Mechanism and vitalism

Mechanism and Vitalism, originally published in German as 'Mechanismus und Vitalismus' in 1957, was translated and brought to an English-speaking audience by the University of Notre Dame Press in 1962. The work emerged from the mid-twentieth-century intellectual effort to bridge the widening gap between the physical sciences and the philosophical understanding of living organisms. It serves as a scholarly intervention in the long-standing biological debate concerning whether life processes can be fully explained by mechanical laws or if they require an irreducible vitalistic principle.

Rainer Schubert-Soldern wrote the text as a critique of reductionist biology, aiming to provide a rigorous framework for what he termed 'objective' biology. By situating his arguments within a historical context of scientific development, he sought to reconcile teleological observations in nature with the established facts of chemistry and physics. The volume was intended primarily for academic circles, contributing to a specific intellectual lineage of Catholic-affiliated philosophical inquiry that sought to challenge the purely materialistic paradigms that dominated mid-century evolutionary biology.