What separates the living from the mechanical?

Whether organisms are complex machines or have a principle that no machine can have.

Direction Both
Span 1664–1916
Questions 3
Works 16
Languages French, Latin, German, English

  1. Q07Does living activity require a principle beyond physical and chemical processes?

    Yes4

    • 1800Bichat, Physiological Researches upon Life and Death

      Vital powers vary constantly in intensity while physical laws are fixed and uniform, so living bodies must be studied by different principles from inanimate ones.

    • 1862Bouillier, Du principe vital et de l'âme pensante

      Defends animism: the vital principle is the same as the thinking soul, against both mechanist physiology and Montpellier vitalism's separate vital force.

    • 1907Bergson, Creative Evolution

      Neither mechanism nor finalism explains evolution; life is a vital impetus that physics and chemistry do not capture, though he criticizes the older vital-principle theories.

    • 1908Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism

      An embryo fragment can form a whole organism, which no machine could do, so development requires a non-physical ordering factor he calls entelechy.

    No2

    • 1842Lotze, Leben. Lebenskraft

      Rejects a special vital force; living phenomena arise from the same kinds of forces as inorganic nature, arranged in complex ways.

    • 1912Loeb, The Mechanistic Conception of Life

      Life phenomena, including development and instinct, can be explained by physics and chemistry, and experimental control of them removes the need for a vital principle.

    Neither2

  2. Q08Does an organism's ability to repair itself distinguish it fundamentally from a machine?

    6 answers are hidden while the authors build this question’s position key.

  3. Q09Can the development of an organism from an egg be explained as the operation of a machine?

    Yes3

    • 1664Descartes, The Description of the Human Body

      Explains the living body's functions by the motion of matter alone, and states that explaining them requires explaining how the animal forms from its beginning by the same mechanical laws.

    • 1895Roux, Collected Papers on the Developmental Mechanics of Organisms

      Proposes a developmental mechanics that studies the causes of embryonic form by experiment on eggs, treating development as the working-out of physical and chemical causes.

    • 1912Loeb, The Mechanistic Conception of Life

      Argues from artificial parthenogenesis and tropism experiments that life processes, including the start of development of the egg, can be explained by physics and chemistry.

    No5

    • 1759Wolff, Theory of Generation

      Argues against preformation that the embryo forms by epigenesis from unorganized matter, and attributes the forming to an essential force (vis essentialis) rather than to a pre-built mechanism.

    • 1789Blumenbach, An Essay on Generation

      Blumenbach denies pre-existing organized germs and defines formative nisus as a distinctive force of generation, growth, nutrition and reproduction.

    • 1790Kant, Critique of Judgement

      Holds that an organized being is not a mere machine, because a machine has only motive power while an organism has a formative power that it passes to matter and that reproduces and repairs its own parts.

    • 1908Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism

      Argues from sea-urchin experiments, where a half-egg still yields a whole larva, that development cannot be the work of a machine and requires a non-mechanical agent he calls entelechy.

    • 1913Haldane, Mechanism, Life and Personality

      Criticizes the mechanistic theory of life, arguing that the self-maintaining and self-reproducing organization of the organism cannot be explained as the working of a machine.