The gestation of German biology : philosophy and physiology from Stahl to Schelling
John H. Zammito
Bok · Engelsk · 2018
| Omfang | 523 sider
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| Opplysninger | The gestation of German biology -- Animism and organism: G.E. Stahl and the Halle medical faculty -- Making life science Newtonian: Albrecht von Haller's self-fashioning as natural scientist -- Albrecht von Haller as arbiter of German medicine: Göttingen and Bern (1736-1777) -- French vital materialism -- Taking up the French challenge: the German response -- From natural history to history of nature: from Buffon to Kant and Herder (and Blumenbach) -- Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the life sciences in Germany: his rise to eminence from the 1770s -- Blumenbach, Kant, and the "daring adventure" of an "archaeology of nature" -- Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer and "an entirely new epoch of natural history" -- Polarität und Steigerung: the self-organization of nature and the actualization of life -- Naturphilosophie and physiology.. - The emergence of biology as a distinct science in the eighteenth century has long been a subject of scholarly controversy. Michel Foucault, for one, argued that its appearance only after 1800 represented a fundamental rupture with the natural history that preceded it, marking the beginnings of modernity, while Ernst Mayr insisted that even the word "biology" was unclear in its meaning as late as 1800, and that the field itself was essentially prospective well into the 1800s. In The Gestation of German Biology, historian of ideas John H. Zammito presents a different version of the emergence of the field, one that takes on both Foucault and Mayr and emphasizes the scientific progress throughout the eighteenth century that led to the recognition of the need for a special science. The embrace of the term biology around 1800, Zammito shows, was the culmination of a convergence between natural history and human physiology that led to the development of comparative physiology and morphology - the foundations of biology. Magisterial in scope, Zammito's book offers nothing less than a revisionist history of the field, with which anyone interested in the origins of biology ought to contend. --
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| Emner | |
| Geografisk emneord | Deutschland . - Germany.
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| Dewey | |
| ISBN | 9780226520797
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| ISBN(galt) |