Bednarczyk Andrzej
Instytut Filozofii, Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.
Kwart Hist Nauki Tech. 2007;52(3-4):55-95.
The aim of the paper is construct an outline of G. L. Buffon's ontology, epistemology and theoretical foundations of biology, using the general ideas recovered from and revealed in the voluminous text of Buffon's Histoire naturelle, which underpinned his biology and the natural science of the Age of Enlightenment, and which Buffon never expounded in a separate work. It was deism that Buffon used as a theoretical assumption that could facilitate explaining of where to look for the origin of the uniformity and order that prevailed in nature, and for the source of the natural laws that were being discovered. It was naturalism, a common cognitive attitude among the natural scientists of the Age of Enlightenment, that Buffon expressed in his view that the created and embodied nature was the only object of cognition within whose bounds the cognizant should remain in the process of cognition, by explaining it through itself. Indeed, Buffon made the notion of nature, which sometimes reveals pantheistic overtones, his main theoretical category. The naturalist Buffon was also a universalist in that he conceived of nature as the infinite universe and entered into it cognitively. He proved his universalist stance by (i) propounding the cosmogonic hypothesis, (ii) formulating the concept of life dispersed throughout the universe, and (iii) viewing the process of Earth's formation as one of the many occurring in the universe, and of life on Earth as one of the many biospheres. Buffon was also a determinist, which can be seen in his belief that the object of nature show stability in their mutability, and unity in their variability, which is the effect of immutable laws which belong to the nature of the world. This determinism showed in Buffon's views in three varieties: causal determinism, co-existential (or morphological) determinism and statistical determinism; he did not accept finalism. Buffon was the author of the principle of the conservation of life, according to which the amount of life in the universe is constant, life is an autonomous quality, and animate matter is as ancient as inanimate matter. This principle forms part of the concept of organic corpuscles, a concept which is not without its internal contradictions. Prominent in this concept, the best known among Buffon's theoretical concepts, is the idea of corpuscularism, and ancient concept, related to that of atomism, which found an application in the biology of the Age of Enlightenment in its qualitative variety. Continualism, an idea opposed to that of corpuscularism, manifested itself in Buffon's philosophy in the form of the concept of the chain of being, which Buffon devised basing on one morphological type which was subject to modification. Connected with this latter, specific way of modelling the structure of nature is the notion of species. Species, discovered by Buffon in nature and viewed as existing in nature in a real way, had a physiological character (in that species were formed by individuals that produced a fertile offspring) and endured in an immutable way (irrespective of the suggestion formulated by historians of biology that species were mutable). As a natural scientist, Buffon was an empiric, or even an empiricist. His attempts at experiments, such as the model experiment in trying to develop the cosmogonic hypothesis, are among the rare exceptions. It was this hypothesis, and the history of the Earth that was intertwined in it, that led Buffon to adopt the concept of geological time and to postulate that irreversible events occurred within it, thus discovering something that was reminiscent of the history of human society. Although Buffon used many very general theoretical notions and hypothetical concepts, this broad view of nature cannot be said-- in spite of the opinions of numerous historians--to have formed a system. It does, however, remain a comprehensive vision of nature, an attempt at an ambitious synthesis in the field of natural science.
本文旨在勾勒出G. L. 布丰的本体论、认识论以及生物学理论基础的轮廓，所依据的是从布丰卷帙浩繁的《自然史》文本中提炼并揭示出的总体思想，这些思想支撑着他的生物学以及启蒙时代的自然科学，而布丰从未在单独的著作中对其进行阐述。布丰将自然神论用作一种理论假设，这有助于解释自然界普遍存在的统一性和秩序的起源，以及正在被发现的自然法则的来源。布丰秉持自然主义，这是启蒙时代自然科学家们共有的认知态度，他认为被创造并具象化的自然是认知的唯一对象，在认知过程中，认知者应在其范围内通过自然本身来解释自然。事实上，布丰将有时带有泛神论色彩的自然概念作为其主要理论范畴。作为自然主义者的布丰也是一位普遍主义者，因为他将自然构想为无限宇宙并在认知层面融入其中。他通过以下方式证明了自己的普遍主义立场：（i）提出宇宙起源假说；（ii）阐述生命散布于宇宙的概念；（iii）将地球形成过程视为宇宙中众多此类过程之一，将地球上的生命视为众多生物圈之一。布丰还是一位决定论者，这体现在他相信自然对象在其变化中展现出稳定性，在其变异性中呈现出统一性，这是属于世界本质的不变法则的作用。这种决定论在布丰的观点中有三种表现形式：因果决定论、共存（或形态）决定论和统计决定论；他不接受目的论。布丰是生命守恒原则的提出者，根据该原则，宇宙中的生命总量是恒定的，生命是一种自主性质，有生命物质与无生命物质一样古老。这一原则是有机微粒概念的一部分，该概念存在内在矛盾。在这个概念中，也是布丰最著名的理论概念中，微粒论的观点很突出，微粒论是一个古老概念，与原子论相关，在启蒙时代生物学中以其定性形式得到应用。连续论是与微粒论相对的观点，在布丰的哲学中以存在之链的概念形式体现出来，布丰基于一种可被修改的形态类型构建了这一概念。与这种构建自然结构的特定方式相关的是物种概念。布丰在自然界中发现并认为真实存在的物种具有生理特征（即物种由能产生可育后代的个体构成），并且以不变的方式存续（不顾生物学史学家提出的物种是可变的观点）。作为一名自然科学家，布丰是一个经验主义者，甚至可以说是实证主义者。他进行实验的尝试很少，比如试图发展宇宙起源假说的模型实验就是罕见的例外。正是这个假说以及与之交织的地球历史，促使布丰采用地质时间概念并假定其中发生了不可逆事件，从而发现了一些让人联想到人类社会历史的东西。尽管布丰使用了许多非常笼统的理论概念和假设性概念，但尽管众多历史学家有不同看法，这种对自然的宽泛观点并不能说是形成了一个体系。然而，它依然是对自然的一种全面看法，是在自然科学领域进行宏大综合的一次尝试。
