Leonard Richmond Wheeler

Leonard Richmond Wheeler (23 July 1888 – 25 September 1948) was a British educationalist and philosopher of biology who worked in British Malaya and the West Indies.

Biography

Wheeler was born on 23 July 1888 in Highgate. He was educated at the University of London and obtained a post teaching mathematics and science at a grammar school in Antigua in 1912. He was later a member of the Royal Flying Corps stationed in the Balkans.

Vitalism

In 1939, Wheeler authored the book Vitalism: Its History and Validity which was submitted for his PhD thesis at the University of London. He defined vitalism as "all the various doctrines which, from the time of Aristotle, have described things as actuated by some power or principle additional to mechanics and chemistry." The book is a scholarly history of vitalistic theories from the time of Aristotle to the twentieth century, and a defence of vitalism. A 1945 review in The Quarterly Review of Biology noted that "a great amount of painstaking scholarly research has gone into the making of his book, and the result will astonish those who have given only casual thought to the subject". Vitalism: Its History and Validity (1939) Harmony of Nature: A Study in Co-Operation for Existence (1947)