Chapter 15. Spotting register-internal variation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life sciences

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Internal Variation

Invisible Architectures

2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Basic Problem ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Strategy I ◽  
The Invisible

The ArgumentIn this essay I will sketch a few instances of how, and a few forms in which, the “invisible” became an epistemic category in the development of the life sciences from the seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast to most of the other papers in this issue, I do not so much focus on the visualization of various little entities, and the tools and contexts in which a visual representation of these things was realized. I will be more concerned with the basic problem of introducing entities or structures that cannot be seen, as elements of an explanatory strategy. I will try to review the ways in which the invisibility of such entities moved from the unproblematic status of just being too small to be accessible to the naked or even the armed eye, to the problematic status of being invisible in principle and yet being indispensable within a given explanatory framework. The epistemological concern of the paper is thus to sketch the historical process of how the “unseen” became a problem in the modern life sciences. The coming into being of the invisible as a space full of paradoxes is itself the product of a historical development that still awaits proper reconstruction.

Editing entomology: natural-history periodicals and the shaping of scientific communities in nineteenth-century Britain

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW WALE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Scientific Communities ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Professional Practitioners

AbstractThis article addresses the issue of professionalization in the life sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century through a survey of British entomological periodicals. It is generally accepted that this period saw the rise of professional practitioners and the emergence of biology (as opposed to the older mode of natural history). However, recent scholarship has increasingly shown that this narrative elides the more complex processes at work in shaping scientific communities from the 1850s to the turn of the century. This article adds to such scholarship by examining the ways in which the editors of four entomological periodicals from across this time frame attempted to shape the communities of their readership, and in particular focuses upon the apparent divide between ‘mere collectors’ and ‘entomologists’ as expressed within these journals. Crucially, the article argues that non-professional practitioners were active in defining their own distinct identities and thereby claiming scientific authority. Alongside the periodicals, the article makes use of the correspondence archive of the entomologist and periodical editor Henry Tibbats Stainton (1822–1892), which has hitherto not been subject to sustained analysis by historians.

The Science of Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donovan O. Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Christian Thought

This chapter examines broad transformations in Christian thought that came to pass over the course of the nineteenth century through exposure to new developments in the life sciences. Taking William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) as a starting point, it shows how a conception of an unchanging God that could be demonstrated through rational proof was affected by the new emphasis on change in the biological sciences, especially in the aftermath of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Rather than suggesting that these new themes weakened Christian faith, however, a close examination of Christian thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century shows that encounters with science energized Christian theology, philosophy, and practice. This trajectory culminated with the development of the psychology of religion, as exhibited by the American pragmatists William James and Charles S. Peirce. George Eliot’s Middlemarch serves as a guide to the complexity of these transformations.

Biological generality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean- Gaël Barbara
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Microscopic Level ◽  
Anatomy And Physiology ◽  
Biological Objects ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
The One

This article examines generality in biology by focusing on two French schools of anatomy: the discipline of anatomie générale that was founded in France in 1800 by Xavier Bichat and the one developed in the 1870s by Louis Ranvier at the Collège de France by means of microscopy. The works of Bichat and Ranvier involved the disciplines of anatomy and physiology. Bichat’s work, especially his research on tissues, is of interest for understanding which kind of concept of generality gained favor in the life sciences at the start of the nineteenth century. Ranvier’s later career sheds light on the ways that generality was searched for at the microscopic level and its significance in the discovery of real and minute biological objects. Following a discussion of Bichat and Ranvier’s anatomie générale, this article explores the two men’s interests in generality as an actor’s category.

Nietzsche’s Naturalism Clarified?

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Schacht
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Philosophical Position ◽  
Considerable Debate ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Rice University

Abstract“Nietzsche and naturalism” has rightly become a topic of great interest and considerable debate in recent years. Christian Emden, a German intellectual historian at Rice University (USA) and author of two previous books on aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, has made a useful contribution to consideration of this topic in his Nietzsche’s Naturalism (henceforth “NN”), by drawing attention to and exploring the intellectual context indicated in his subtitle: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century. This is the context in which Nietzsche was operating as his “naturalizing” thinking was developing; and an awareness of it may well be helpful to the understanding of some of his positions and claims. But how completely is Nietzsche’s thinking embedded in that context? Emden’s accounts of “Nietzsche’s naturalism” as a philosophical position, and of its relation to the various strands within that context he identifies, are both problematic in important respects.

Locating Rods and Cones: Microscopic Investigations of the Retina in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Berlin and Würzburg

2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jutta Schickore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physiological Function ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Rods And Cones ◽  
Morphological Studies ◽  
The Common ◽  
And Function ◽  
Microscopic Investigations

The ArgumentThis paper is concerned with the diversity of microscopic research in nineteenth-century life sciences. It examines how two researchers, Ernst Wilhelm Brücke and Heinrich Müller, investigated the structure and function of the retina. They did so in significantly different ways, thereby developing quite different accounts of this organ and its role in the process of vision. Both investigators were carrying out microscopic investigations, both were particularly concerned with interpreting their findings in terms of physiological function, and both employed the physical sciences in their microscopic research. Their approaches differed, however, with respect to the manner of handling and preparing the tissues, as well as with respect to the conceptual tools they applied to their findings.The cases indicate that the common tendency to associate microscopic research mainly with morphological studies of organic material is not appropriate. To understand nineteenth-century microscopy and its place in the sciences of life, close attention should be paid to the manner in which microscopic investigations were performed. It is only then that the flexibility and versatility of microscopic research comes into view.

scholarly journals Modern Living and Vital Race: Foucault and the Science of Life

2011 ◽  
pp. 97-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Beth Mader
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Modern Racism ◽  
Modern Era

The paper examines the relation between Foucault’s account of modern race and racism in the "Society Must Be Defended" lectures and his analysis of the emergence of the modern notion of life and its science in The Order of Things. In "Society Must Be Defended," Foucault uses the term ‘life’ both with respect to pre-modern and modern political regimes, arguing that in the pre-modern eras there was a particular relation of sovereign power to life and death that differs from the relation to life and death which prevails in the modern era. In The Order of Things, Foucault also discusses the concept of life and the historical emergence of the science of life, biology, in the nineteenth century. For Foucault, modern biological racism is a specifically scientific death sentence. The paper argues that the kind of death at issue in this modern racism must be understood in light of the new evolutionary accounts of life as a transorganismic continuity that emerge in the life sciences.

The Unity of the Life Sciences

2020 ◽  
pp. 188-226
Author(s):  
Stephen Gaukroger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
Central Argument

This chapter deals with the historical path in the life sciences, exploring attempts to unify evolutionary theory with other developments in the life sciences. The development of the life sciences in the nineteenth century not only involved the meeting of trajectories along two distinct and seemingly autonomous paths, the physiological and the historical, but the latter involved at least three distinct forms of enquiry which came to align themselves with one another, in a process of qualified mutual reinforcement rather than assimilation. The central argument is that the life sciences remain irreducibly pluralistic, despite the attempts at unification pursued by advocates of the ‘New Synthesis’, and in this capacity can act as a model for the sciences more generally.

Heredity, evolution and development in their (epistemic) environment at the turn of the nineteenth century

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-113
Author(s):  
Federica Turriziani Colonna
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Research Facility ◽  
Evolution And Development ◽  
Family Wealth ◽  
Material Basis ◽  
Evolutionary Changes ◽  
The One ◽  
Anton Dohrn

During the early 1870s a young zoologist who worked as a Privatdozent delivering lectures at different Prussian universities invested much of his family wealth and solicited his fellows' contributions to establish a research facility by the sea. The young zoologist happened to be called Anton Dohrn. From the time it opened its doors, the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station – or Naples Zoological Station, as it was originally called – played a crucial role in shaping life sciences as it facilitated research aimed at explaining the mechanics of inheritance. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, zoologists attempted to explain how evolutionary changes occur within a population and become stabilized. In so doing, they looked at developmental processes as well as environmental pressure, coming up with different hypotheses to explain inheritance. In some cases, their research was highly speculative, whereas in other cases they conducted cytological observations to identify the material basis of heredity. Research on evolution and development has been carried out in different places, and zoological stations like the one in Naples have played a major role in this story. However, numerous biological institutions active at the turn of the twentieth century have not received much attention from historians.

From Design to Dissolution: Thomas Chalmers' Debt to John Robison

1979 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crosbie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Present Note ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Major Transition ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Design In Nature

The claim that the nineteenth century was a period of major transition for the relation between theology and natural science has become a historical truism. With its implications for the design argument and the doctrines of divine providence, Darwin's theory of evolution has rightly attracted the attention of scholars of Victorian science. Yet so much emphasis not only on Darwin himself, but on the life sciences generally, has tended to obscure some important issues concerning the relation of theology to natural science in the first half of the nineteenth century. As John Brooke has argued recently, natural theology in this pre-Darwinian period was far from being an essentially static, autonomous, and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, but was, for various reasons, in a fragmented and disordered state. The general aim of the present note is to suggest some further dimensions to historical debates about the nature of natural theology, and in particular to emphasize the need for an examination of the physical sciences as well as the life sciences in this period.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document