See comments interleaved below.

At 06:20 PM 2/22/2004 +0000, Ioannis Trisokkas wrote:

>Here is some extra material for all those who are still interested in the
>discussion 'The problem of metaphysics'.
>
>1. DEFINITION OF VITALISTIC MATERIALISM
>***A'. A quotation from Beiser's Cambridge essay [as quoted by John Bardis
>(23/1/2004)]***
>"Seen in its proper historical perspective, Schelling's and Hegel's
>metaphysics should be placed within the tradition of vitalistic
>materialism, which goes back to Bruno and the early free-thinkers
>of seventeenth-century England. This tradition attempted to
>banish the realm of the supernatural, yet it was not atheistic.
>Rather, it conceived of God as the whole of nature. Although it
>held that nature consists in matter alone, it conceives of matter
>in vitalistic rather than mechanistic terms. Matter was seen as
>dynamic, having self-generating and self-organizing powers. The
>similarities with Schelling's and Hegel's metaphysics are apparent."

The differences with Schelling's and Hegel's metaphysics should also be
apparent. And one should beware of allegations about "tradition" and
indiscriminate appellations such as "vitalistic materialism."

>3. HOW DID VITALISTIC MATERIALISM SOLVE THE PROBLEMS CREATED BY MECHANISM
>AND DUALISM?
>. . . .
>and the body would be an inchoate form of the forces inherent in the mind."

This is a sticky wicket.

>4. PROBLEMS WITH VITALISTIC MATERIALISM
>***Beiser, "The Fate of Reason", (ibid., p. 14)***:
>(1) The postulation of organic forces only reintroduces occult qualities,
>which merely redescribe the phenomena to be explained. (Hamann)
>(2) It does not provide an answer to Hume's scepticism toward causality:
>Whether we construe a cause as a purpose or an antecedent event, there is
>still no necessary connection between cause and effect. (Hamann)
>(3) Teleology amounts of necessity to metaphysics because its explanations
>cannot be verified in possible experience. We cannot verify the claim that
>nonconscious agents act according to ends, because our only experience of
>purposive activity is taken from our own consciousness. We assume that
>things in nature act according to ends only by analogy with our conscious
>activity; but we cannot even confirm such an analogy, since we know nothing
>about the inner world of vegetables, crystals and animals. All that we can
>safely assume, then, is that nature *appears* to act *as if* it were
>purposive. Thus teleology has a strictly regulative, not a constitutive,
>role in the sciences. (Kant)

(1) would seem to be the biggest problem, since a real materialist would
jettison Humean concerns, teleology, and the postulation of mental states
of material entities without a nervous system.

>5. THE CONNECTION BETWEEN VITALISTIC MATERIALISM AND SCHELLING/HEGEL
>***Beiser, "The Fate of Reason", (ibid., p. 14-15)***: "Hamann's and Kant's
>attack on [vitalistic materialism] had raised serious questions about the
>prospects for teleology as a model of explanation in natural science. It
>seemed that if reason were to remain within the limits of possible
>experience, then it had to content itself with a mechanical model of
>explanation. But this was not satisfactory either, since it only reinvoked
>the old dilemma of dualism or mechanism. Thus philosophers of the
>Enlightenment had come to an impasse. They had rejected all the options
>available to them. (a) Vitalism did not satisfy their demand for
>verifiability; (b) dualism restricted the frontiers of science; and (c)
>mechanism could not explain mental phenomena. There was but one route out of
>this impasse: confronting Kant's [and Hamann's] objections against teleology
>and attempting to verify [vitalistic materialism] by the later scientific
>results. This course emerged only in the late 1790s with the
>*Naturphilosophie* of Schelling and Hegel."

This one route out of the impasse is only applicable to that time. It
seems to have failed miserably. 20th century attempts to resurrect
vitalism have a bad record: Bergson, Shaw, Driesch, and the odd case of
Wilhelm Reich. Also Ernst Bloch. It seems the mind-body problem which
persists is not so easily solved in concrete scientific practice.