Biography:

I am an ARC Post-Doctoral Fellow (early career researcher) in the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, with a PhD in Philosophy from Boston University and an earlier graduate degree from the Universit de Paris-IV Sorbonne. I work chiefly on the history and philosophy of biology and medicine in the Enlightenment and the early modern period. I have published articles on La Mettrie, Diderot, Locke and medicine, the concept of organism, brain and mind, and determinism, co-authored a review essay on Darwin in Metascience (2009); I have edited Monsters and Philosophy (2005; see www.monstersandphilosophy.com ), a special issue of Science in Context entitled Vitalism without Metaphysics?, on eighteenth-century medical thought (2008); in preparation are 2 co-edited volumes: a book entitled Embodied Empiricism (forthcoming December 2009) and a special issue of Hist. and Phil. of the Life Sciences on Organism (2010).

Abstract:

Revisiting the metaphysics of transformism: The problem of Darwins Enlightenment precursors

It is a commonplace of the history of science and the study of Darwinian thought that (a) Charles Darwin has no relevant precursors before Lamarck or his grandfather Erasmus Darwin in the early 1800s; (b) the very concept of a precursor should be eliminated from careful scholarship, as argued influentially by Koyr, Canguilhem and Foucault among others. In this paper I revisit the forms of transformism (i.e. evolutionary theories lacking the component of natural selection) in the Enlightenment, notably those of Buffon, Robinet and Bonnet as well as the anonymous manuscript Tintinnabulum naturae and ask if it possible to rehabilitate the concept of precursor on a different basis. Whether or not Enlightenment transformism was Darwinism avant la lettre, it might nevertheless deserve our consideration.