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750Cultured brains and the production of subjectivity: The politics of affect(s) as an unfinished projectIn W. Neidich (ed.), The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism II, Archivebooks. pp. 245-267. 2014.A reflection on overcoming Natur vs Geisteswissenschaften oppositions in thinking about the 'cultured brain' and plasticity
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1530A happiness fit for organic bodies: La Mettrie's medical EpicureanismIn Neven Leddy & Avi Lifschitz (eds.), Epicurus in the Enlightenment, Voltaire Foundation. pp. 69--83. 2009.A chapter on the specifically 'medical' Epicureanism of La Mettrie, connecting his materialist approach to mind-body issues and his hedonistic ethics
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1382“The Materialist Denial of Monsters”In Charles Wolfe (ed.), Monsters and Philosophy, . pp. 187--204. 2005.Locke and Leibniz deny that there are any such beings as ‘monsters’ (anomalies, natural curiosities, wonders, and marvels), for two very different reasons. For Locke, monsters are not ‘natural kinds’: the word ‘monster’ does not individuate any specific class of beings ‘out there’ in the natural world. Monsters depend on our subjective viewpoint. For Leibniz, there are no monsters because we are all parts of the Great Chain of Being. Everything that happens, happens for a reason, including a mon…Read more
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775Vital materialism and the problem of ethics in the Radical EnlightenmentPhilosophica 88 (1): 31-70. 2013.From Hegel to Engels, Sartre and Ruyer (Ruyer, 1933), to name only a few, materialism is viewed as a necropolis, or the metaphysics befitting such an abode; many speak of matter’s crudeness, bruteness, coldness or stupidity. Science or scientism, on this view, reduces the living world to ‘dead matter’, ‘brutish’, ‘mechanical, lifeless matter’, thereby also stripping it of its freedom (Crocker, 1959). Materialism is often wrongly presented as ‘mechanistic materialism’ – with ‘Death of Nature’ ech…Read more
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1040Embodied EmpiricismIn Charles T. Wolfe & Ofer Gal (eds.), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, Springer. pp. 1--6. 2010.This is the introduction to a collection of essays on 'embodied empiricism' in early modern philosophy and the life sciences - papers on Harvey, Glisson, Locke, Hume, Bonnet, Lamarck, on anatomy and physiology, on medicine and natural history, etc.
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41Materialism (review)Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 19 (1): 183-185. 1996.Introduction to the special issue on materialism I edited
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900Review of Lucretius and the Early ModernThe Classical Review. forthcoming.long version of review forthcoming in much shorter version in Classical Review
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718Locke’s compatibilism: Suspension of desire or suspension of determinism?In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O.’Rourke & Harry Silverstein (eds.), Action, Ethics and Responsibility, Mit Press. 2010.In Book II, chapter xxi of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, on ‘Power’, Locke presents a radical critique of free will. This is the longest chapter in the Essay, and it is a difficult one, not least since Locke revised it four times without always taking care to ensure that every part cohered with the rest. My interest is to work out a coherent statement of what would today be termed ‘compatibilism’ from this text – namely, a doctrine which seeks to render free will and determinism comp…Read more
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2145From Locke to Materialism: Empiricism, the Brain and the Stirrings of OntologyIn A. L. Rey S. Bodenmann (ed.), 18th-Century Empiricism and the Sciences, . 2018.My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle wi…Read more
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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
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216The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science (edited book)Springer. 2010.This volume focuses on the development of empiricism as an interest in the body - as both the object of research and the subject of experience.
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921On the role of Newtonian analogies in eighteenth-century life science:Vitalism and provisionally inexplicable explicative devicesIn Zvi Biener & Eric Schliesser (eds.), Newton and Empiricism, Oxford University Press. pp. 223-261. 2014.Newton’s impact on Enlightenment natural philosophy has been studied at great length, in its experimental, methodological and ideological ramifications. One aspect that has received fairly little attention is the role Newtonian “analogies” played in the formulation of new conceptual schemes in physiology, medicine, and life science as a whole. So-called ‘medical Newtonians’ like Pitcairne and Keill have been studied; but they were engaged in a more literal project of directly transposing, or see…Read more
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604In reflecting on the relation between early empiricist conceptions of the mind and more experimentally motivated materialist philosophies of mind in the mid-eighteenth century, I suggest that we take seriously the existence of what I shall call ‘phantom philosophical projects’. A canonical empiricist like Locke goes out of his way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical considerat…Read more
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25Le rire matérialisteMultitudes 3 (3): 177-185. 2007.The figure of the materialist philosopher as the « laughing philosopher », who mocks the rest of humanity, its fears, superstitions and even values, is a classic one. It has been associated variously with Democritus, Epicurus, Spinoza, Rabelais, La Mettrie and others. Apart from the interest one might have in this figure of the philosopher as someone who is rather far removed from school benches, the present essay seeks to describe or define this conceptual character in order to argue that laugh…Read more
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813“Man-Machines and Embodiment: From Cartesian Physiology to Claude Bernard’s ‘Living Machine’”In Justin E. H. Smith (ed.), Embodiment, Oxford Philosophical Concepts, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.A common and enduring early modern intuition is that materialists reduce organisms in general and human beings in particular to automata. Wasn’t a famous book of the time entitled L’Homme-Machine? In fact, the machine is employed as an analogy, and there was a specifically materialist form of embodiment, in which the body is not reduced to an inanimate machine, but is conceived as an affective, flesh-and-blood entity. We discuss how mechanist and vitalist models of organism exist in a more compl…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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1010Chance 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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83“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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835The 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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1190“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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876Rethinking 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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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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307Review 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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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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1828Forms 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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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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3064Vitalism 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
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 |