Notes

• [1]
  Gayon laments Canguilhem’s absence in philosophy of biology (at the time the field was particularly emphasizing evolutionary approaches) and observes that “[h]ardly a single reference to him could be found in the current literature of the ‘philosophy of biology’” (Gayon 1998, 305). Marjorie Grene, however, can be mentioned as someone in the field who did cite and value the works of Canguilhem early on (see her 1976; 2000; on Grene and Canguilhem, see Méthot 2009; 2018; see also the Introduction, this volume).
• [2]
  “Regulation is the adjustment according to some rule or norm, of a plurality of movements or acts and of their effects or products which by their diversity or their succession are extraneous for each other” (Canguilhem 2018, 541 [1972] [my translation]).
• [3]
  The notion of “animal economy” was important in the physiology of the eighteenth century, related to the notion of “organisation,” and led to a tradition considering organisms as autonomous beings starting in the nineteenth century after Claude Bernard’s notion of the milieu intérieur. According to Wolfe and Terada (2008, 538) this notion is related to a “coherent, structural-functional model of the body and its workings.”
• [4]
  The controversy between Stahl and Leibniz (Duchesneau 1995; Cheung 2006) on the notion of organism reflected two conservative views: in one, the soul organises the body (Stahl) and in the other, there is a pre-established harmony between the soul and the body.
• [5]
  Bernard sought to develop a scientific physiology, without giving up with the idea of understanding organisms as different from mechanisms. Organisms are examples of what he called “constant life” and they organize an internal milieu in which basic processes are regulated apart from the “cosmic phenomena” of the external milieu. “Just as the notion of milieu served biologists at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century to explain the modifications and adaptations of the organism and of species, this notion of internal milieu allowed Claude Bernard to explain how, in the organism’s interior, each part finds itself in relation to all the others by the intermediary of a sort of liquid matrix composed of salts, water, and products of internal secretion, a matrix whose stability depends on two devices that in the higher animals are the keystones of all these operations: the nervous system and the system of internal secretion (or endocrine) glands. Bernard’s originality resided not just in his showing that there exists an internal milieu, but indeed in his showing that it is the organism that produces this internal milieu” (Canguilhem 2012, 72-73 [1955]).
• [6]
  Landecker (2017) criticises Bernard’s conceptions of metabolism as an autonomous system and emphasises that current biology underlines the tight connectedness of life forms and their influence on one another.
• [7]
  “The regulations for which Cannon invented the general term homeostasis are similar to those which Claude Bernard had unified under the name of ‘constants of the internal environment.’ These are norms of organic functioning such as the regulation of respiratory movements under the effect of the rate of carbonic acid dissolved in the blood, thermoregulation in animals with constant temperature, etc. We know today what Bernard could only suspect, namely that other forms of regulation must be taken into consideration in studying organic structures and the origin of these structures. Contemporary experimental embryology has found its basic problems in the fact of morphological regulations which, in the course of embryonic development, conserve or establish the integrity of the specific form and extend their organizing action in repairing certain mutilations. So that the set of norms, by virtue of which living beings show themselves as forming a distinct world, can be classed as norms of constitution, norms of reconstitution and norms of functioning” (Canguilhem 1991, 260-261 [1966]).
• [8]
  There are important relational issues being debated currently, such as those related to the microbiota and the philosophical aspects of biological individuality (Gilbert et al. 2012; Huneman and Bouchard 2013).
• [9]
  Canguilhem notices that the term “regulator,” as applied to a mechanical part, historically precedes that of regulation as an abstract term; its origins are located in watchmaking (the regulator spiral), but were also present in 18^th century political economy and were brought into animal physiology by Lavoisier.
• [10]
  “Social norms are to be invented and not observed” (Canguilhem 1991, 259).
• [11]
  On social norms in relation to biological norms, see the chapters by Roth and by Arminjon, this volume.
• [12]
  Canguilhem also describes the historical interpretations of the term in literature and sociology, etc. and finally attributes to Taine the use of the term in singular and abstract to denote “the environment” (2008, 99). According to Pearce (2010), in the nineteenth century the notion of environment acquired a distinct metaphysical status in biology as a correlate of the organism to speak of the organism-environment interaction, as, before that term was established, English authors referred to “circumstances,” Spencer being the first to use environment to talk of the interaction.
• [13]
  Healthy individuals do not strictly depend on a given environment for self-maintenance, like ill individuals may; in Canguilhem’s view, the capacity to remain viable and active across environments is a landmark of health. This view can be problematic, however, if read as saying that the environment is inert and all self-maintenance occurs at the level of the organism.
• [14]
  West-Eberhard (2005) uses the term “accommodation” to refer to this kind of mutual adjustment.
• [15]
  Like Canguilhem’s approach, the organizational perspective of biological autonomy distinguishes between the constitutive and interactive aspects of living organization (Moreno et al. 2008; Moreno and Mossio 2015). This suggests that the relation with the milieu occurs after the organism is constituted, the environment being only positive or negative from the perspective of organic normativity, without taking into account its specific causal activity.
• [16]
  Grene (1976; 2000) considers that Canguilhem explains better than logical positivism the problems medicine faces with the use of types. On Canguilhem and its relation to Darwinism, see the chapters by Méthot and Sholl, this volume.
• [17]
  Wouters (2003) distinguishes four notions of function in biology. One of them views function as the activity a part or organ performs or is capable of performing, without considering the use of this activity. The other three notions view function as use or role, because they attempt to identify the role or roles of a given structure or part, understood as its contribution to survival and reproduction (in the case of function as biological advantage), to a selected effect (in the case of the etiological function), or to a complex activity (in the case of function as causal role).
• [18]
  This perspective prompted ideas of a pioneer in evo-devo like Pere Alberch, who in his work vindicated that so-called monsters are just as possible outcomes of developmental systems as are adaptive forms, and need to be taken into account in evolutionary biology (see Alberch 1989).
• [19]
  On individual norms and how they change through life, see the chapters by Baucher and by Blasimme, this volume.
• [20]
  On the discussion between Waddington and Thom, see also Nuño de la Rosa & Etxeberria (2012). On Canguilhem and the biology of ageing and senescence, see the chapter by Blasimme, this volume.
• [21]
  On allostasis and the project of a “critical physiology” in Canguilhem’s writings on the normal and the pathological, see the chapter by Arminjon, this volume.
• [22]
  On Canguilhem and the 4P approach, see the chapter by Giroux, this volume.
• [23]
  On Canguilhem and medical humanities more specifically, see the chapter by Keuck and Freeborn, this volume.
• [24]
  For connections between Canguilhem and autopoietic perspectives, see Etxeberria and Wolfe (2018).
• [25]
  See, for example, Barandiaran and Egbert (2014).
• [26]
  Menatti and Casado da Rocha (2016) suggest that the landscape plays a role as an affordance for health and disease.
• [27]
  The expression is interesting as the ectoderm is the most external of the three tissue layers of a metazoan embryo, from which both the epidermis and the nervous system are developed, that is to say: two organs that seem to establish a relationship, but also a distance, between organism and environment.
• [28]
  For example, Morar and Skorburg (2018) have reviewed different proposals in cognitive science and biology to determine which is the appropriate kind of relation of individuals and other living beings of the same species or of different species, such as the microbiota. They defend a middle way in which medicine and bioethics can overcome extreme individualism without taking the risk of blending differences and eliminating organisms.
• [29]
  Morar and Skorburg (2018) claim that both naturalism and normativism are individualist, but Canguilhem’s perspective is probably not individualist in the sense they examine.