| Description |
1 online resource |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
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. |
| Summary |
The emergence of biology as a distinct science in the eighteenth century has long been a subject of scholarly controversy. Michel Foucault, on the one hand, argued that its appearance only after 1800 represented a fundamental rupture with the natural history that preceded it, marking the beginnings of modernity. Ernst Mayr, on the other hand, 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. Historian of ideas John 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. |
| Local Note |
eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America |
| Subject |
Biology -- Study and teaching -- Germany.
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Physiology -- Study and teaching -- Germany.
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NATURE -- Reference. |
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SCIENCE -- Life Sciences -- Biology. |
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SCIENCE -- Life Sciences -- General. |
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Biology -- Study and teaching. |
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Physiology -- Study and teaching. |
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Germany. |
| Other Form: |
Print version: Zammito, John H., 1948- Gestation of German biology. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018 9780226520797 (DLC) 2017023339 (OCoLC)975487426 |
| ISBN |
9780226520827 (electronic bk.) |
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022652082X (electronic bk.) |
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9780226520797 |
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022652079X |
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