La physiologie des lumières: empirisme, modèles et theories (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 109 neutral scientific theories could easily be put to theological uses. It is appropriate, given the other essays, that even the pair that are least concerned with connections between science and religion cannot tell the story of an important scientific development without a chapter on Biblically inspired scientific theories of the Earth. PHILLIP D. CUMMINS University of Iowa Franqois Duchesneau. La physiologie des lumikres: empirisme, modkles et theories. Archives internationales d'historie des id6es, No. 95. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 198~. Pp. xxi + 611. n. p. Franqois Duchesneau's important study, La physiologie des lumi~res, illustrates the interest the history of ideas can attain when new issues and unusual problematics form the subject of focus. The thinkers dealt with in this book--names like Georg Ernst Stahl 066o-1733), Albrecht Von Hailer (17o8-77), Kaspar Friedrich Wolff (1733-94), Th~ophile Bordeu (17~2-76) and Xavier Bichat (1771-18o2)--are hardly known to those not conversant with the literature in the history of medicine and biology. The central topic of the book itself--the development of the concept of physiology as an autonomous science in the late eighteenth century--would further seem to locate it among specialized monographs in the history of science. But while surely a book of special interest to historians of the life sciences, it is considerably more than this, and it is best seen as a study by a historian of philosophy concerned to elucidate some of the basic intellectual changes taking place between Descartes and the end of the Enlightenment . In this respect it forms a logical successor and companion to Jacques Roger's landmark, Les sciences de la vie dans la pens~e franfaise du xviiie sikcle,' while attaining a more philosophically analytic level than Roger's study. If the task of the history of philosophy is not simply to grasp the arguments in abstracto of past thinkers, but is also to seek a hermeneutical understanding of philosophy in its concrete historical content, Duchesneau's extended monograph is an important contribution to the history of philosophy as well. Kant scholars, for example, will with profit be able to see more clearly the fuller historical context of questions that surround Kant's analysis of teleology and mechanism in the second part of the Kritik der Urteilskraft. Those interested in the philosophy of the life sciences will also profit from this book. By giving such an extensive discussion of the historical formation of the conceptual problems of biology, Duchesneau has supplied strong reasons to conclude that arguments over whether or not biology is a "science" in terms of its conformity or lack of conformity to nomothetic models of scientific explanation may only in the end reflect the fact that so much of the primary history and philosophy of science has been written from the exclusive standpoint of mathematical physics, and may have little real bearing on either the conceptual analysis or the historical understanding of ' Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la penile franfaise du xviiie si~cle 2d ed. (Paris: Colin, 1971). 110 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23: 1 JANUARY 1985 the biomedical sciences. As Duchesneau's book reveals, the intense issues of focus for the life sciences, as they emerged against the backdrop of seventeenth-century physics , were special problems of order, organization and purposive behavior. And his intent has been to explicate "... the rational conditions which have rendered possible , at a given moment in history, the theoretical comprehension of physiological phenomena, according to a specific order, identified as its own order" (xviii). The work consists of three main sections. The first supplies a detailed analyses of the main physiological theories in the period before the major writings of Albrecht von Hailer in the 175os and 176os. Primarily this section explores the conflicts that opened up in the early eighteenth century between the two primary formulators of German medical physiology, Georg Ernst Stahl and Friedrich Hoffman, which sharply posed the options between mechanistic and "animistic" analyses of function. A valuable discussion of the importance of Leibniz and the Leibnizian tradition forms a further component. A second main sequence of chapters is primarily devoted to the theories...