Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-v2bm5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-11T18:45:16.106Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Can Matter Mark the Hours? Eighteenth-Century Vitalist Materialism and Functional Properties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2008

Timo Kaitaro
Timo Kaitaro*
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Argument

Eighteenth-century Montpellerian vitalism and contemporaneous French “vitalist” materialism, exemplified by the medical and biological materialism of La Mettrie and Diderot, differ in some essential aspects from some later forms of vitalism that tended to postulate immaterial vital principles or forces. This article examines the arguments defending the existence of vital properties in living organisms presented in the context of eighteenth-century French materialism. These arguments had recourse to technological metaphors and analogies, mainly clockworks, in order to claim that just as machines can have functional properties which its parts do not possess (e.g., showing time), so living organisms can, as material entities, also have organic or vital properties which its material parts do not possess. Such arguments, with the help of a healthy dose of epistemological scepticism, tend to strike a balance between two positions concerning the ontology of life which we now tend to label “vitalism” and “emergentism.” Although there is nothing inconsistent in viewing vital properties as emergent, some ambiguity results if one does not draw a clear distinction between properties and functions. The philosophical problems related to these ambiguities are revealed in Diderot's apparent hesitation concerning sentience as “a general property of matter or the product of organization.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , December 2008 , pp. 581 - 592
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barthez, Paul-Joseph. 1778. Nouveaux éléments de la science de l'homme. Montpellier: Jean Martel.Google Scholar
Bénichou, Paul. 2004. Romantismes français I. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Benton, E. 1974. “Vitalism in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Thought: A Typology and Reassessment.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 5:17–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bloch, Olivier. 1993. Parité de la vie et de la mort. La “Réponse” du médecin Gaultier. Paris: Universitas, coll. Libre pensée et littérature clandestine.Google Scholar
Bonnet, Charles. 1760. Essai analytique sur les facultés de l'âme. Copehagen: Frères Ch. & Ant. Philibert.Google Scholar
Bordeu, Théophile. 1818. OC. Œuvres complètes, 2 vols. Paris: Caille et Ravier.Google Scholar
Canguilhem, Georges. 1966. Le normal et le pathologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Clarke, Desmond M. 1989. Occult Powers and Hypothesis: Cartesian Natural Philosophy under Louis XIV. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de. [1746] 1947–1951. Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines. In Œuvres philosophiques, vol. 1, edited by Roy, Georges Le, 3 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Descartes, René. 1889–1913. AT. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Adam, Charles and Tannery, Paul. 12 vols. Paris: Léopold Cerf.Google Scholar
Diderot, Denis. 1938. Lettres à Sophie Volland. Edited by Babelon, André, 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Diderot, Denis. 1955–1979. Corr. Correspondance. Edited by Roth, Geroges, 16 vols. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.Google Scholar
Diderot, Denis. 1875–1877. OC/AT. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Assézat, J. and Tourneux, M., 20 vols. Paris: Garnier.Google Scholar
Dissertation sur la formation du Monde. Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris, ms. 1168, no. 2 (Manuscript).Google Scholar
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. 1751–1772. Edited by Diderot, Denis and d'Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 28 vols. Paris: Briasson, David, Le Breton & Durand.Google Scholar
Gaultier, Abraham. 1714. Réponse en forme de dissertation à un théologien, Qui demande ce que veulent dire les sceptiques, qui cherchent la verité par tout dans la Nature, comme dans les écrits des philosophes; lors qu'ils pensent que la Vie et la Mort sont la même chose. Niort: Jean Elias.Google Scholar
Hall, Thomas S. 1989. Ideas of Life and Matter, 2 vol. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Haller, Albrecht von. [1753] 1892. Mémoire sur l'irritabilite. In Sensiblité et l'irritabilité. Paris: G. Masson.Google Scholar
Kaitaro, Timo. 1997. Diderot's Holism: Philosophical Anti-Reductionism and Its Medical Background. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Kaitaro, Timo. 1999. “Ideas in the Brain: The Localization of Memory Traces in the Eighteenth Century. Journal of the History of Philosophy 37:301–322.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaitaro, Timo. 2001. “‘Man is an Admirable Machine’ – A Dangerous Idea?” La Lettre de la Maison française d'Oxford (14, Michaelmas Term):105–120.Google Scholar
Kaitaro, Timo. 2004. “Brain-Mind Identities in Dualism and Materialism – A Historical Perspective.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences 35:627–645.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaitaro, Timo. 2007. “Technological Metaphors and the Anatomy of Representations in Eighteenth-Century French Materialism and Dualist Mechanism.” In Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience, edited by Whitaker, Harry, Smith, C.U.M, and Finger, Stanley, 335–344. Dordrecht: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. [1747] 1960. L'homme machine. Edited with an introductory monograph and notes by Vartanian, Aram. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Le Camus, Antoine. 1755. Médicine de l'esprit, 2. vols. Paris: Ganeau.Google Scholar
Malebranche, Nicolas. [1674–1675] 1979. De la recherche de la vérité. In Œuvres I, Paris: Gallimard, coll. Pléiade.Google Scholar
Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science. 2003. Editor in Chief Heilbron, J. L.. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rey, Roselyne. 1987. Naissance et développement du vitalisme en France de la deuxième moitié du XVIIIème siècle à la fin du Premier Empire. Typescript dissertation. 3 vols. Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Département d'Histoire. (An abridged version of the thesis has been published in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 381. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000.)Google Scholar
Rey, Roselyne. 1991. “La théorie de la sécrétion chez Bordeu, modèle de la physiologie et de la pathologie vitaliste.” Dix-Huitème Siècle 23:45–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roger, Jacques. 1963. Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle. La génération des animaux de Descartes à l'Encyclopédie. Paris: Armand Colin.Google Scholar
Sebastian, Anton. 1999. A Dictionary of the History of Medicine. New York: Parthenon Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Térada, Motoichi. 1998. “Le médecin Gaultier et le courant caché du matérialisme émergentiste du XVIIIe siècle.” Études de langue et littérature françaises 72:45–59.Google Scholar
Thomson, A. 1988. “L'homme machine, mythe ou métaphore?” Dix-Huitième Siècle 20:368–376.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tirri, Raimo, Lehtonen, Juhani, Lemmetyinen, Risto, Pihakaski, Seppo, and Portin, Petter. 2001. Biologian sanakirja. Helsinki: Otava.Google Scholar
Voltaire, F. M. Arouet de. 1855–1875. (OC). Œuvres complètes, 51 vols. Paris: Garnier.Google Scholar
Williams, Elizabeth A. 2003. A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar