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300Monster –Sammlung und AllegorieIn Sarah Schmidt (ed.), Sprachen des Sammelns. Literatur als Medium und Reflexionsform des Sammelns, Brill Fink. pp. 487-495. 2016.an essay on monsters, science and categories from Diderot to Baudelaire
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36La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie : une histoire du vitalismeClassiques Garnier. 2019.Table des matières Remerciements 1 INTRODUCTION 2 PREMIERE PARTIE LE VIVANT ET LA REVOLUTION SCIENTIFIQUE 7 ONTOLOGIE DU VIVANT OU BIOLOGIE ? LE CAS DE LA RÉVOLUTION SCIENTIFIQUE 8 Introduction 8 La vie et le vivant sont-ils des thèmes de controverse explicites dans la philosophie naturelle de l’âge classique ? 18 Machines de la nature, ferments et métaphysique chimique 28 Crisis, what crisis ? 42 Conclusion 45 LE MÉCANIQUE FACE AU V…Read more
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12PrésentationMultitudes 3 (3): 167-170. 2007.Introduction to dossier I edited on laughter and materialism
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9L'évolution du statut de la connaissance dans le traité du serf-arbitre de LutherArchives de Philosophie 2 (2): 279-302. 2003.By examining the relation between knowledge, faith and will in Luther’s Bondage of the Will, our aim is to show how he delimits a space corresponding to modern « self-consciousness », which he however defines as a space of pure passivity, of heteronomy in relation to the divine Law rather than autonomy of reason or the will. This passivity which is nevertheless a source of spontaneitycorresponds to the condition Luther describes as « simultaneously justified and a sinner ».
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117Brain theory : essays in critical neurophilosophy (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2014.Collection of essays in 'critical neurophilosophy '
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31Vital anti-mathematicism and the ontology of the emerging life sciences: from Mandeville to DiderotSynthese 196 (9): 3633-3654. 2019.Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scie…Read more
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8The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History (review)Isis 100 659-659. 2009.review of Martensen's book The Brain Takes Shape (CUP)
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40The idea of 'philosophy of biology before biology' : a methodological provocationIn Charles T. Wolfe & Cécilia Bognon-Küss (eds.), Philosophy of Biology Before Biology, Routledge. 2019.We argue for a conception of ‘philosophy of biology before biology’ which is neither internalist study of biological doctrines, nor a reconstruction of the role philosophical concepts might have played in the constitution of biology as science, but rather a kind of interplay between metaphysical and empirical issues. This should have an impact both on our present understanding of philosophy of biology, given that it is necessarily conditioned by a very specific history and historiography, and on…Read more
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28Materialism and ‘the soft substance of the brain’: Diderot and plasticityBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (5): 963-982. 2016.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
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63Philosophy of Biology Before Biology (edited book)Routledge. 2019.Philosophy of biology before biology Edited by Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe Table of contents Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe. Introduction 1. Cécilia Bognon-Küss & Charles T. Wolfe. The idea of “philosophy of biology before biology”: a methodological provocation Part I. FORM AND DEVELOPMENT 2. Stéphane Schmitt. Buffon’s theories of generation and the changing dialectics of molds and molecules 3. Phillip Sloan. Metaphysics and “Vital” Materialism: The Gabrielle Du Châtelet…Read more
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12Penser L'Ordre Naturel, 1680-1810 - edited by Adrien Paschoud and Nathalie VuilleminCentaurus 56 (1): 62-65. 2014.
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43Introduction: sketches of a conceptual history of epigenesisHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (4): 64. 2018.This is an introduction to a collection of articles on the conceptual history of epigenesis, from Aristotle to Harvey, Cavendish, Kant and Erasmus Darwin, moving into nineteenth-century biology with Wolff, Blumenbach and His, and onto the twentieth century and current issues, with Waddington and epigenetics. The purpose of the topical collection is to emphasize how epigenesis marks the point of intersection of a theory of biological development and a theory of active matter. We also wish to show…Read more
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324Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of VitalismKairos 20 (1): 113-140. 2018.Vitalism was long viewed as the most grotesque view in biological theory: appeals to a mysterious life-force, Romantic insistence on the autonomy of life, or worse, a metaphysics of an entirely living universe. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to present a revised, lighter version that was not weighted down by revisionary metaphysics: “organicism”. And mainstream philosophers of science criticized Driesch and Bergson’s “neovitalism” as a too-strong ontological commitment to the…Read more
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26Smithian Vitalism?Journal of Scottish Philosophy 16 (3): 264-271. 2018.reflection on misreadings of Adam Smith as vitalist in light of E Schliesser's Adam Smith book which shows a different interpretive route
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843Canguilhem and the Logic of LifeTransversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science 4 47. 2018.In this paper we examine aspects of Canguilhem’s philosophy of biology, concerning the knowledge of life and its consequences on science and vitalism. His concept of life stems from the idea of a living individual, endowed with creative subjectivity and norms, a Kantian view which “disconcerts logic”. In contrast, two different approaches ground naturalistic perspectives to explore the logic of life and the logic of the living individual in the 1970s. Although Canguilhem is closer to the second,…Read more
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12Paolo Quintili, Matérialismes et Lumières. Philosophies de la vie, autour de Diderot et de quelques autres 1706-1789 , pp. 334, € 82.00, ISBN 978 2 7453 1786 5 (review)Early Science and Medicine 17 (6): 669-671. 2012.
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13The collapse of mechanism and the rise of sensibility: science and the shaping of modernity, 1680–1760Intellectual History Review 26 (4): 561-564. 2016.review essay on Gaukroger, Collapse of Mechanism and Rise of Sensibility (OUP)
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26The organism as reality or as fiction: Buffon and beyondHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (1): 3. 2016.In this paper, we reflect on the connection between the notions of organism and organisation, with a specific interest in how this bears upon the issue of the reality of the organism. We do this by presenting the case of Buffon, who developed complex views about the relation between the notions of “organised” and “organic” matter. We argue that, contrary to what some interpreters have suggested, these notions are not orthogonal in his thought. Also, we argue that Buffon has a view in which organ…Read more
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318La biophilosophie de Georges CanguilhemScienza and Filosofia 17. 2017.ABSTRACT: GEORGES CANGUILHEM’S BIOPHILOSOPHY The 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”. Certain influential French philosophers of science of the mid‐century such as Georges Canguilhem would disagree, or at least seek to resist some of Jacob’s diagnosis. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but…Read more
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64Models of Organic Organization in Montpellier VitalismEarly Science and Medicine 22 (2-3): 229-252. 2017.The species of vitalism discussed here is a malleable construct, often with a poisonous reputation (but one which I want to rehabilitate), hovering in between the realms of the philosophy of biology, the history of medicine, and the scientific background of the Radical Enlightenment (case in point, the influence of vitalist medicine on Diderot). This is a more vital vitalism, or at least a more ‘biologistic,’ ‘embodied,’ medicalized vitalism. I distinguish between what I would call ‘substantival…Read more
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Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010 (edited book)Springer Science+Business Media. 2013.
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The Renewal of Materialism, Graduate Faculty of Philosophy Journal, 22, n° 1Presses Universitaires de France. 2005.SPECIAL ISSUE OF GFPJ ON MATERIALISM
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76Critical 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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20The 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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33The 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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29Empiricist heresies in early modern medical thoughtIn Charles T. Wolfe & Ofer Gal (eds.), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, Springer. pp. 333--344. 2010.Vitalism, from its early modern to its Enlightenment forms (from Glisson and Willis to La Caze and Barthez), is notoriously opposed to intervention into the living sphere. Experiment, quantification, measurement are all ‘vivisectionist’, morally suspect and worse, they alter and warp the ‘life’ of the subject. They are good for studying corpses, not living individuals. This much is well known, and it has disqualified vitalist medicine from having a place in standard histories of medicine, until …Read more
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387Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scie…Read more
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131The concept of organism: historical philosophical, scientific perspectivesHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3): 147. 2010.0. Philippe Huneman and Charles T. Wolfe: Introduction 1. Tobias Cheung, “What is an ‘organism’? On the occurrence of a new term and its conceptual transformations 1680-1850” 2. Charles T. Wolfe, “Do organisms have an ontological status?” 3. John Symons, “The individuality of artifacts and organisms” 4. Thomas Pradeu, “What is an organism? An immunological answer” 5. Matteo Mossio & Alvaro Moreno, “Organisational closure in biological organisms” 6. Laura Nuño de la Rosa, “Becoming organisms. The…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 |