Knowledge of Life

Introduction

Knowledge of Life appeared in 1952, with a revised edition in 1965, and collects lectures and essays from the years after the war. They deal with thought and the living being, experimentation in animal biology, cell theory, vitalism, machine and organism, the living being and its milieu, and the normal and the pathological. Canguilhem defends the specificity of biology without metaphysical vitalism: living beings set their own norms and relate to an environment that they help to define. In “Machine and Organism” he reverses the usual comparison and treats machines as extensions of organs. The essay on milieu traces the concept from Newtonian mechanics to biology and geography, and the collection is an introduction to his historical way of working with concepts.

Connections

Builds on

• The Normal and the Pathological1943 · Georges Canguilhem

Criticizes

• Discourse on the Method1637 · René Descartes

More works by Georges Canguilhem

• 1943The Normal and the Pathological