‘Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism’. Francis Crick's comment is an expression of a common contempt for the vitalist doctrine, with its invocation of the non-physical, mystical ‘vital spark’ and its problematic teleological associations. This collection (the latest addition to Springer's History, Philosophy & Theory of the Life Sciences series) presents a palpable challenge to his dismissive attitude, and provides a stimulating reassessment of the relevance of that much-maligned science. The editors have assembled a fascinating selection of papers that examine the history of vitalism and trace its various developments from the end of the Enlightenment to the modern day, reassessing both its historical and conceptual import.

There are three parts – corresponding roughly to discussions of 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century renderings of the doctrine – and 14 chapters in total. The contributors approach the topic from an impressively wide variety of disciplinary angles, and despite their methodological disparities the essays complement each other well, capturing distinct, yet related elements of the vitalist body of thought. They demonstrate the variegation of the idea, how ‘vitalism’ can refer to a supernatural thesis, an epistemological challenge, or a valuable heuristic, and how, despite Crick's derision, the vitalistic model remains relevant and generative.

At the same time, the collection is subject to the problems typical of histories of concepts. Disconcertingly, some of the chapters hardly mention ‘vitalism’ at all – though perhaps this is unsurprising, since this relatively new term encapsulates much older thoughts and more pervasive ones (6). It is also a testament to vitalism's mutability that it is described here both as consilient and at odds with organicism, emergentism (compare comments on pages 5 and 175), and mechanism (see William Bechtel's discussion of the ‘New Mechanism’ in the absorbing final chapter, ‘Addressing the Vitalist's Challenge to Mechanistic Science’).

Further, given these apparent inconsistencies, one will wonder whether the editorial ambition to ‘puzzle together the patterns of vitalism’ (3) can ever be realized. In their introductory essay, Normandin and Wolfe describe how the various strands of the concept – the metaphysical, epistemological and methodological – can be brought into a single focus by a core vitalist thought: the ‘acceptance of the unknown as a central fact of life’. The idea that ‘the known is always in flux’ (2) is positioned as the centre of a spiral of otherwise discordant theses. Yet one might worry that it mischaracterizes the stratified nature of this rich, and syncretic idea. Turning to classic statements of vitalism (e.g., those described by Guido Giglioni in his essay ‘Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Place of Irritability in the History of Life and Death’) one finds they make no claims about necessary unknowns (but rather scientifically controvertible claims about, for instance, the inherent reactivity of matter). The general methodological point is that rather than describing ‘vitalism’ and vitalist theses as being bound by some unifying rationale, it might be better construed – as in the genealogical tradition – as a conceptual accretion (or as what Wolfe has called elsewhere a ‘hybrid concept’). Doing so would discourage the exclusion of conflicting elements.

These qualms, however, are questions of framing and do not reduce the value of the essays themselves, which demonstrate the importance of this historical (genealogical or not) approach to scientific-cum-philosophical theories. For instance, Bechtel's essay (mentioned above) shows well the insights we can glean from a discussion of this scientific doctrine. He focuses on the vitalist critiques of nineteenth-century mechanism and argues for their continued application. The basic mechanistic model sees organisms and other biological phenomena to function sequentially, in a ‘step-by-step manner’; the vitalists, he argues, correctly identified the limitations of this model, focussing on how organisms are more than simply reactive, but are ‘endogenously active’. (346) Living systems seem to resist external forces imposed on them, and this is a fact that mechanists must accommodate by articulating a mode of non-sequential organization. Bechtel is an established figure in the world of philosophy of biology, and for good reason – typically rigorous and effortlessly engaging, his essay is a helpful and insightful addition here.

Brian Garrett identifies another potential benefit of a historical examination of vitalism – though a negative one from the point of view of the vitalist. In his chapter, ‘Vitalism versus Emergent Materialism’ he argues that attention to the history of vitalism – and emergentism – will help us avoid the worrying effects of ‘intellectual amnesia’. (130) In a clear, if overly general piece, he focuses on significant similarities between philosophical trends in the 1920s and 1990s, stating that ‘the core problems and arguments, particularly issues of the ontological role of the irreducible, remain pretty much the same’. (133) Remembering earlier failed attempts at non-reductionism, he suggests, will help us avoid making the same mistakes again: ‘Given the force of the exclusion argument, the mysterious implications of downward causation and the general lack of scientific support, I doubt the fate of contemporary non-reductionism will be much different from that of emergent evolution and of vitalism.’ (152)

Garrett's conclusion is unduly pessimistic and seems to exhibit its own form of intellectual amnesia. Perhaps James's ‘automaton theory’ (131) – restated in Jaegwon Kim's ‘exclusion argument’ (151) – will effectively discredit contemporary kinds of emergentism. (Many, like John Dupré, will contest it (see, e.g. his piece, ‘Varieties of Living Things’, co-authored with Maureen O'Malley – chapter 13 in this volume).) Still, one may doubt that this seals the fate for ‘contemporary non-reductionism’ across the board. It is clear from Garrett's paper, and Christophe Malaterre's piece ‘Life as Emergent Phenomenon’ (chapter 7), that ‘emergentism’ is taken to be the view that higher-level living systems – e.g. organisms – possess ‘non-derivative causal properties’. Where emergence stands as a metaphysical thesis (rather than an epistemic one – see page 135), entities are seen to be real if they have novel causal powers. This is the thought captured by Kim in his well-known ‘Alexander's Dictum’.

Yet here we may learn from vitalists like Hans Driesch, whose discussions of entelechy seem – interpreted generously – to give voice to the thought that metaphysical status is determined by more than causal dependence (this is suggested by Garrett's own comments on page 138). That is, non-reductionism does not always have to involve claims about causal properties. Despite his warnings about intellectual amnesia, Garrett neglects a form of non-reductionism, hinted at in Driesch but borne from a much older tradition found in Aristotle. In the Aristotelian schema, the claim that organisms are primary substances emerges from two inter-related theses: a causal thesis – which describes a two-way causal flow from the elements upwards and from the form downwards – and a thesis about the priority of the whole over its parts. This latter thesis, currently the subject of renewed interest in the burgeoning field of ‘ontological dependence’, sees organisms to be irreducible to their parts because the parts can only be conceived in relation to the whole – i.e. the organism is a constituent in the statement of the essence of the organs. Garrett (and Malaterre) both display a bias towards arguments that relate to causation, from which claims about ontological dependence are separable.

In addition to the essays already mentioned, there are pieces by Joan Steigerwald and Sean Dyde, which focus on vitalism in 19^th Century, and analyse – respectively – how vitalistic theories emerged in Germany in the shadow of Kant, and how theories of life interacted with theories of mind in the work of Laycock, Combe, and Hall. Sebastian Normandin has also contributed a paper on Wilhelm Reich, which examines the psychiatrist's writings in relation to vitalism. There are also two fascinating pieces, by Chiara Ferrario and Luigi Corsi, and Giuseppe Bianco, on Kurt Goldstein, and on Georges Canguilhem. J. Scott Turner has contributed a paper about the forgotten vitalist roots of theories of adaptation. Chapter 12, authored by Sonnenschein, Lee, Nguyen and Soto, similarly draws attention to the vitalist assumptions that may have underpinned early experiments into tissue cultures.

Finally, mention should be made of Juan Rigoli's engaging paper, ‘The “Novel of Medicine”’ (a revised translation of the French original). Here, again, ‘vitalism’ itself is not the direct focus, but Rigoli's discussion of physiology, and the ‘semantic plasticity’ of the term (86), is of a piece with Normandin and Wolfe's overall project. Rigoli argues that physiology, as a body of thought, should be understood to cover heterogenous works; its history should not be understood as a linear narrative, as the obvious supersession of the mystical doctrinal models of vitalism, but rather in terms of a power struggle between different types of conflicting physiologies, expressing the decline and revival of various vitalist currents. (78) Central to his treatment is the contrast between ‘medical’ and ‘literary’ physiologies, the latter being those treatises, popular in the 19^th century, that ostensibly applied the observational paradigm onto social systems (83) (and covered such diverse phenomena as marriage, house-keeping, adultery… and the Bois de Bolougne). The debt owed here to Foucault's Birth of the Clinic is clear (and perhaps slightly more could have been made of the Foucauldian analysis of the physiologist's metaphor of observation).

Rigoli's piece also discusses stylistic differences between literary and medical physiologies. Alibert's style, we are told, was seen to be unnecessarily ‘flowery’, in contrast to the precision and sobriety valued by Pinel (88) – and this distinction, and critique, may appeal to Analytic-minded philosophers encountering this volume. There are papers here that are perhaps too ‘seductive’ (89) for Analytical tastes, but it is a triumph of the editors to have positioned these contributions alongside the more literal – but no less fascinating – pieces by Dupré and O'Malley, and Garrett and Malaterre. What results is a compelling and insightful volume, which puts the spark back into the contemporary Vitalist debate.