Anne Conway’s Exceptional Vitalism: Material Spirits and Active Matter

The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz's Concept of the Monad

Molecular “Vitalism”

ate on very different principles. Even the simple signal-response of an allosteric enzyme is not machine-like Berkeley, California 94720 when examined in detail. Allosteric proteins have intrin-sically active and inactive conformations, which exist in some ratio in the absence of an external signal (Monod In the early nineteenth century, views on the nature of et al., 1965; Henry et al., 1997)....

The Nature of Moral Vitalism

Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. We introduce a scale designed to assess the belief in moral vitalism. High scorers on the scale endorse items such as “There are underlying forces of good and evil in this world.” After establishing the reliability and criterion validity of the scale (Studies 1, 2a, and 2b), we exami...

Muck and Magic or Change and Progress: Vitalism versus Hamiltonian Matter-of-Fact Knowledge

In chapter V, titled “Change and Progress,” in his now classic Evolutionary Economics: A Study of Change in Economic Thought, David Hamilton contrasted beliefs in magic and mystic potencies with the matter-of-fact knowledge of technology in the form of tools, machines, and techniques of production (1999, 93, 109, 111, 112). As with most evolutionary economists, his view of technological change ...

Active Matter

The term active matter describes diverse systems, spanning macroscopic (e.g. shoals of fish and flocks of birds) to microscopic scales (e.g. migrating cells, motile bacteria and gels formed through the interaction of nanoscale molecular motors with cytoskeletal filaments within cells). Such systems are often idealizable in terms of collections of individual units, referred to as active particle...