vitalism

" Here is a final word from Hall, "We need not be faith curers but must be vitalists and believe in some kind of elan vital or creative evolution as opposed to materialistic or mechanistic interpretations of life." Hear that President Duterte.

Driesch was, like Bergson (whom he cited several times), a 'critical'--not a naive" vitalist. "These critical vitalists" [Driesch and Bergson] "distinguished from 'naive' vitalists who posit as the source of life a spiritual force or soul, understand nature as more than a machine and in principle beyond calculation, even as they remain committed to scientific knowledge".

In another form, philosophical vitalists like Henri Bergson re-described evolution itself in spiritual terms.

Vitalists, and, in a sense, spiritualists, posit a vital or spiritual force that provides the top-down causation to the lower-level entities.

The three chosen themes are of course eminently important in the context of the 17th- and 18th-century debates on the nature of matter and mind, in the context of heated controversies among Aristotelians, adherents to various versions of mechanical natural philosophies, and those who may perhaps be aptly called vitalists of different denominations, so they indeed deserve careful scrutiny in their own right.

In a proper search for Deleuze's vitalism, much needs to be said about the old debate between vitalists and mechanicists in the philosophy of biology; about Deleuze's relationship with Bergson and his (and Guattari's) notion of Nonorganic or Anorganic Life; about his life-long philosophical search for the plane of immanence and ontological univocity, which concluded with an enigmatic invocation of 'a Life' that precedes all individuations; about Badiou's contention that in Deleuze's philosophical universe, Life is the proper name of Being.

At a time when Baconian science and Cartesian dualism were reinforcing both the ancient polarity of matter and spirit and the belief that humankind had absolute dominion over the rest of creation, certain poets--variously definable as monists, vitalists, or animist materialists--shared a conviction 'that nature is alive in all her parts' (p.

Her contrasting of the reactions to the finale of Mahler's Sixth Symphony before and after World War I--first general discomfort at the degree of aestheticized violence, followed by a frank embrace of the same by a new generation of vitalists who positively valorized willpower--is at least provocative, and persuasively documented as well.

Tinbergen was himself very uncomfortable with issues of subjectivity, questioning even the study of play behavior, perhaps a result of his struggle to wrest the 'objective study of behavior' from remnant Dutch vitalists in the 1930s and 1940s.

In his fifth chapter, Reill argues that the advances made in the language and depiction of nature during the second half of the eighteenth century suffered a sharp setback with the advent of Romantic Naturphilosophie, which contradicted the understanding of matter, reality, scientific method, and epistemology proposed by Enlightenment vitalists. "Rather than seeing Naturphilosophie as vitalism's logical conclusion," he writes, "I interpret it as its negation" (14).

Its major quality, so attractive for experiments conducted by vitalists, is what Bakhtin/Kanaev describes as its "amazing capacity for organic regulation." (31) Dissecting the hydra into segments, the German biologist Hans Driesch demonstrated its propensity to reform.