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Article ID: CBB001451908

Teleomechanism Redux? Functional Physiology and Hybrid Models of Life in Early Modern Natural Philosophy (2014)

Wolfe, Charles T. (Author)

Gesnerus
Volume: 71, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 290-307
Publication date: 2014
Language: English

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Teleology Medicine Mechanism; mechanical philosophy Natural philosophy Physiology Vitalism Early modern Oxford University

The distinction between `mechanical' and `teleological' has been familiar since Kant; between a fully mechanistic, quantitative science of Nature and a teleological, qualitative approach to living beings, namely `organisms' understood as purposive or at least functional entities. The beauty of this distinction is that it apparently makes intuitive sense and maps onto histo - rico-conceptual constellations in the life sciences, regarding the status of the body versus that of the machine. I argue that the mechanism-teleology distinction is imprecise and flawed using examples including the `functional' features present even in Cartesian physiology, the Oxford Physiologists' work on circulation and respiration, the fact that the model of the `body-machine' is not a mechanistic reduction of organismic properties to basic physical properties but is focused on the uniqueness of organic life; and the concept of `animal economy' in vitalist medicine, which I present as a `teleomechanistic' concept of organism (borrowing a term of Lenoir's which he applied to nineteenth-century embryology) -- neither mechanical nor teleological. Keywords: Teleomechanism, mechanism, teleology, vitalism, physiology

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Article Presti, Roberto Lo (2014) Introduction: Within or Beyond the Paradigm Shift? Teleology and Mechanism in the Early Modern Medical Discourse on the Functions of the Living Body. Gesnerus (pp. 177-186). unapi

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