Philosophy

Engagement is not synonymous with commitment, even though the two words are used in translation between English, French, and German. However, engagement is also not some supplementary phenomenon or a technical term that the phrase social acts already includes in itself or that the concepts of ‘commitment’ or ‘joint commitment’ somehow necessarily imply.

The project is to produce a definite philosophical treatment of Enlightenment vitalism dealing with its philosophy of science, account of mind and body, and relation to competing theories of machines and organisms. Vitalism, the medico-philosophical focus on the uniqueness of biological life, has a complex relation with the development and change of biology and medicine as sciences, and Enlightenment vitalism is its most diverse philosophical form – not least in its ‘speculative’ materialist presentation, in Diderot’s ‘D’Alembert’s Dream’ with its metaphysics of living matter.