Vis essentialis and entelechy. Caspar F. Wolff's and Hans A.E. Driesch’s parametric dimension of the organic world, University of Rzeszów Press, 2024, 214 pp.

The book undertakes an analysis of the conceptions advanced by Caspar Friedrich Wolff and Hans Driesch, interpreting them as attempts to formulate a parametric account of biological processes through recourse to general and relatively invariant explanatory factors governing organismal development. The author focuses in particular on the notions of vis essentialis and entelechy, conceptualising them as naturalistic categories in an explicitly heuristic sense. Crucially, however, it is emphasised that the notion of a “natural parameter” functions here exclusively as an interpretative instrument. It does not imply that either Wolff or Driesch operated with fully measurable or operationalisable quantities; rather, it serves to reconstruct their methodological intentions, namely the aspiration to render biological phenomena intelligible in a manner analogous to the procedures characteristic of the physical sciences, where processes are described in terms of constants and universal relations. Within this framework, Wolff sought a factor responsible for the genesis and organisation of living structures, conceived as a general causal principle underlying morphogenesis, whereas Driesch attempted to capture a regulatory factor governing development and to articulate it in a form approximating parameters known from physics. Both thinkers thus combined empirical observation with an effort to construct generalised explanatory models aimed at identifying regularities of a potentially predictive character. At the same time, the author underscores that their respective conceptions fail to meet contemporary criteria of scientificity, primarily owing to the limited scope for their operationalisation and empirical verification. Nevertheless, they are presented as a significant stage in the development of biology - marking the transition from a predominantly phenomenological description to attempts at systematic, theoretically grounded explanations of vital processes. In this perspective, the notion of a natural parameter functions as a key interpretative device, enabling the epistemological significance of these intellectual endeavours to be more precisely articulated.