For the past few days I've been unable to write the second chapter. Once I had begun, I figured out that it was hard for my position NOT to seem like vitalism, AND that seeming to defend vitalism makes one the instant target of lots of criticism by mechanists.
It's really hard to say what vitalism is, as it seems to be many different things to many different people. Some would place Aristotle with vitalists simply because he's not a mechanists. Some would say vitalists think that there's an immaterial force--but they are probably reading vitalistic claims from a positivistic perspective, which assumes all material forces are measurable in the way that psi is measurable. Some think that vitalism implies that the artificial synthesis of organic compounds is impossible. But urea and other organic compounds can be made artificially.
It's really hard to say what vitalism is, as it seems to be many different things to many different people. Some would place Aristotle with vitalists simply because he's not a mechanists. Some would say vitalists think that there's an immaterial force--but they are probably reading vitalistic claims from a positivistic perspective, which assumes all material forces are measurable in the way that psi is measurable. Some think that vitalism implies that the artificial synthesis of organic compounds is impossible. But urea and other organic compounds can be made artificially.
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