Article ID: CBB750845119

Between Biology and Chemistry in the Enlightenment: How Nutrition Shapes Vital Organization. Buffon, Bonnet, C.F. Wolff (2019)

unapi

This paper seeks to characterize how the study of nutrition processes contributed to revisit the problem of vital organization in the late eighteenth century. It argues that focusing on nutrition leads to reformulate the problem of the relation between life and organization in terms of processes, rather than static or given structures. This nutrition-centered approach to life amounts to acknowledge the specific strategic role nutrition played in the development of a materialist approach to the generation of vital organization. The paper proposes a clarification of the multiple meanings of the concept of organization in the context of Enlightenment physiology and nascent biology, before focusing on the century long analogy between nutrition and generation. It shows how, by contrasting different uses of this analogy, nutrition was employed as a key vital phenomenon in the development of epigenetic theories of generation, i.e. how a nutritive modeling of generation was used in the undermining of preformationism. To this purpose I contrast two seemingly opposite theories of generation, Buffon’s and Bonnet’s, and show that despite the obvious metaphysical discontent, their views of generation share a common mechanical conceptual frame in which nutrition is conflated with growth and repair. I then turn to the role nutrition played in the epigenetic conception of generation in C. F. Wolff’s embryology and analyze this rival understanding of nutrition as an organizing process.

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Authors & Contributors
Roe, Shirley A.
Baldassarri, Fabrizio
Demarest, Boris
Wellmann, Janina
Rocci, Giovanni
Rieppel, Olivier
Concepts
Embryology
Biology
Physiology
Scientific illustration
Epigenesis
Natural philosophy
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
Early modern
21st century
20th century
Places
Italy
France
Europe
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