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847The 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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1199“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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880Rethinking 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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309Review 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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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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1833Forms 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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3083Vitalism 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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44Endowed 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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92Vitalism 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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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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18The Deleuze Connections (review)Multitudes 4 (4): 236-241. 2001.review of Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections
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2120The 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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52Paolo 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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54Materialism: 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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20Le 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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1985DIDEROT 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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33Introduction: 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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207“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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37The 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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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.
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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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2381Sensibility as vital force or as property of matter in mid-eighteenth-century debatesIn Henry Martyn Lloyd (ed.), The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment, Springer Cham. pp. 147-170. 2013.Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is …Read more
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1697Monsters and Philosophy (edited book)College Publications. 2005.Table of contents for MONSTERS AND PHILOSOPHY, edited by Charles T. Wolfe (London 2005) List of Contributors iii Acknowledgments vii List of Abbreviations ix Introduction xi Charles T. Wolfe The Riddle of the Sphinx: Aristotle, Penelope, and 1 Empedocles Johannes Fritsche Science as a Cure for Fear: The Status of Monsters in 21 Lucretius Morgan Meis Nature and its Monsters During the Renaissance: 37 Montaigne and Vanini Tristan Dagron Conjoined Twins and the Limits of our Reason 61 Annie Bitbol-…Read more
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119From substantival to functional vitalism and beyond: animas, organisms and attitudesEidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad Del Norte 14 212-235. 2011.I distinguish between ‘substantival’ and ‘functional’ forms of vitalism in the eighteenth century. Substantival vitalism presupposes the existence of a (substantive) vital force which either plays a causal role in the natural world as studied scientifically, or remains an immaterial, extra-causal entity. Functional vitalism tends to operate ‘post facto’, from the existence of living bodies to the search for explanatory models that will account for their uniquely ‘vital’ properties better than fu…Read more
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35Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding: A Reader's Guide (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (4): 719-721. 2010.review of Uzgalis' introductory book on Locke
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489Automata, man-machines and embodiment: deflating or inflating Life?In A. Radman & H. Sohn (eds.), Critical and Clinical Cartographies; Embodiment /Technology /Care /Design, 010. forthcoming.Early modern automata, understood as efforts to ‘model’ life, to grasp its singular properties and/or to unveil and demystify its seeming inaccessibility and mystery, are not just fascinating liminal, boundary, hybrid, crossover or go-between objects, while they are all of those of course. They also pose a direct challenge to some of our common conceptions about mechanism and embodiment. They challenge the simplicity of the distinction between a purported ‘mechanistic’ worldpicture, its ontology…Read more
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26Endowed Molecules and Emergent Organization: The Maupertuis-Diderot DebateEarly Science and Medicine 15 (1-2): 38-65. 2010.In his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and a natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of 'genetic' information, described living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence.” Now, Maupertuis was a Leibnizian of sorts; his molecules possessed higher-level, 'mental' properties, recalling La Mettrie's statement in L'Homme-Machine, t…Read more
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754Vitalism without Metaphysics? Medical Vitalism in the EnlightenmentScience in Context 21 (4): 461-463. 2008.This is the introduction to a special issue of 'Science in Context' on vitalism that I edited. The contents are: 1. Guido Giglioni — “What Ever Happened to Francis Glisson? Albrecht Haller and the Fate of Eighteenth-Century Irritability” 2. Dominique Boury— “Irritability and Sensibility: Two Key Concepts in Assessing the Medical Doctrines of Haller and Bordeu” 3. Tobias Cheung — “Regulating Agents, Functional Interactions, and Stimulus-Reaction-Schemes: The Concept of “Organism” in the Organ…Read more
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1317“Empiricism contra Experiment: Harvey, Locke and the Revisionist View of Experimental Philosophy”Bulletin d'histoire et d'épistémologie des sciences de la vie 16 (2): 113-140. 2009.In this paper we suggest a revisionist perspective on two significant figures in early modern life science and philosophy: William Harvey and John Locke. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is often named as one of the rare representatives of the ‘life sciences’ who was a major figure in the Scientific Revolution. While this status itself is problematic, we would like to call attention to a different kind of problem: Harvey dislikes abstraction and controlled experiments (asi…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 |