Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--History of Science. / "Authorized facsimile produced by microfilm-xerography in 1976 by University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, Michigan."

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-132).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of History, March 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-256). Also available on the Internet.

Vitalism is an underappreciated and often misunderstood idea. This thesis seeks to explore the historical origins and meanings of vitalism in 19th century France; tracing the transition from medical vitalism in the Montpellier School in the late 18th and early 19th century to a largely philosophical vitalism in the late 19th century, emblemized by Henri Bergson. / I argue that the decline of medical vitalism was brought about by the rise of scientific medicine, the experimentalism of physiologists like Claude Bernard and the growing influence of positivism in late 19th century France. I see the seminal moment of this transition from a metaphysical to a scientific world-view in the materialism-spiritualism controversy of the 1850s, which was sparked by the development of modern biology and the experimental life sciences. / Despite its general disappearance from mainstream medicine and science, vitalism continued to have echoes in a number of fields in the 20th century, and remains a concept relevant to our contemporary circumstances.

Orientador: Luiz Benedicto Lacerda Orlandi / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-21T17:33:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Blumer_DiogoGondim_M.pdf: 2205632 bytes, checksum: 6d54fddab57374aa0e30bfa211298c4d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: A noção de vida percorre singulares tramas conceituais na filosofia de Deleuze. Seguir a sinuosidade desse percurso tornará possível uma caracterização mais segura do vitalismo desse filósofo. Pensado em função de tensões entre o que ele tematiza como vida orgânica e vida não orgânica, esse vitalismo implica complexas relações entre articulações extensivas e intensivas, vetores que modulam a própria vida em suas oscilações entre uma saúde dominante e uma paradoxal grande saúde / Abstract: The notion of life covers in a unique conceptual scheme in Deleuze philosophy. The sinuosity of this path will enable us to understand better the vitalism of this philosopher. Due to the tensions between the life he thematizes as organic and non-organic life, this vitalism involves complex relationships between extensive and intensive joints, vectors that modulate life itself in its oscillations between a dominant health and a paradoxical great health / Mestrado / Filosofia / Mestre em Filosofia

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This thesis takes issue with the standard critical attribution to Milton of a backward Aristotelian scientific paradigm for his work, demonstrating that body and soul represented in Paradise Lost are inscribed in terms of radical contemporary medical theories of vitalism. Milton’s close friendship with his doctor, Nathan Paget, links him to Paget’s colleague, Francis Glisson, Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge University, an academic and practising physician who was closely involved in cutting-edge contemporary medical research. Not only can Glisson’s heretical notion of the energetic, living nature of substance be seen to match the dynamic scale of nature represented in Paradise Lost, but in fact Milton’s animist materialism corresponds precisely to the chemical innovations made by Glisson in the anatomy of blood and bodily fluids and spirits. Exploring Milton’s representation of body and soul, spirit and matter, in the light of these contemporary medical innovations, this thesis focuses upon the way that his theodicy is supported by this most heretical natural philosophy. Milton’s vital anatomia animata is shown to be central to the harmonious integration of science and theology in Paradise Lost; it complements the literalism of the poem and provides a non-satanic logic of self-determination. Beginning with the basic evidence of Milton’s materialism of the soul in the Christian Doctrine, the first chapter correlates the theological assertions made with the language of natural philosophy that Milton uses to make them. The next chapter addresses the problem of the antinomy between the material soul proposed by Milton and the Aristotelian terminology with which he describes it, arguing that the latter is more heterogeneous than literary critics have acknowledged. The third chapter examines several versions of vitalism in order to delineate a working, medical model of the active matter presupposed by Milton’s body-soul composites and the wider natural philosophy of Paradise Lost. This model of active matter and spirit is then used in chapter four to illuminate the representation of Creation, demonstrating the acute accuracy with which Milton’s Creation draws upon contemporary medical research into conception. Chapter five extends the analysis to compare early notions of chemical digestion with the metabolic transformations of paradise. The final chapter demonstrates that the physiological and psychological corruptions of the Fall correspond to the effects of the putrid or poisonous ferment, while Milton’s representation of regeneration calls upon the vital, generative anatomia animata.

In this thesis I present a critical examination of the role played by mechanistic ideas in shaping our understanding of living systems. I draw on a combination of historical, philosophical, and scientific resources to uncover a number of problems which I take to result from the adoption of mechanistic thinking in biology. I provide an analysis of the historical development of the conflict between mechanistic and vitalistic conceptions of life since the seventeenth century, and I argue that the basic terms of this conflict remain central to current disputes over the nature of the organism as well as the question of how far the theories, concepts, and methods of physics, chemistry, and engineering can ultimately take us in the explanation of life. I offer a detailed critique of the machine conception of the organism, which constitutes the central unifying idea of mechanistic biology. I argue that this notion, despite its undeniable heuristic value, is fundamentally inadequate as a theory of the organism due to a number of basic differences between organisms and machines. Ultimately, I suggest that the neglected vitalistic tradition in biology actually possesses the best conceptual tools for coming to terms with the nature of living systems. I also undertake a philosophical analysis of the concept of mechanism in biology. I argue that the term ‘mechanism’ is actually an umbrella term for three distinct notions, which are unfortunately conflated in philosophical discussions. I explore the relation between mechanistic biology and the new philosophical interest in the concept of mechanism and I show that these two research programs have little to do with one another because each of them understands the concept of mechanism in a different way. Finally, I draw on the historical and philosophical foundations of cell theory to propose an epistemological perspective which enables the reductionistic explanation of the organism without having to give up the distinctive features of life in the process. In this way, I show this perspective to have significant advantages over the classic physicochemical reductionism of mechanistic biology.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-256). Also available on the Internet.

I examine the way in which, in his work of the 1840s, Ruskin uses methods and assumptions derived from eighteenth-century Materialist, Mechanist and Vitalist Natural Philosophy, especially his assertion that the meanings which he reads into natural phenomena are objectively present and can be quantified, and the way in which therefore aesthetic concepts, responses and judgements can be quantified, and their values fixed. I examine the ways in which Ruskin seeks to demonstrate the relationship between the unity of Nature and the Multipilicity of Phenomena, not only as existing objectively in the external world, but also as reflected in the paintings of Turner. I suggest that his attempt at demonstration features a problematic relationship between his accounting for a material reality and the spiritual significances which he sees as immanent in it, and that resistance to the dynamism of contemporary industrial and social change is implicit in his celebration of an eternalised natural order. I examine four features of his correspondence during the 1840s: his dealings in the art market, his outright opposition to a number of modern developments, his urgent desires to see his favourite European architectural heritage preserved, and his strident xenophobia, and suggest relationships between the last two and his resistance to the modern. I examine the shift in his interests in the 1840s and 1850s from Nature and Art to Architecture and Man, and thence to Political Economy, and examine available accounts which rely too heavily on references to his psychological development, or on his claims to regular epiphanies, or on a significant shift in focus which can be explained by revealing the internal continuities in his work. I conclude with an attempt to demonstrate that what I have called the "broad sweep" approach obscures the confusions and contradictions in his position in the late 1840s and 1850s, and suggest that his social and intellectual inheritance, which is of a highly conservative and unremittingly paternalistic nature, crucially limits his work as ~ social critic. I offer three appendices: on the problem of the relationship between the Unity of Nature and the Multiplicity of Phenomena as that had been addressed in the Natural Philosophy on whose assumptions Ruskin draws; on eighteenth century Materialist, Mechanist and Vitalist theories of matter; and on the work of Edmund Burke and Sir Charles Bell.