Paul Joseph Barthez and the impact of vitalism on medicine and psychology.

摘要

Traditional views of the Enlightenment assume it embraced mechanical science as the model for all knowledge. Yet many of its seminal thinkers championed vitalism--a medical philosophy that contrasted life processes with inert mechanical processes--and extended it to explicate chemistry, physics, psychology and culture. This dissertation corrects the image of eighteenth-century science as essentially mechanistic by demonstrating the authority of vitalism in the French Enlightenment.; Archival sources illustrate the centrality of vitalism by illuminating the career of its chief proponent, Paul Joseph Barthez. Member of a score of European Academies, Encyclopediste, Chancellor of Montpellier's medical university and physician to Louis XVI, the Revolutionary Armies and Napoleon, Barthez ensconced his program in the innermost circles of learning and society. His refutation of reigning mechanist and animist physiological and psychological theories underscored the scientific bankruptcy of philosophical rationalism. In its place he offered a phenomenalist methodology tailored to distinctively living events: growth, nutrition, healing, generation, locomotion, instinct, intellection. But more than explaining these separate capacities, Barthez sought the laws of their integration: the "vital principle of unity" creating and coordinating the body's organs and acts for its self-determined aims. He thus helped refocus life sciences from describing and classifying discrete structures and functions toward investigating how the organism purposively orchestrates its parts and powers.; Upon these vitalist insights Barthez projected an overarching Science of Man, because for him, free agency characterized not only organic, but also mental and cultural, operations. His vitalism thus aimed to impact the humanities and social sciences as well as medicine and psychology, and in fact did so for three reasons. First, its empiricism assuaged contemporary doubts about the certainty of knowledge. Second, it sanctioned increasing expectations that medicine would cure both personal and societal ills by balancing citizens' particular constitutions to achieve public well-being. Finally, it consecrated individual sovereignty. The self-agency Barthez found linking physiological, psychological and social phenomena parallels the thesis of individual freedom informing French Enlightenment political and philosophical critique. Far from being anomalous or retrograde, vitalist methodology and perceptions helped displace rationalist mechanism as the paradigm of human intelligence.