Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology

Preface/Foreword/Introduction.- 1. "Unknown material"?.- 2. Georges Canguilhem and mechanism.- 3. Georges Canguilhem and Kant. Biological normativity and the Third Critique.- 4. Knowledge about life or knowledge as life? Canguilhem and Kant on concepts as preserved problems.- 5. Canguilhem and the current debate on the Kantian idea of organism at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques.- 6. Neither Brute nor Angel: Ouroboric Thought in Canguilhem, Merleau-Ponty.- 7. Georges Canguilhem and the promise of the flesh.- 8. Marjorie Grene and Georges Canguilhem:  Philosophy and Biology before (and after) the Rise of Philosophy of Biology.- 9. The Multiple Lives Of Marjorie Grene.- 10. Kurt Goldstein's Impact on Georges Canguilhem's Notion of Illness. Some more or less philosophical considerations.- 11. Georges Canguilhem's Rationalist Vitalism.- 12. "Dilettantes of life." Franco-German refractions of anthropogenesis in 20th century thought.- 13. Levels of the Organic and the Social: Marxism and Philosophical Anthropology.- 14. Auto-organizing Life: Canguilhem, Serres and the Groupe des Dix.- 15. A Bergsonian Perspective on Evolution - Mathilde Tahar-Malussena.

Charles T. Wolfe is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Université de Toulouse-2 Jean-Jaurès. He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (2016), La philosophie de la biologie: une histoire du vitalisme (2019) and Lire le matérialisme (2020), and has edited or coedited volumes on monsters, brains, empiricism, biology, mechanism and vitalism, including most recently (w. D. Jalobeanu) the Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences (2019-2022) and (w. J. Symons, in progress) The History and Philosophy of Materialism. He is co-editor of the book series 'History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences' (Springer). Papers available at [https://univ-tlse2.academia.edu/CharlesWolfe]


Gertrudis Van de Vijver is Full Professor at the department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of Ghent University. She was awarded her PhD in philosophy from this university in 1988. Since receiving her PhD, she was post-doctoral researcher and research director at Ghent University until she became a professor there in 2000. Her research is mainly on the epistemological implications of issues of complexity, self-organization and teleology in the life sciences, in psychology and in the study of cognition. For this, she developed a transcendental approach to the philosophy of biology, centring on the idea of co-constitution. In addition, she does research on other aspects and implications of transcendental philosophy, and on the connections of psychoanalytic theory with epistemology and philosophy of language.



Giuseppe Bianco is researcher at Cà Foscari University, Venice. He was awarded his PhD in philosophy from Lille3 University and workedin several European and American Universities. His area of interest