Vitalism, school of scientific thought—the germ of which dates from Aristotle—that attempts (in opposition to mechanism and organicism) to explain the nature of life as resulting from a vital force peculiar to living organisms and different from all other forces found outside living things.

Vitalism is a worldview and a key philosophical root of naturopathic medicine as well as a focus of criticism among its detractors. It is a concept notoriously difficult to elucidate and often is roundly debated among naturopathic physicians.

The meaning of VITALISM is a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from physicochemical forces.

2023年7月11日 · This essay explores the meaning of vitalism, its historical context, key proponents, and its impact on the fields of biology, medicine, and philosophy. Additionally, it discusses the criticisms and challenges posed to vitalism, and its legacy in contemporary scientific and philosophical discourse.

2023年1月3日 · Vitalism has spent most of the twentieth century, and part of the twenty-first, being perhaps the most misunderstood and reviled philosophy of life, with organicism being a close second (on the latter see (Martindale 2013), although some theorists seek to drive a...

2024年3月30日 · Vitalism is the belief or concept that all life forms (and in some definitions also all inanimate phenomena) are driven, ruled, or created by a mysterious, primordial “Vital Force” or “Vital Energy.”

2022年1月16日 · Vitalism has long been looked down upon in modern biology; it’s been seen as an appeal to a mysterious life-force, a romanticization of the living organism, or as mystical metaphysical...

2020年10月9日 · Vitalism is a notoriously deceptive term. It is very often defined as the view, in biology, in early modern medicine, and differently in early modern philosophy, that living beings differ from the rest of the physical universe due to their possessing an additional “life force,” “vital principle,” “entelechy,” enormon or élan vital.

In its simplest form, vitalism holds that living entities contain some fluid, or a distinctive ‘spirit’. In more sophisticated forms, the vital spirit becomes a substance infusing bodies and giving life to them; or vitalism becomes the view that there is a distinctive organization among living things.

2022年7月29日 · Vitalism is typically presented as the belief – scientific, metaphysical, poetic, and other – in the uniqueness of life, presented as a “substance,” “force,” or “principle.”