De la règle de l’exception au principe de Bonnet: les principes épistémologiques des sciences de la vie à partir de 1740 (2017)
Ratcliff, Marc James (Author)
Mefisto: Rivista di medicina, filosofia, storia
Volume: 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 105-124
The paper investigates the epistemological reactions of the eighteenth century scholarly world to the regeneration of the polyp discovered by Abraham Trembley in the early 1740s. I coined one of these reactions the rule of the exception, adopted by Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur and the Reaumurians to illustrate the place and the impact of the new discovery. Réaumur signalled in 1742 the exceptions the polyp brought to the “general rules,” i.e. to the laws of life. There were exceptions to some laws, like mating, which characterised only some classes of organisms and not all beings. Later, during the 1760s, Charles Bonnet outlined several precepts that combined the heuristical power of the scholar to the diversity of models in nature. The paper unified those precepts, called Bonnet’s principle, and which, added to the rule of the exception, reorganised the epistemological space of life sciences, far from the traditional antagonism between preformation and epigenesis.
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