Revisiting the Logical Empiricist Criticisms of Vitalism

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...

Erich Kretschmann as a Proto-Logical-Empiricist: Adventures and Misadventures of the Point-Coincidence Argument

The present paper attempts to show that a 1915 article by Erich Kretschmann must be credited not only for being the source of Einstein’s point-coincidence remark, but also for having anticipated the main lines of the logical-empiricist interpretation of general relativity. Whereas Kretschmann was inspired by the work of Mach and Poincaré, Einstein inserted Kretschmann’s point-coincidence parlan...

On the Vitality of Vitalism

MANY OF those who share an interest in the life sciences today, perhaps most, would agree with the claim that vitalism is obsolete. Some prominent biologists now use ‘vitalism’ as a derogatory label associated with lack of intellectual rigour, anti-scientific attitudes, and superstition (see, e.g., Dawkins, 1988). Other scientific commentators treat the term more seriously, but equally arrive a...

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)....

Plantinga and the Logical Problem of Evil