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259Review of Fumie Kawamura, Diderot et la chimie: science, pensée et écriture. (review)H-France Reviews 16. 2016.
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25La catégorie d' « organisme » dans la philosophie de la biologieMultitudes 2 (2): 27-40. 2004.The category of« organism » has an ambiguous status: scientific or philosophical? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific « bolstering » for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the « mechanistic » or « reductionist » trend, which is seen as dominant since the 17th century, whether in the case of Stahlian animism, Leibnizian monadology, the neo-vitalism of Hans Driesch, or, lastly, of the « phenomenology of organic life » in the 20th century, with authors such …Read more
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1056Epigenesis as Spinozism in Diderot’s biological project (draft)In O. Nachtomy J. E. H. Smith (ed.), The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 181-201. 2014.Denis Diderot’s natural philosophy is deeply and centrally ‘biologistic’: as it emerges between the 1740s and 1780s, thus right before the appearance of the term ‘biology’ as a way of designating a unified science of life (McLaughlin), his project is motivated by the desire both to understand the laws governing organic beings and to emphasize, more ‘philosophically’, the uniqueness of organic beings within the physical world as a whole. This is apparent both in the metaphysics of vital matter he…Read more
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1254Do organisms have an ontological status?History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3): 195-232. 2010.The category of ‘organism’ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” trend, which has been perceived as dominant since …Read more
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755The self-fashioning of French Newtonianism Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9511-3 Authors Charles T. Wolfe, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia David Gilad, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.
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60The Animal Economy as Object and Program in Montpellier VitalismScience in Context 21 (4): 537-579. 2008.Our aim in this paper is to bring to light the importance of the notion of économie animale in Montpellier vitalism, as a hybrid concept which brings together the structural and functional dimensions of the living body – dimensions which hitherto had primarily been studied according to a mechanistic model, or were discussed within the framework of Stahlian animism. The celebrated image of the bee-swarm expresses this structural-functional understanding of living bodies quite well: “One sees them…Read more
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440The organism – reality or fiction?The Philosophers' Magazine (67): 96-101. 2014.A reflection on organisms as real entities, as constructions, or as fictions
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1179Materialism and ‘the soft substance of the brain’: Diderot and plasticityBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (5): 963-982. 2017.ABSTRACTMaterialism is the view that everything that is real is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot was one of the first to notice that a…Read more
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 |