Charles T. Wolfe

The brain in its plasticity and inherent 'sociality' can be proclaimed and projected as a revolutionary organ. Far from the old reactions which opposed the authenticity of political theory and praxis to the dangerous naturalism of 'cognitive science' (with images of men in white coats, the RAND Corporation or military LSD experiments), recent decades have shown us some of the potentiality of the social brain (Vygotsky, and more recently Negri 1995 and Negri 2000, Virno 2001). Is the brain somehow inherently a utopian topos? If in some earlier papers I sought to defend naturalism against these reactions, here I consider a new challenge: the recently emerged disciplines of neuronormativity, which seek in their own way to overcome the nature-normativity divide. This is the task of a materialist brain theory today. 1. The setup: horns of a dilemma There is a lingering zone of what one might think of as sore cognitive muscle tissue in the area of materialism. It is an area of both contested territory and in some cases, a kind of pathos of distance of the 'Ugh! Keep that thing away from me!' sort. I have in mind the combination of materialism as an emancipatory socio-political project (which need not be construed in strictly Marx-Engels terms, if we think of Lucretius et al.) and as a cold-hearted 'spontaneous philosophy of the men in white coats', e.g. nefarious neurophilosophers. Faced with this rather massive alternative, this choice between two projects, I have stubbornly been saying since some discussions with Negri in the late 90s.

I examine a series of definitions, defences and rejections of early modern vitalism. This yields a broad distinction between more or less metaphysically committed forms of vitalism. Given the plurivocity of the term, I suggest that we restrict the term ‘vitalist’ to thinkers who are actively concerned with the distinction between life and non-life (whether or not they substantialize this distinction), with special reference to the case of eighteenth-century Montpellier vitalism – where the term was first explicitly used. Further, I discuss the association of vitalism with a (potentially problematic) metaphysics of life as partly a polemical construct – which is internal to the process of defining projects and programs in life science, where one vital(istical)ly oriented author will, almost desperately, seek to brand a predecessor or a rival as a vitalist in order to legitimize her own apparently more ‘experimental’ brand of organicism. But perhaps metaphysics is endemic to vitalism?

Newton’s impact on natural philosophy has been well studied, but little attention has been paid to the role Newtonian “analogies” played in the formulation of conceptual schemes in physiology, medicine, and life science. This chapter focuses on figures such as Haller, Barthez, and Blumenbach, who constructed methodological analogies between celestial mechanics and physiology. In celestial mechanics, they held, an entity—gravity—is posited to mathematically link physical phenomena. One can remain agnostic about the ontological status of the entity if the linked phenomena are represented adequately. They held that the physiologist can similarly posit an unknown—‘life’—and use it to link phenomena from digestion to sensation and glandular function. No ontological claims are made about this principle, and no attempts are made to causally connect it to phenomena. This “Newtonian analogy” brings together diverse schools of thought, and cuts across a surprising variety of programs and natural philosophical practices.

Materialism – the philosophical doctrine that ‘Everything that exists, is material’, including human beings, who cannot then have an immortal soul – has been a heretical or clandestine teaching since the beginnings of philosophy. Its main crime is “explaining the higher level in terms of the lower level,” as Auguste Comte put it; this in turn is supposed to lead straight to immoralism: even Darwin denied that he was a materialist! At the same time, materialism is said to be the position which somehow facilitated and prepared the advent of modern science, particularly physical and biological science. What then is materialism? Is there only one, or are there many variants? I will mainly examine the first sustained materialist school in modern philosophy, in eighteenth-century French thought, chiefly represented by La Mettrie and Diderot, but also other figures notably in England. In addition, I will draw some contrasts between ‘French materialism’ and contemporary philosophy of mind, in which the dominant question is the relation between mind and brain.

In the interest of articulating a materialist theory of self in which self and brain are ‘correlates’ in the broad sense that they form part of a meaningful, integrated whole, I take the case of phantom limb syndrome. When considered in a philosophical light, such phenomena might seem to imply the necessity of the first-person perspective, a key insight of the phenomenological tradition, in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in particular. But it is possible to formulate a materialist response to this first-person challenge. For this response to be effective, it will have to take integrate a notion of embodiment. However, in order to not to reinvest brain or body with the mysterious character that the materialist approach has stripped from the ‘first person’, the vision of the brain here must also be an embedded vision, as Andy Clark calls it, that is, locating brain not just in an embodied context but also in the social world, in the network of symbolic relations (what I call, following Lev Vygotsky, the “social brain”). A self which is the product of the brain, a brain which is intentional and embodied, and both as correlates of a materialist theory of self: this is what I attempt to sketch out, taking as a particular case, phantom limb syndrome.

From its beginnings until the present day, neuroscience has always had a special relationship to philosophy. And philosophy has long puzzled over the relation between mind and brain (and by extension, the relation of cerebral processes to freedom, morals, and justice, but also to perception and art). This volume presents some of the state-of-the-art reflections on philosophical efforts to 'make sense' of neuroscience, as regards issues including neuroaesthetics, neuroethics and neurolaw, but also more critical, evaluative perspectives on topics such as the social neuroscience of race, neurofeminism, embodiment and collaboration, memory and pain, and more directly empirical topics such as neuroconstructivism and embodied robotics. Brain theory as presented here is neither mere commentary on the state of the sciences, nor armchair philosophical reflection on traditional topics. It is more pluralistic than current philosophy of neuroscience (or neurophenomenology), yet more directly engaged with empirical, indeed experimental matters than socio-cultural discussions of 'brainhood' or representations of the brain.

This book collects a variety of short essays on Stephen Gaukroger’s thought, by leading scholars, both senior and junior. Stephen Gaukroger (1950–2023) was one of the preeminent specialists of early modern science and philosophy, particularly their interrelations including under the heading ‘natural philosophy’, on the international scene, since the 1980s, starting with his prominent Cartesian scholarship (and biography) and moving towards the formidable 4-volume series on science and the shaping of modernity (from Emergence of a Scientific Culture to Civilization and the Culture of Science), dealing not just with early modernity but with the Enlightenment, German Romanticism and 20th-century society. This volume covers the thought of this highly-recognized scholar and engages with his works covering early modern philosophy, enlightenment, and contemporary periods, making it a must-read for any philosopher and historian of science.

Early 20th-century critiques of materialism (often assimilated to ‘mechanistic materialism’) frequently emphasized that the materialist conception of the world eradicates any presence of agency, selfhood, intentionality – the features by which a human being, and indeed an animal shows signs that ‘someone is home’, as Daniel Dennett phrased it. According to this critique (which runs roughly from Husserl to Ruyer and Sartre, and onto some versions of post-war anti-naturalism) materialism is at best the facilitator of scientific practice with its quantitative, ‘third-person’ approach to personhood, and at worst a kind of ontological legitimator of dehumanization. As one commentator on Diderot put it, “Materialism as a working philosophy, used as a tool in the scientific investigation of the material universe, is appropriate and highly effective. Intended for the objective analysis and description of the world of externals, it yields disastrous results when applied to the inner, subjective world of human nature, human thought, and human emotions” (Hill 1968, 90). Here the historian of early modern materialism has a word to say, for in contrast to the above views, there were indeed various attempts to bridge the gap between selfhood/agency and the world of Nature and naturalist explanations (and additionally one can see that normative judgments with regard to what constitutes ‘inner life’ versus ‘external nature’ are present also in the ‘scholarly’ mode of writing). I will seek to reconstruct two possible responses to the “disastrous results” challenge, both of which were present in French materialism – notably in Diderot – and are compatible although independent of one another: (1) a weakly Spinozist position in which absolute privacy is denied and the self is presented as belonging to the world of external relations, such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) an ‘animalist’ reconstruction of selfhood as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality, but also, one which builds on the foundation of animal life. As Diderot wrote in response to a manuscript by the Dutch natural philosopher Franz Hemsterhuis, in 1774: “Grant me that the animal can feel. I will take care of the rest” (Diderot 1975,- XXIV, 299).

In this short essay I reflect on Stephen Gaukroger’s enterprise especially as presented in the four-volume study on science and the shaping of modernity, and ask if it is a version of historical epistemology. Because the Gaukrogerian project is (deliberately?) ambiguous when it comes to choosing between the safe neutrality of the study of science, and the more committed versions of a ‘political epistemology’ in which, to paraphrase Shapin and Schaffer, questions of knowledge and questions of social order turn out to be one and the same.

Table of Contents 0. Introduction Part I. Life and mechanism 1. Guido Giglioni (Macerata) Scaliger Bacon Harvey: A Trajectory in the Early Modern History of Vegetative Life 2. Andreas Blank (Klagenfurt) Jacob Schegk on Plants, Medicaments, and the Question of Emergence 3. Oana Matei (Arad/Bucharest) Particles, universal spirit, and seeds: John Evelyn's theory of matter in Elysium Britannicum 4. Luca Tonetti (Bologna) Stimulus and fibre theory in Giorgio Baglivi’s medicine: A reassessment 5. Antonio Clericuzio (Roma Tre) ‘Febris non est morbus, sed bellum contra morbum’. A study of seventeenth-century theories of fevers. 6. Riccardo Chiaradonna (Roma Tre) Plotinus and Ficino in Ralph Cudworth’s philosophy of nature 7. Raphaële Andrault (CNRS-ENS Lyon) The chain of motions and the chain of thoughts. The diachronic mechanism of Spinoza's friends. 8. Antonio M. Nunziante (Padova) Both Natural and Supernatural: Leibniz’s Integrated Model of Life 9. Marco Storni (Neuchâtel) Experience, Analogy and Mechanism in Maupertuis’s Theory of Generation 10. Cécilia Bognon-Küss (Louvain-La-Neuve) Intussusception, vital mechanisms and the ontology of life 11. Charles Wolfe (Toulouse) Expanded mechanism or heuristic vitalism? Part II. Mechanisms of the mind 12. Emanuela Scribano (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) Powers of the Body and Eclipse of the Soul. From Descartes On 13. Ursula Renz (Graz) Shaftesbury’s Conception of Human Thought 14. Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) Psychology and Mechanism: Christian Wolff on the Soul-Body Analogy 15. Federico Boccaccini (Brasilia) Mental Machinery and active powers from Hartley to Ward 16. Paolo Pecere (Roma Tre) Mechanism, organization, mind: a Kantian legacy in 19th century psychology 17. Lydia Patton (Virginia Tech) Organic Memory and the Perils of Perigenesis: the Helmholtz-Hering Debate.

Dans un court article rarement discuté intitulé « Note sur la situation faite en France à la philosophie biologique » (publié en 1947 dans la Revue de métaphysique et de morale ), Canguilhem dénonce la « situation » de ce qu’il appelle la philosophie biologique en France, par rapport à une tradition germanique plus développée. Il explique que la réflexion française sur les questions biologiques est à l’arrêt, à la fois en raison de son héritage cartésien et d’une sorte de crainte inavouée à l’égard de la tradition romantique « lebensphilosophisch » allemande et de ses traductions politiques. Cette position est inhabituelle dans un texte paru peu après la guerre, et dont l’auteur fut un résistant actif. Mais plutôt que d’examiner la conjoncture socio-historique et les influences qui ont pu conduire à cette « Note », l’article en examine les assertions. Que serait une telle philosophie biologique? Une philosophie de la vie germanique traduite en français? En un sens, l’accueil très enthousiaste que Canguilhem a réservé à l’œuvre de Kurt Goldstein (qu’il a faite traduire en français avec Merleau-Ponty) relève d’une telle translatio. Mais en un autre sens, tous ses travaux ne relèvent pas de ce programme : d’une certaine façon, Le normal et le pathologique (1943, revu et augmenté en 1966) y correspond, mais non les essais réunis dans La Connaissance de la vie (1952, augmentée en 1965), notamment en raison de leur orientation plus historiciste. Ce dernier cas est particulièrement clair : une épistémologie historique des sciences de la vie est un projet tout à fait différent d’une « philosophie biologique » (ou philosophie de la vie) d’inspiration romantique. L’article conclut sur les perspectives d’une philosophie biologique aujourd’hui.

Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science Volume 77Issue 4 01 November 2023 Table of Contents [1] C. T. Wolfe, “The life of matter: early modern vital matter theories,” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 673–675, Nov. 2023. [2] G. Giglioni, “Large as life: Francis Bacon on the animate matter of plants,” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 677–696, Nov. 2023. [3] L. Georgescu, “Cavendish on life,” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 697–715, Nov. 2023. [4] A. Clericuzio, “Thomas Willis’ iatrochemistry and the activity of matter,” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 717–732, Nov. 2023. [5] R. Garau, “Gassendi’s second thought. From a materialistic picture of cognition to the defence of dualism: the lasting influence of the polemic with Descartes,” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 733–751, Nov. 2023. [6] T. Demeter, “Sympathetic Organizations: body, mind, and society in Robert Whytt and David Hume,” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 753–769, Nov. 2023. [7] P. Pecere, “Materialism, Lebenskraft and the limits of science: metaphysical vitalism in post-Kantian scenarios,” Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 771–787, Nov. 2023.

Materialism as a doctrine is, of course, a part of the history of philosophy, even if it was often a polemical construct, and it took until the 18th century for philosophers to be willing to call themselves materialists. Difficulties also have been pointed out in terms of “continuity,” i.e., does what Democritus, Lucretius, Hobbes and Diderot have to say about matter, the body and the soul all belong in one discursive and conceptual frame? Interestingly, materialism is also a classic figure in the history of medicine, often intersecting with philosophical considerations. Notably, the question of body-soul relations. This is apparent in Galen’s treatise on body and soul and then much more massively in the early modern period (with reference to Galen, but also Lucretius, and Aristotelian naturalism). In the following essay I reflect on the exact nature of early modern medical materialism, its philosophical status and contribution.

In earlier work I wrestled with the question of the “ontological status” of organisms. It proved difficult to come to a clear decision, because there are many candidates for what such a status is or would be and of course many definitions of what organisms are. But what happens when we turn to theoretical projects “about” organisms that fall under the heading “organicist”? I first suggest that organicist projects have a problem: a combination of invoking Kant, or at least a Kantian “regulative ideal,” usually presented as the epistemological component (or alternately, the complete overall vision) of a vision of organism – as instantiating natural purposes, as a type of “wholeWhole, wholes” distinct from a merely mechanistically specifiable set of parts, etc. – and a more ontological statement about the inherent or essential features of organisms, typically presented according to a combination of a “list of heroes” or “laundry list” of properties of organisms. This amounts to a category mistake. Other problems concern the too-strict oppositions between mechanism and organi(ci)sm, and symmetrical tendencies to “ontologize” (thus objectifying) properties of organisms and to “subjectify” them (turning them into philosophies of subjectivity). I don’t mean to suggest that no one should be an organicist or that Kant is a name that should be banished from civilized society. Rather, to borrow awkwardly from Sade, “organicists, one more effort!” if one wants a naturalistic, non-foundationalist concept of organicism, which is indeed quite active in recent theoretical biology, and which arguably was already alive in the organismic and even vitalist theories of thinkers like Goldstein and Canguilhem.

Ce livre étudie, à travers une série d'épisodes allant de la philosophie des Lumières à notre époque, le problème du matérialisme dans l'histoire de la philosophie et l’histoire des sciences. Comment comprendre les spécificités de l’histoire du matérialisme, des Lumières à nos jours, au sein de la grande histoire de la philosophie et de l’histoire des sciences ? Quelle est l’actualité de l’opposition classique entre le corps et l’esprit ? Qu’est-ce que le rire ou le rêve peuvent nous apprendre du matérialisme ? En traversant l’histoire de ce concept jusqu’à l’émergence d’un « nouveau matérialisme » contemporain, l’ouvrage vise à revitaliser le matérialisme et sa lecture.