This is an extraordinary book, in more in than one sense. It presents clusters of questions concerning scientific description, analysis and explanation of living entities, in particular the vitalist perspective, and explores their interweaving to form enabling conceptual conditions for the emergence of biology as a scientific discipline. These clusters are considered and debated historically and philosophically and placed within their historiography: the late seventeenth century, with central emphasis on the eighteenth, touching upon the nineteenth (mainly the Bernard–Bichat exchange) through to the mid-twentieth century (mainly Canguilhem). The book is profoundly erudite, impressively innovative, and driven by a complex, sustained many-part overarching argument in that, and in the actual contents of their complex argument, there is an interesting affinity, despite deep differences, between Jessica Riskin's The Restless Clock (2016) and the present book. It is perhaps helpful to think about it within the context of the last decade and a half stream of publications on the problématique of the emergence of life sciences and modes of distinguishing and explaining the living/non-living from the late seventeenth century on, e.g. mechanism, reductionism, materialism, vitalism, organicism, holism, etc., and the continuing tensions through more recent and contemporary conceptual transformations of that problématique, echoing yet innovating. Charles Wolfe has been a significant participant in that flow.

The book is divided into four very densely detailed parts; it is impossible to do justice here to the sophisticated analyses offered and their accumulative effect.

Wolfe first asks, did the Cartesian notion of mechanism (of the Scientific Revolution) suffice to account scientifically for living entities? How did the two following generations of scientists discuss phenomena encountered in medicine, physiology and botany? Did they need to deploy a strong (ontological) notion of ‘life’? What would then be the principal differences between the eighteenth- and the nineteenth-century controversies on defining ‘life’ and investigating ‘living entities’?

The main thrust of the argument in this first part concerns both historical-conceptual and historiographical interpretations. Wolfe argues that there was no chasm between mechanists and vitalists (in particular of the Montpellier school) during the core eighteenth-century period studied, but rather a transformative broadening of the key concepts of the mechanists by the vitalists, and serious attempts on the part of the major mechanists, when dealing with life/living entities, to deploy heuristic analogies based on properties of ‘the living’. He points out the special role of Leibniz, and of contemporaneous uses of chemistry. Thus the well-accepted view of a clear-cut opposition – living bodies as machines, looked upon as reductive versus ‘organized’ entities, looked upon dynamically, functionally, as well as morally and metaphysically – is complexified. This is achieved by looking at a multiplicity of functional – teleological – structural modelling work, carried out by members of both groups, which resulted in the production of ‘conceptual hybrids’. This approach is applied to analyse how matter – and thus materialist positions – were discussed by all parties, where ‘machine’ and ‘organization’ were not posited as opposites and sensibility was seen by some as an attribute either of matter or of its organized state.

The second part continues the focus on materialism through analysis of the diversity of positions on determinism (and ‘free will’), some canonical, e.g. Locke, others clandestine: primarily naturalization of ‘spirit/mind’ and biologization of determinism.

Wolfe calls for a revision of accepted views on determinism, arguing for a diversity in a manner that does not distribute them along mechanist/materialist versus vitalist/spiritualist lines. This argument elucidates diverse combined positions, vitalist, materialist and determinist, in eighteenth-century medical thinking on the living body, especially the work of La Mettrie within the active medical traditions of his time.

The mid-eighteenth-century Diderot–Maupertuis debate is viewed as a two-paths search for minimal components of ‘life’ and an adequate description of a ‘whole’ made up of these minimal units. It is contextualized within the eighteenth-century readings of Leibnizian/Newtonian monads, molecules and attraction, which deployed in a telltale differing manner the self-organization metaphor of the bee swarm. The properties attributed to the minimal components in the process of decomposing matter (thus total material reality) had to provide an account of interaction and association, but also of organizing structure and of function; thus they stood in complex relation to those attributed to ‘wholes’.

Wolfe considers Diderot a key figure in the eighteenth-century developments, significant in the emergence and crystallization of biology as a discipline, and offers a sophisticated analysis of Diderot's position vis-à-vis materialism and determinism. He emphasizes the bifurcations cancelled out by Diderot, e.g. between sensation and reason, between humans and other animals, and between kinds of causes through a biologization of the principle of causality. Diderot is presented as a neo-Spinozist who, drawing on the problématique of traditional metaphysics, contemporary clandestine experimental work on the living and ‘folk biology’, laid the foundation for a science of living entities – a clandestine, emphatically non-mathematically oriented biology, a radical materialist project that adopted both vitalist and emergentist positions.

The third and longest part is founded on the ‘no-chasm’ assumption. It deals directly with vitalism, defined as a synthetic approach combining the explanatory power of mechanist and the dynamism of animist models, dealing with (materialist) organic individuation. Wolfe argues for three historical varieties of vitalism: substancial, e.g. Stahl and, much later, Driesch; functional, whose paradigmatic case is the cluster of plural positions of the Montpellier school, primarily Bordeu, Barthez, Fouquet, Le Caze, Suavage, Ménuret and Chambaud, but also facets of Bernard in the nineteenth century; and cognitive – Goldstein and Canguilhem.

‘Animal economy’ is the scientifically central Montpellier structural-functional model for living entities, which implied structured non-hierarchical organization, and dynamic balance among coordinated relationally interacting but continuous living units/parts that produced effects beyond the properties of each individual living unit. Thus life became biologically emergent through the production of self-organized systems, and self-organization a marker of living entities, over and above reproduction. Eighteenth-century vitalists were thus anti-spiritualist, and did not rely on vital force or special substance as distinct from the physical world, but assumed laws and observed phenomena, since they insisted on the primacy of observation over experiment. Wolfe analyses their non-homogeneous attitudes to vivisection within the medical context – Hippocratic tradition, holism and irreducibility of living entities. Another aspect of the ‘no-chasm’ argument is the innovative discussion of how Newtonian analogies and modes of explanation were extended and transformed in deployment for multiple differing explanatory, systemic, constructive purposes by both non-vitalists and vitalists.

The fourth part enters the eighteenth century to reach out to twentieth-century developments, such as the individuation of ‘organism’, a hybrid concept. Such is the passage in the mid-twentieth century from the problematized history of vitalism to vitalist positions (e.g. Goldstein, Canguilhem), which affirms the singularity (neither mystical nor metaphysical status) of existing biological entities (such as organisms), some of whose attributes are seen as inaccessible to quantitative science. Distinct programmes crossed paths and transformed throughout the centuries: organicism, mechanism, instrumentalism/constructivism, which are to be read in relation to the varieties of historical vitalism, with the ‘no-chasm’ historiographical assumption.

The perspective offered by Wolfe posits the epistemic constraint on any version of vitalism to deploy concepts that belong to biology, to assume ‘weak ontology’, not to give up materiality and not to deploy interiority/subjectivity.

One caveat: this extraordinary book is for long-distance runners.