One of the speakers at The Organic and the Normative conference, taking place between July 30–August 1, 2024 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, is going to be Charles T. Wolfe.

Charles T. Wolfe is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy and co-director, ERRAPHIS at the Université de Toulouse-2 Jean Jaurès. He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (2016), La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie: une histoire du vitalisme (2019) and Lire le matérialisme (2020), and has edited or coedited volumes on monsters, organisms, brains, empiricism, epigenesis, the conceptual foundations of biology, mechanism and vitalism, Locke and Canguilhem, including (w. John Symons, in progress) The History and Philosophy of Materialism. He is co-editor of the Springer book series ‘History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences’ and a founding member of the Verum Factum editorial collective. Papers available at https://univ-tlse2.academia.edu/CharlesWolfe ABSTRACT: Organisms as material agents, organisms as meaning-makers Organisms, like zombies, nearly extinct Jedi knights or perhaps more gently, like a character in a play who keeps exiting and then somehow returning to the stage, keep having a ‘return’ or a ‘revival’ in bio-theoretical and bio-philosophical thought. Most of the time, they return as key elements of proud empirical claims to “overturn mechanism”; truth claims, in fact: organisms are x, are defined by properties y and z, and so on. I have tried to achieve some (friendly) critical distance on such literal truth claims about organisms in past work (Wolfe 2010, 2014, 2023b), but it is never a clearly resolved issue, for at least two reasons. First, because the strongly opposite view – a kind of pragmatic, constructivist approach along the lines of ‘handsome is as handsome does’, in this case approaching organisms as heuristic constructs – seems to leave something out; some of their “vital materiality,” perhaps, which is characteristic of biological systems. Second, because the empirical definitions keep changing (Claude Bernard’s organicism is different from Francisco Varela’s, and both are different again from the metaphysics of organism in Hegel or Hans Jonas; this is a point of disagreement between me and staunch defenders of organicism who treat it as monolithic). But there is another way in which organisms can and do return: as what one might call meaning-makers (following a line of inquiry often associated with Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt-research). It is a very different approach to organism, to their existence and to ‘what makes them tick’ to say they are defined by metabolism, or organizational closure, and to say that they are defined by the production of meaning (and the responsiveness to meaning). This approach has a definite biosemiotic flavor to it, but instead of reiterating those analyses, I will explore it on the basis of insights from Uexküll, Kurt Goldstein, Georges Canguilhem and Jean Starobinski. Organisms in this context bear some resemblance to the ‘organism as figure of subjectivity’ narrative familiar from the German Idealist and Romantic tradition (which Canguilhem in 1947 wanted to ‘bring back’ into biophilosophical work: Canguilhem 1947a, Wolfe 2024); yet they have a processual, performative quality which makes them rather less foundational or internalist; less like the corps propre of embodied and/or enactivist phenomenology which is defined by its subjectivity (Wolfe 2023a). Hopefully, the return of organisms as meaning-makers is neither tragedy nor farce.

Highlighted Article

Wolfe, Charles T. (forthcoming). Eliminating Life: From the early modern ontology of Life to Enlightenment proto-biology. In Stephen Howard & Jack Stetter (eds.), The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press.

Well prior to the invention of the term ‘biology’ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus (and lesser-known figures in the decades prior), and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ‘organism’ under the pen of Leibniz and Stahl in the early 1700s, the question of ‘Life’, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanism to medical Newtonianism, from Stahlian animism to the discourse on the ‘animal economy’ in vitalist medicine, models of living being were constructed in opposition to ‘merely anatomical’, structural, mechanical models. It is therefore striking that the classic narratives of the Scientific Revolution conspicuously avoid any consideration of what status to grant living beings in a newly physicalized universe (I discuss this in Wolfe 2011, 2019 chapt. 1). Neither Harvey, nor Boyle, nor Locke (to name some likely candidates, the latter having studied with Willis and collaborated with Sydenham) ever ask what makes organisms unique, or conversely, what does not. In this chapter I seek to establish how something we might call ‘the knowledge of Life’, to use an expression of Georges Canguilhem’s, emerged as part of early modernity without being part of the mainstream history of life science. This leads to the question, can one can correlate early modern “knowledge of life” with the emergence of a science called ‘biology’? (see Zammito 2018, Wolfe 2019, Bognon-Küss and Wolfe eds. 2019). It was once fashionable to speak of, e.g. ‘precursors of Darwin’, and then Canguilhem and Foucault famously did away with the category of precursor. But how then do we account for the phase that precedes the constitution of a science? With the case of biology, how do we account for the increasing fascination with the ontology of Life during the decades prior to the ‘naming of biology’, as McLaughlin has called it, at the end of the eighteenth century? This increased focus on Life and the ontology of Life sits awkwardly, both with mainstream narratives of the Scientific Revolution and of the history of biology. In seeking to address this increased focus (in which vitalism plays a role but was by no means the only conceptual actor: Wolfe 2020), I critically examine Foucault’s notorious claim (Foucault 1966) that there was no such thing as ‘Life’ in the eighteenth century and thus no such thing as biology.