Oddbean new post about login | logout A wow prescient quote from 1865 that will resonate with my anti-reductionist friends “Physiologist and physicians must never forget that a living being is an organism with its own individuality. Since physicists and chemists cannot take their stand outside the universe, they study bodies and phenomena in themselves and separately, without necessarily having to connect them with nature as whole. But physiologists, finding themselves, on the contrary, outside the animal organism which they see as a whole, must take account of the harmony of the whole, even while trying to get inside, so as to understand the mechanism of its every part. The result is that physicists and chemists can reject all idea of the final causes for the facts that they observe; while physiologists are inclined to acknowledge a harmonious and pre-established unity in an organized body, all of whose partial actions are interdependent and mutually generative. We really must learn, then, that if we break up a living organism by isolating its different parts, it is only for the sake of ease in experimental analysis, and by no means in order to conceive them separately. Indeed, when we wish to ascribe to a physiological quality its value and true significance, we must always refer to this whole, and draw conclusions only to its effects in the whole.” Stumbled upon via this excellent take about homestasis (and how it's anti-reductionistic) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7076167/pdf/fphys-11-00200.pdf Claude Bernard, 1865
@8599d6ab Claude Bernard was very pioneering. Georges Canguilhem has a great text centrally featuring Bernard which is called "Experimentation in animal biology" (can be found in the book of collected Canguilhem texts 'Knowledge of Life'). Absolutely worth adding to your certainly already very long reading list! 🙂
@8599d6ab @8c566aab Bernard is great. It sounds prescient in retrospect because, as ~biology has become more empirical, it's become less philosophical. But the flipside is that if you go back, that kind of philosophical aspect, which was more common, can now seem like — and really *be* — a revelation. You might really enjoy Georges Canguilhem's history of how definitions of *health* have evolved over the last few centuries, _The Normal and the Pathological_ (1943). For context, he was Michel Foucault's doctoral advisor, so it's pretty, uh, 'theory'; but it's *full* of brilliant passages like this. My fave, from René Leriche: health understood as "life in the silence of the organs," IOW an experience of life in which the components and systems that make us up don't draw attention to themselves — these days we might say "transparent." The fabulously named Jakob Johann von Uexküll (pron. "ewks-kewl," more or less) is 🔥 too. His theory of the "umwelt" is genuinely beautiful: rather than assume a living being is distinct and separate from its environment, he treats that ~boundary — many, really — as a thing in its own right, a space of mutual adaptation and transformation. A lot of these ideas will ring all kinds of bells for an expert like yourself 🌞 — but, like the Bernard passage you shared, actually reading them laid out clearly can be really refreshing and even inspiring.