Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1701--1788): The Main Ideas of His Science of Life. On the Tricentenary of the French Naturalist's Birthday (2007)
Bednarczyk, A. (Author)
Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki
Volume: 52, no. 3-4
Issue: 3 - 4
Pages: 55-95
Edition Details: [Translated title.] In Polish.
Language: Polish
The aim of the paper is to construct an outline of G. L. Buffon's ontology, epistemology and theoretical foundations of biology, using the general ideas recovered from and revealed in his 'Histoire naturelle'. It was deism that Buffon used as a theoretical assumption that could facilitate explaining of where to look for the origin of the uniformity and order that prevailed in nature, and for the source of the natural laws. It was naturalism, a common cognitive attitude among the natural scientists of the Age of Enlightenment, that Buffon expressed in his view that the created and embodied nature was the only object of cognition. Indeed, Buffon made the notion of nature, his main theoretical category. The naturalist Buffon was also a universalist in that he conceived of nature as the infinite universe and entered into it cognitively. He proved his universalist stance by (i) propounding the cosmogonic hypothesis, (ii) formulating the concept of life dispersed throughout the universe, and (iii) viewing the process of Earth's formation as one of the many occurring in the universe, and of life on Earth as one of the many biospheres. Buffon was also a determinist, which can be seen in his belief that the object of nature show stability in their mutability, and unity in their variability. This determinism showed in Buffon's views in three varieties: causal determinism, co-existential (or morphological) determinism and statistical determinism; he did not accept finalism. Buffon was the author of the principle of the conservation of life, according to which the amount of life in the universe is constant, life is an autonomous quality, and animate matter is as ancient as inanimate matter. This principle forms part of the concept of organic corpuscles.Prominent in this concept is the idea of corpuscularism, and ancient concept, related to that of atomism, which found an application in the biology of the Age of Enlightenment. Continualism, an idea opposed to that of corpuscularism, manifested itself in Buffon's philosophy in the form of the concept of the chain of being. Connected with this latter, specific way of modelling the structure of nature is the notion of species. Species, discovered by Buffon in nature and viewed as existing in nature in a real way, had a physiological character and endured in an immutable way. As a natural scientist, Buffon was an empiric, or even an empiricist. His attempts at experiments, such as the model experiment in trying to develop the cosmogonic hypothesis, are among the rare exceptions. It was this hypothesis, and the history of the Earth that was intertwined in it, that led Buffon to adopt the concept of geological time and to postulate that irreversible events occurred within it. Although Buffon used many very general theoretical notions and hypothetical concepts, this broad view of nature cannot be said - in spite of the opinions of numerous historians to have formed a system. It does, however, remain a comprehensive vision of nature, an attempt at an ambitious synthesis in the field of natural science.
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