Forces vitales et organisation : vitalisme et philosophie de la nature en Allemagne (1752-1802). / In the course of the last thirty years, a considerable body of scholarship has examined the life sciences that arose in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. This literature has shown that previous dismissals of this tradition, assumed to be infected with a pathological imagination, were unwarranted. Yet the interpretations of the period have not always been consistent with each other, and they often have been characterized by vagueness. Generally speaking, the scholarly debate has focused on the historical and conceptual relationship between three elements: (1) Kant's philosophy of biology, as it is formulated in the Critique of the Power of Judgment , (2) the biological vitalism developed at the Göttingen medical school by Blumenbach and his students Kielmeyer, Link, Reil and Treviranus, and (3) the Naturphilosophie of Goethe, Schelling, Oken and Carus. In his pioneering studies, Timothy Lenoir (1978, 1980, 1981, 1982) argues that, although the life sciences developed in Germany in the late eighteenth century have been dismissed as an era dominated by empty speculation, they were in fact the result of a coherent research program. This program was developed in Göttingen by a wellconnected group of biologists after receiving its first formulation in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment in 1790. In the second part of this work, Kant sees teleology as a necessary tool to understand fundamental features of living beings such as functions and development. He also considers it as a mere heuristic principle, not as a constitutive character of organized bodies. According to this account, Blumenbach was the first naturalist to accept the Kantian understanding of teleological principles and organize it as a structured research program. This program was first developed by his most distinguished students Kielmeyer, Treviranus and Reil, and then employed by Meckel, von Baer and Müller (Lenoir 1982, 54-111). The disregard of this “Kantian” tradition in life sciences has, for Lenoir, both theoretical and historical grounds. The main issue is the assumption that only reductionist models are capable of generating a quantitative account of natural phenomena. Nevertheless, the idea that biological organization is not quite reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry is fully compatible with the fidelity to quantitative rigor as a touchstone of scientific explanation. According to Lenoir, the “vitalmaterialism” of the Göttingen School accepted this challenge and developed a “teleomechanical” research program based on the Kantian distinction between constitutive and regulative understanding of teleology. […]
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:theses.fr/2014PA010701 |
| Date | 16 September 2014 |
| Creators | Gambarotto, Andrea |
| Contributors | Paris 1, Scuola normale superiore (Pise, Italie), Huneman, Philippe |
| Source Sets | Dépôt national des thèses électroniques françaises |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, Text |
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