Talk:Vitalism - Misplaced Pages

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Not sure about equating anti-vitalism and mechanical reduction

After the first sentence the lede of this article equates vitalism with the view that life is irreducible to mechanism. But that's too general: many (I would venture most) philosophers of science and biology today think that biological explanations are not reducible to mechanical ones because function-concepts are categorically different than mechanism-concepts. But there are plenty of ways to be pro-science and a materialist without buying the most extreme reduction position (the literature here on reduction and emergence is obviously immense and very complicated).

I would propose clarifying the lede by putting vitalism in terms of positing "non-natural" rather than "non-mechanistic" entities. The opening sentence differentiates claims about a "non-physical element" from claims that organisms "are governed by different principles than are inanimate things." But then the rest of the lede conflates these two different claims. The former is what is discredited, the latter is at the very least an active topic of scientific and philosophical debate. AtavisticPillow (talk) 16:01, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

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