Introduction: Vitalism and the Idea of a Historico-logical Study

This extensive introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first part revisits current scholarship on vitalism and poses three key questions: the historical question, the logical question, and the riddle of life. Regarding the historical question, I argue that additional forms of vitalism remain to be identified within the history of science. Concerning the logical question, I contend that a more penetrating analysis, grounded in extensive historical knowledge, should be conducted. Additionally, I assert that proper responses to both the historical and logical questions can illuminate the so-called central question in biology—the riddle of life. The second part of the chapter reviews several significant methodological issues from both historical and logical perspectives. I clarify that this book aims to address the aforementioned three questions through a comprehensive historico-logical study of vitalism, spanning from Aristotle’s natural philosophy to early-twentieth-century physical, biological, and social sciences. This historico-logical method, or the logical analysis of both historical and contemporary scientific knowledge, has been variously endorsed by figures such as Immanuel Kant, post-Kantian philosopher-scientists like Ernest Mach, and several early-twentieth-century philosophical schools including logical empiricism, British analysis, pragmatism, Husserlian phenomenology, and neo-Kantianism, as well as by historicists like French historical epistemologists and Kuhnians. In the second part, I also provide an exposition on the general logic of science and discuss the relationship between science and philosophy following the pivotal nineteenth-century separation of the sciences from philosophy.