Review: Charles Wolfe, La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie: Une histoire du vitalisme: Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019. Pp. 514. ISBN 978-2-4060-8072-5 (hardback)

The book is divided into four very densely detailed parts; it is impossible to do justice here to the sophisticated analyses offered and their accumulative effect. [...]the well-accepted view of a clear-cut opposition – living bodies as machines, looked upon as reductive versus ‘organized’ entities, looked upon dynamically, functionally, as well as morally and metaphysically – is complexified. ‘Animal economy’ is the scientifically central Montpellier structural-functional model for living entities, which implied structured non-hierarchical organization, and dynamic balance among coordinated relationally interacting but continuous living units/parts that produced effects beyond the properties of each individual living unit. [...]life became biologically emergent through the production of self-organized systems, and self-organization a marker of living entities, over and above reproduction.