Title: Knowledge of life /
Authors: Canguilhem, Georges, 1904-1995; Marrati, Paola; Meyers, Todd
Publisher: Fordham University Press,
Year: 2008
Subjects: Life (Biology); Biology Philosophy; Life; Knowledge; Philosophy, Medical; Vitalism; Biology Philosophy; Life (Biology); Biologie.; Philosophie.
Abstract: "As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Francois Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology." "How do transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge "undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him, or outside of him?" Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other."--book jacket.
Contents: Introduction: thought and the living -- Experimentation in animal biology -- Cell theory -- Aspects of vitalism -- Machine and organism -- The living and its milieu -- The normal and the pathological -- Monstrosity and the monstrous -- Appendixes. Note on the transition from fibrillar theory to cell theory -- Note on the relationship between cell theory and Leibniz's philosophy -- Extracts from the "Discours sur l'anatomie du cerveau" ("Discourse on the anatomy of the brain"), delivered by Nicolas Steno in Paris in 1665 to the "Messieurs de l'Assemblée de chez Monsieur Thévenot" in Paris.