Vital Forces, Teleology and Organization

Abstract

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Hegel's Organizational Account of Biological Functions

“… 14 I agree with Gambarotto (2018) that, contrary to common wisdom, the true vindicator of the Aristotelian concept is not Kant, but Hegel. See also Michelini 2008: 85.…”

Axiomatic Natural Philosophy and the Emergence of Biology as a Science

“…44–45) has suggested that Treviranus paid specific attention to the dynamics of nature and in this way helped pave the way for a more transformist and historical conception of nature. According to Andrea Gambarotto, Treviranus’s work is mostly synthetic, because it brings together various strands of earlier work ( 2018 , p. 93) and follows Schelling in many ways, but goes beyond the latter in presenting the deduction of the “ideal series” of organisms as a “real” and therefore historical sequence of organic forms (Gambarotto 2018 , p. 113). Thus, like de Jager, Gambarotto considers the historicization of nature and of life to be the aspect of Treviranus’s thought that contributed to the emergence of biology.…”

“…Steigerwald notes that “[i]n the lengthy introduction in the first volume [of his Biologie ], Treviranus laid claim to scientific study of living organisms, modeled after philosophical conceptions of science as a system of knowledge … and founded on certain principles” (Steigerwald 2014 , p. 106). Gambarotto points out that, for Treviranus, “[t]rue science must be based on fundamental principles and deduce all its propositions from them” and that this demand reveals Kant’s and Schelling’s influence (Gambarotto 2018 , p. 94). However, apart from these brief and general remarks, these authors do not discuss this aspect of Treviranus’s work in more detail and focus instead on its more historicist and naturalist strands.…”

“…Hence, Blumenbach introduced principles that were specific to the life sciences. The vital materialism that was adopted by many biologists at the end of the eighteenth century is an important factor in the emergence of biology as a special science (see Gambarotto 2018 ).…”

Thomas Khurana. Das Leben Der Freiheit. Form und Wirklichkeit der Autonomie. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. ISBN 978-3-518-29798-8. Pp. 550. €24.

“…Another element possibly missing in the book is context: recent years have seen increasing scholarly interest devoted to the numerous views on nature, life and organism emerging around and mediating the link between Kant and Hegel—such as the work of Schelling, Oken, Eschenmayer or Romantic Naturphilosophie (Richards 2002, and the materials now collected in Zammito 2018, Gambarotto 2018). Khurana does not seem to consider the relevance of practically any of these interlocutors.…”