ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the historical development of philosophical Mechanism beginning with the seventeenth century, though focusing primarily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vitalism claims that living organisms defy description in purely physicochemical terms because organisms possess some non-material, non-measurable forces or directive agents that account for their complexity. Jacques Loeb, an Americal physiologist, illustrates more clearly than many others how one form of mechanistic materialism was put into practice as a scientific research program. In the period between 1900 and 1950, holistic philosophy included a wide spectrum of approaches with widely differing views on both the philosophical meanings of holism and the practical applications of holistic thinking to scientific research programs. Today, with the advent of computer technologies and fields such as bioinformatics with large data sets, systems, and "complexity" theory, holistic thinking is no longer so suspect in a variety of fields.
