Organicism and vitalism are defined in Encyclopædia Britannica in the context of studies of the philosophy of nature, as follows:

Basically and traditionally, there are three distinct philosophical stands regarding the biological nature of life: vitalism, mechanism, and organicism.

Essentially, vitalism holds that there exists in all living things an intrinsic factor—elusive, inestimable, and unmeasurable—that activates life. In its classic form, as espoused by many biologists at the turn of the 20th century—in particular, by Hans Driesch, a German biologist and philosopher—it has suffered severe criticism. Ernest Nagel, a philosopher of science, rang its death knell in 1951, when he wrote in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (11:327 ff.):

Vitalism of the substantival type … is now a dead issue … less, perhaps, because of the methodological and philosophical criticism that has been leveled against the doctrine than because of the infertility of vitalism as a guide in biological research and because of the superior heuristic value of alternative approaches.

And whereas most biologists concur in renouncing this so-called naïve vitalism, some continue to espouse a so-called critical vitalism, perhaps indistinguishable from organicism (see below).

Simply stated, the view of the mechanists is that organisms are no different from subtle machines: the whole is the sum of its parts, which are arranged in such a way that an internal energy source can move them in accordance with a built-in program of purposeful action. In the mechanist’s view, advances in molecular biology corroborate this claim and demonstrate that in principle organisms are no more than complicated physical systems. This is, in essence, the reductionist position, which states that biological principles can be reduced to physical and chemical laws. Antireductionists, of course, contend that molecular biology cannot explain all aspects of living forms.

It has often been said that, whereas biologists may think as vitalists—and hold the conviction that organisms are more than just complex machines—they perforce become practicing mechanists in the laboratory, required by the demands of scientific inquiry to view their experiments in terms of the measurable parameters of physics and chemistry. K.F. Schaffner, an American philosopher, suggested in 1967 that, even though reductionism may be correct, a better strategy may be to strive toward an independent biology.

The basic claim of organicism is that organisms must be interpreted as functioning wholes and cannot be understood by means of physics and chemistry alone. Few scientists today call themselves organismic biologists or endorse the doctrines put forward by such organismic theorists as Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Edward Stuart Russell. Nevertheless, most antireductionists subscribe at least to part of the organismic doctrine, in particular to its wholistic claim. Russell, a foremost proponent of organicism, stated in his work The Interpretation of Development and Heredity (1930):

Any action of the whole organism would appear then to be susceptible of analysis to an indefinite degree—and this is in general the aim of the physiologist, to analyze, to decompose into their elementary processes the broad activities and functions of the organism. But … by such a procedure something is lost, for the action of the whole has a certain unifiedness and completeness which is left out of account in the process of analysis. … In our conception of the organism we must … take account of the unifiedness and wholeness of its activities … since … the activities of the organism all have reference to one or other of three great ends, and that both the past and the future enter into their determination. … Bio-chemistry studies essentially the conditions of action of cells and organisms, while organismal biology attempts to study the actual modes of action of whole organisms, regarded as conditioned by, but irreducible to, the modes of action of lower unities.

In some special sense, then, an organism is regarded as being more than a simple sum of its parts; an additional “something” has accrued to it as a result of the unique arrangement of its components. As Morton O. Beckner, a philosopher of biology, asserted in an article in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (5:549):

In the history of biology it is difficult to disentangle vitalistic and organismic strands, since both schools are concerned with the same sorts of problems and speak the same sort of language. The distinction between them was drawn clearly only in the twentieth century. Organismic biology may be described as an attempt to achieve the aims of the murky organismic-vitalistic tradition, without appeal to vital entities.

Further (p. 551):

Organismic biology is to be interpreted as a series of methodological proposals, based on certain very general features of the organism—namely, the existence in the organism of levels of organization with the biological ends of maintenance and reproduction. These features are sufficient to justify “a free, autonomous biology, with concepts and laws of its own,” whether or not the higher levels are ultimately reducible to the lower ones.

There is also a separate entry on vitalism in Encyclopædia Britannica as follows:

school of scientific thought—the germ of which dates from Aristotle—that attempts (in opposition to mechanism and organicism) to explain the nature of life as resulting from a vital force peculiar to living organisms and different from all other forces found outside living things. This force is held to control form and development and to direct the activities of the organism. Vitalism has lost prestige as the chemical and physical nature of more and more vital phenomena have been shown.

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According to entries in Wikipedia:

Organicism is a philosophical orientation that asserts that reality is best understood as an organic whole. By definition it is close to holism. Benedict Spinoza and Constantin Brunner are two philosophers whose thought is best understood as organicist.

Organicism is also a biological doctrine that stresses the organization, rather than the composition, of organisms. William Emerson Ritter coined the term in 1919. Organicism became well-accepted in the 20th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organicism

Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is

• a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from physicochemical forces
• a doctrine that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry alone and that life is in some part self-determining

Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the “vital spark,” “energy” or “élan vital,” which some equate with the “soul.”

Vitalism has a long history in medical philosophies: most traditional healing practices posited that disease was the result of some imbalance in the vital energies which distinguish living from non-living matter. In the Western tradition, associated with Hippocrates, these vital forces were identified as the humours; eastern traditions posited similar forces such as qi and prana. More recently, vitalistic thinking has been identified in the naive biological notions of children.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism

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