Diderot et de quelques autres 1706-1789 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009) (review)Early Science and Medicine 17 (6): 669-671. 2012.
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2084The 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’. Nowadays, as David Hull puts it, “both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted… Organisms are ‘nothing but’ atoms, and that is that.” In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as G…Read more
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21Le rêve matérialiste, ou « Faire par la pensée ce que la matière fait parfois »Philosophiques 34 (2): 317-328. 2007.Cet article vise à expliciter la notion de « rêve matérialiste » à partir d’une réflexion sur l’ouvrage de Diderot, Le Rêve de D’Alembert. Quel lien y a-t-il entre le matérialisme philosophique proclamé dans ce livre et la forme du rêve qui donne un caractère inédit à la présentation de cette philosophie? Une approche purement textuelle montrerait, déjà, une indissociabilité particulière entre forme et contenu; mais l’approche proposée ici s’attache à la manière dont une certaine idée du rêve se…Read more
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58Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical IntroductionSpringer. 2015.This book provides an overview of key features of (philosophical) materialism, in historical perspective. It is, thus, a study in the history and philosophy of materialism, with a particular focus on the early modern and Enlightenment periods, leading into the 19th and 20th centuries. For it was in the 18th century that the word was first used by a philosopher (La Mettrie) to refer to himself. Prior to that, ‘materialism’ was a pejorative term, used for wicked thinkers, as a near-synonym to ‘ath…Read more
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2006DIDEROT AND MATERIALIST THEORIES OF THE SELFJournal of Society and Politics 9 (1): 37-52. 2015.The concept of self has preeminently been asserted (in its many versions) as a core component of anti-reductionist, antinaturalistic 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 …Read more
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34Introduction: Vitalism without Metaphysics? Medical Vitalism in the EnlightenmentScience in Context 21 (4): 461-463. 2008.my introduction to special issue of Science in Context on 18c vitalism
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39The organism as ontological go-between: Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual historyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48 151-161. 2014.The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles, sometimes masked, often normative, throughout the history of biology. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and its ‘theorization’, but conversely has also been the target of influential rejections: as just an instrument of transmiss…Read more
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235“Determinism/Spinozism in the Radical Enlightenment: the cases of Anthony Collins and Denis Diderot”International Review of Eighteenth-Century Studies 1 (1): 37-51. 2007.In 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 dec…Read more
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15Robert L. Martensen. The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History. xxvii + 247 pp., index. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 (review)Isis 100 (3): 659-659. 2009.
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39Sommes-nous les héritiers des lumières matérialistes ?Revue Phares 8. 2008.An essay on whether or not we today are the 'heirs' of the materialist Enlightenment.
Charles T. Wolfe
Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès
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Université de Toulouse Jean-JaurèsProfessor
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Università Di Venezia "Ca' Foscari"Post-doctoral fellow
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Philosophy of Biology |
20th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
History of Biology |
Life |
Vitalism |
17th/18th Century French Philosophy |