Charles Wolfe
Charles Wolfe studied in New York (New School for Social Research), Paris (U. de Paris IV-Sorbonne) and Boston (Boston University), obtaining a PhD on determinism and the mind in the Radical Enlightenment (Locke, Collins, Diderot). He works mainly on early modern and ‘Enlightenment’ theories of life, in relation to both materialism (La Mettrie, Diderot, etc.), Montpellier vitalism, and the development of biology. Some outcomes of the latter set of interests are: the edited volume ‘Monsters and Philosophy’ (2005), the special issue of HPLS on the concept of organism (2010), the coedited volumes ‘Vitalism and the Scientific Image’ (2013), ‘Vitalism and its legacy in 20th century life science and philosophy’ (2022) and ‘Philosophy of Biology before Biology’ (2019) and, reflecting his focus also on early modern life science and empiricism, the coedited volumes ‘The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge’ (2010) and ‘Mechanism, Life and Mind in Early Modern Natural Philosophy’ (2022). Another volume (2014) he edited was on Brain Theory, and in 2020-2022 he coedited the Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. He is the author of two monographs on materialism (2016 and 2020) and one monograph on biology and vitalism (2019). He is currently working on Georges Canguilhem, in addition to various abovementioned topics.
Posts by Charles Wolfe
