EcoMaterialisms: Bichat and Lamarck

This week’s EMC meeting was on Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). It was also my week to present and I had a lot of fun with these texts, building on our conversations from previous classes and trying to draw some connections to last year’s discussions.

Bichat: Physiological Researches upon Life and Death (1800)

Lamarck: Zoological Philosophy: Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals (1809)

Starting Points:     

• Reiterating a Critique of Foucault
• Organized and Brute Matter vs. Living and Dead Matter
• Physical and Vital Forces: Lamarck vs. Buffon and Bichat
• Living Bodies and their States: First Proposition
• Living Bodies and their States: Second Proposition
• Reactive Power vs. Intussusception

EcoMaterialisms: Maupertuis and Buffon

This year, the EcoMaterialisms Collective is working through a three-part nexus: histories and theories of the organism in the fall, of ecologies in the winter, and of cosmologies in the spring. Every now and then I’ll post my reflections to the week’s readings along with what those readings were:

Required:

• Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698-1759): The Earthly Venus
• Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788): Natural History, General and Particular
  • Ch. 2. Of Reproduction in General.
  • Ch. 4. Of the Generation of Animals.
  • Ch. 9. Varieties in the Generation of Animals.
  • Ch. 10. Of the Formation of the Foetus.
  • Ch. 11. Of the Expansion, Growth, and Delivery of the Foetus.

Suggested:

• Michael Hoffheimer: “Maupertuis and the Eighteenth-Century Critique of Pre-Existence” in Journal of the History of Biology 15(1): 119-144 (1982).
• Paul Farber: “Buffon and the Concept of Species” in Journal of the History of Biology 5.2 (1972): 259-284.

Also discussed: Foucault’s The Order of Things and Hans Jonas’ The Phenomenon of Life.