Life: Modern French Philosophy and the Life Sciences

In France, from the early nineteenth century, the interaction between what today we call the life sciences and philosophy provoked several important controversies. They resulted in the mutation of ideas about biological and human life; in the transformation of the disciplines of philosophy and medicine; and in the emergence of new disciplines, such as neurophysi- ology, psychopathology, biology, anthropology, and psychology. Compared to simultaneous transformations in Germany, the interactions in France, took a peculiar form, since they depended on the specific division of intellectual labour inside the universities, which had been reformed by Napoleon in 1806.1 Philosophy was taught as an independent discipline in the last year of secondary education (the so-called ‘classe terminale’ of the ‘lycées’) and, in universities, in the framework of the Faculty of Letters (Faculté des Lettres), which was neatly separated from the four other faculties of Theology, Law, Science, and Medicine. The most important scientific breakthroughs in the life sciences were produced by physicians, trained and/or teaching in the Faculty of Medicine (see Huguet, 1991), and, to a much lesser extent, by scholars trained/or teaching in the Faculty of Science. Philosophers and physicians fre- quently competed for the monopoly over topics that they shared, and colleagues across faculties would thus interfere in each other’s work. This conflictual interaction, which often involved the appropriation and re-use of texts from the history of knowledge, resulted in the epistemological reframing of scientific theories and in the readjustment of philosophical concepts under the pressure of empirical evidence. This chapter analyses the five most important sequences of these interactions from the beginning of the process of disciplinarization (see Roger, 1997, for a study of the previous period). The first section, which spans 1830 to 1852, focuses on the strategies adopted by philosophers in order to defend their area of competence, namely the ‘moral’ part of man, from the physicians’ attempts to naturalize human cognition and behaviour. The second section analyses how, between 1855 and 1864, philosophers were involved in controversies concerning both the difference between human and biological life and between biological life and inanimate matter. The third section shows how Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale [Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine] (1864) pushed philosophers to adopt a more cautious approach, avoiding claims about the nature of life. The fourth section concerns the limited fortune of the theory of evolution and the rejection of social Darwinism by philosophers and sociologists between 1865 and 1920. Finally, the fifth section exposes two apparently contradictory developments: on the one hand a growing attention towards the history of the transformation of biological concepts and theories, and, on the other hand, the return to bolder metaphysical claims about the nature of life and organisms.