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  1. Structuralism, functionalism, and the four Aristotelian causes.Olivier Rieppel - 1990 - Journal of the History of Biology 23 (2):291-320.
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  • Medical teaching at the University of Paris, 1600–1720.Laurence Brockliss - 1978 - Annals of Science 35 (3):221-251.
    The article traces the changes that occurred in the teaching of theoretical medicine at the University of Paris in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as the Faculty came under the influence of new medical ideas and discoveries. As a result it is essentially a study in the history of the transmission of ideas; the article illustrates how quickly and in what form these new ideas and discoveries became part of the common medical inheritance of one region of Europe. At (...)
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  • Winged Men and the Cast of Dice: Anti–Finalism and Radical Materialism in Guillaume Lamy.Filippo Del Lucchese - 2010 - Dialogue 49 (4):527-546.
    The controversy over teleology raged in the early modern period with particular intensity. In this paper, I will show that Guillaume Lamy represents a current of antifinalism, devoid of weakness, and far from compromise with his adversaries. This antifinalism makes of Lamy not so much a sincere supporter of the unknowability of God in other words, a proto but rather a radical Lucretian materialist, whose aim is to openly distance himself equally from the partial Cartesian rejection of final causes and (...)
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  • Epigenesis and the rationality of nature in William Harvey and Margaret Cavendish.Benjamin Goldberg - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (2):1-23.
    The generation of animals was a difficult phenomenon to explain in the seventeenth century, having long been a problem in natural philosophy, theology, and medicine. In this paper, I explore how generation, understood as epigenesis, was directly related to an idea of rational nature. I examine epigenesis—the idea that the embryo was constructed part-by-part, over time—in the work of two seemingly dissimilar English philosophers: William Harvey, an eclectic Aristotelian, and Margaret Cavendish, a radical materialist. I chart the ways that they (...)
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  • Diderot et d'Holbach: un système matérialiste de la nature.Josiane Boulad-Ayoub - 1985 - Dialogue 24 (1):59-.
    Je n'examinerai, au cours de cet article, que I'un des aspects du matérialisme de Diderot: la physionomie du théoricien de la nature, de l'auteur de I' Interprétation de la Nature, du Rêve de d'Alembert. Ces oeuvres versent au dossier du développement de la philosophie des sciences de la nature, une doctrine, le materialisme; une methodologie; un programme de recherche. Mais sur ce sujet on ne peut guere separer la réflexion de Diderot de celle de son ami d'Holbach, réflexion qui lui (...)
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  • The individuality of the species: A Darwinian theory? — From Buffon to Ghiselin, and back to Darwin. [REVIEW]Jean Gayon - 1996 - Biology and Philosophy 11 (2):215-244.
    Since the 1970s, there has been a tremendous amount of literature on Ghiselin's proposal that species are individuals. After recalling the origins and stakes of this thesis in contemporary evolutionary theory, I show that it can also be found in the writings of the French naturalist Buffon in the 18th Century. Although Buffon did not have the conception that one species could be derived from another, there is an interesting similarity between the modern argument and that of Buffon regarding the (...)
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  • Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism.Elliott Sober - 1980 - Philosophy of Science 47 (3):350-383.
    Ernst Mayr has argued that Darwinian theory discredited essentialist modes of thought and replaced them with what he has called "population thinking". In this paper, I characterize essentialism as embodying a certain conception of how variation in nature is to be explained, and show how this conception was undermined by evolutionary theory. The Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary gradualism makes it impossible to say exactly where one species ends and another begins; such line-drawing problems are often taken to be the decisive (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Kant’s epigenesis: specificity and developmental constraints.Boris Demarest - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (1):1-19.
    In this paper, I argue that Kant adopted, throughout his career, a position that is much more akin to classical accounts of epigenesis, although he does reject the more radical forms of epigenesis proposed in his own time, and does make use of preformationist sounding terms. I argue that this is because Kant (1) thinks of what is pre-formed as a species, not an individual or a part of an individual; (2) has no qualm with the idea of a specific, (...)
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  • Jacob versus Monod on the Natural Selection of Ideas.Pierre-Olivier Méthot - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (2):492-510.
    François Jacob’s The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity has shown an enduring relevance for the history and philosophy of biology. In this article, resisting the received view that regards this book merely as an application of Foucault’s archaeological method, I reconstruct a silent debate between François Jacob and Jacques Monod. More precisely, I argue that Jacob’s history of biology offers a riposte to Monod’s claims in Chance and Necessity. First, I show that the distinction between a “history of (...)
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  • The Lost Liquid Cosmogony of Johannes Daniel Schlichting (1705–1765).Justin Begley - 2020 - Perspectives on Science 28 (5):571-609.
    The focus of this paper is a fascinating but hitherto unstudied 1742 manuscript treatise by Johannes Daniel Schlichting (1705–1765) titled “Sapientiæ Problema” that contains something extremely rare in the mid-eighteenth century: a full-blown speculative cosmogony. As this article reveals, Schlichting developed a distinctive vital liquid matter in an effort to account for the generation of all natural bodies and combat the stamina-based theories that were dominant in his day. He hoped that his treatise would be published in the Philosophical Transactions (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Kant’s epigenesis: specificity and developmental constraints.Boris Demarest - 2016 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (1):3.
    In this paper, I argue that Kant adopted, throughout his career, a position that is much more akin to classical accounts of epigenesis, although he does reject the more radical forms of epigenesis proposed in his own time, and does make use of preformationist sounding terms. I argue that this is because Kant thinks of what is pre-formed as a species, not an individual or a part of an individual; has no qualm with the idea of a specific, teleological principle (...)
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  • (1 other version)Vital anti-mathematicism and the ontology of the emerging life sciences: from Mandeville to Diderot.Charles T. Wolfe - 2017 - Synthese:1-22.
    Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scientific field or cluster of (...)
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  • Descartes, the Sceptics, and the Rejection of Vitalism in Seventeenth-Century Physiology.Phillip R. Sloan - 1977 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 8 (1):1.
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  • From l'homme physique to l'homme moral and back: towards a history of Enlightenment anthropology.Robert Wokler - 1993 - History of the Human Sciences 6 (1):121-138.
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  • Folding into being: early embryology and the epistemology of rhythm.Janina Wellmann - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (1):17-33.
    Historians have often described embryology and concepts of development in the period around 1800 in terms of “temporalization” or “dynamization”. This paper, in contrast, argues that a central epistemological category in the period was “rhythm”, which played a major role in the establishment of the emerging discipline of biology. I show that Caspar Friedrich Wolff’s epigenetic theory of development was based on a rhythmical notion, namely the hypothesis that organic development occurs as a series of ordered rhythmical repetitions and variations. (...)
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  • Regulating Agents, Functional Interactions, and Stimulus-Reaction-Schemes: The Concept of “Organism” in the Organic System Theories of Stahl, Bordeu, and Barthez.Tobias Cheung - 2008 - Science in Context 21 (4):495-519.
    ArgumentIn this essay, I sketch a problem-based framework within which I locate the concept of “organism” in the system theories of Georg Ernst Stahl, Théophile Bordeu, and Paul-Joseph Barthez. Around 1700, Stahl coins the word “organism” for a certain concept of order. For him, the concept explains the form of order of living bodies that is categorically different from the order of other bodies or composites. At the end of the century, the “organism” as a specific form of order becomes (...)
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  • Malpighi, Swammerdam and the Colourful Silkworm: Replication and Visual Representation in Early Modern Science.Matthew Cobb - 2002 - Annals of Science 59 (2):111-147.
    In 1669, Malpighi published the first systematic dissection of an insect. The manuscript of this work contains a striking water-colour of the silkworm, which is described here for the first time. On repeating Malpighi's pioneering investigation, Swammerdam found what he thought were a number of errors, but was hampered by Malpighi's failure to explain his techniques. This may explain Swammerdam's subsequent description of his methods. In 1675, as he was about to abandon his scientific researches for a life of religious (...)
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  • From Vitalism to Animal Magnetism: The Mesmerist Experiments of Dr Jean-Emmanuel Gilibert.Arnaud Parent - 2020 - Acta Baltica Historiae Et Philosophiae Scientiarum 8 (1):72-95.
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  • Revisiting Enlightenment racial classification: time and the question of human diversity.Devin Vartija - 2021 - Intellectual History Review 31 (4):603-625.
    The Enlightenment is commonly held accountable for the rise of both racial classification and modern scientific racism. Yet this argument sits uneasily alongside the birth of a modern rights language and strong anticolonial perspectives within the same intellectual movement. This article seeks to make sense of this paradox by arguing that one of the contexts in which we can best understand eighteenth-century race concepts is humanity’s place in a transformed history of nature that brought together novel understandings of deep time (...)
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  • Retrospectives: Unconventional paths.Anita Guerrini - 2019 - British Journal for the History of Science 52 (4):696-706.
    I am the first to admit that my career has not followed a conventional path. But in talking to my colleagues, I am not sure that there is a conventional path to an academic career. This retrospective is both a look at how the profession has changed over the forty years since I began graduate school in the late 1970s, and a reflection on my own trajectory within that profession. Historiographical references reflect my own views and are not meant to (...)
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  • Ways of knowing: towards a historical sociology of science, technology and medicine.John V. Pickstone - 1993 - British Journal for the History of Science 26 (4):433-458.
    Among the many groups of scholars whose work now illuminates science, technology and medicine (STM), historians, it seems to me, have a key responsibility not just to elucidate change but to establish and explain variety. One of the big pictures we need is a model of the varieties of STM over time; one which does not presume the timeless existence of disciplines, or the distinctions between science, technology and medicine; a model which is both synchronic and diachronic, and both cognitive (...)
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  • (1 other version)Geração orgânica, acidente e herança na Carta xiv de Maupertuis.Maurício de Carvalho Ramos - 2004 - Scientiae Studia 2 (1):99-128.
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  • Form – A Matter of Generation: The Relation of Generation, Form, and Function in the Epigenetic Theory of Caspar F. Wolff.Elke Witt - 2008 - Science in Context 21 (4):649-664.
    ArgumentThe question, how organisms obtain their specific complex and functional forms, was widely discussed during the eighteenth century. The theory of preformation, which was the dominant theory of generation, was challenged by different alternative epigenetic theories. By the end of the century it was the vitalist approach most famously advocated by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach that prevailed. Yet the alternative theory of generation brought forward by Caspar Friedrich Wolff was an important contribution to the treatment of this question. He turned his (...)
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  • Mechanical and “Organical” Models in Seventeenth-Century Explanations of Biological Reproduction.Daniel C. Fouke - 1989 - Science in Context 3 (2):365-381.
    The ArgumentThe claim that Jan Swammerdam's empirical research did not support his theory of biological preformation is shown to rest on a notion of evidence narrower than that used by many seventeenth-century natural philosophers. The principles of evidence behind the use of mechanical models are developed. It is then shown that the Cartesian theory of biological reproduction and embryology failed to gain acceptance because it did not meet the evidential requirements of these principles. The problems in this and other mechanistic (...)
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  • (1 other version)Secrets of God, nature, and life1.Evelyn Fox Keller - 1990 - History of the Human Sciences 3 (2):229-242.
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  • (1 other version)Essay Review: Buffon Studies Today, Buffon: Un Philosophe au Jardin du Roi, Buffon 88: Actes du Colloque International pour le Bicentenaire de la Mort de Buffon, Les Sciences de la Vie dans la Pensée Française du xviiie Siècle.Phillip R. Sloan - 1994 - History of Science 32 (4):469-477.
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  • Invisible Architectures.Hans-Jörg Rheinberger - 2000 - Science in Context 13 (1):121-136.
    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. (...)
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  • Atheist Therapy: Radical Embodiment in Early Modern Medical Materialism.Charles Wolfe - forthcoming - Diametros:1-16.
    Materialism as a doctrine is, of course, a part of the history of philosophy, even if it was often a polemical construct, and it took until the 18th century for philosophers to be willing to call themselves materialists. Difficulties also have been pointed out in terms of “continuity,” i.e., does what Democritus, Lucretius, Hobbes and Diderot have to say about matter, the body and the soul all belong in one discursive and conceptual frame? Interestingly, materialism is also a classic figure (...)
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  • (1 other version)Vital anti-mathematicism and the ontology of the emerging life sciences: from Mandeville to Diderot.Charles T. Wolfe - 2019 - Synthese 196 (9):3633-3654.
    Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scientific field or cluster of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology.Amanda Jo Goldstein - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):13.
    Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique (...)
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  • Evolutionism in the Enlightenment.Peter J. Bowler - 1974 - History of Science 12 (3):159-183.
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  • (1 other version)Charles Bonnets allgemeine Systemtheorie organismischer Ordnung.Tobias Cheung - 2004 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 26 (2):177-207.
    In diesem Artikel geht es um die historische und konzeptuelle Entwicklung von Charles Bonnets (1720-1793) allgemeiner Systemtheorie organismischer Ordnung. Hierfür wird der Kontext von Bonnets Ansatz in Naturgeschichte und Philosophie rekonstruiert. Leitfaden zur Analyse von Bonnets Systemtheorie bildet das Problem der doppelten Verortung des Organischen: Zum einen unterscheiden sich organisierte Körper durch ihre Ordnungsform von allen nicht organisierten Körpern, und zum anderen reihen sie sich zusammen mit den nicht-organisierten Körpern in eine Stufenleiter der Wesen ein, die von den Elementen bis (...)
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  • Gassendi's atomist account of generation and heredity in plants and animals.Saul Fisher - 2003 - Perspectives on Science 11 (4):484-512.
    In his accounts of plant and animal generation Pierre Gassendi offers a mechanist story of how organisms create offspring to whom they pass on their traits. Development of the new organism is directed by a material “soul” or animula bearing ontogenetic information. Where reproduction is sexual, two sets of material semina and corresponding animulae meet and jointly determine the division, differentiation, and development of matter in the new organism. The determination of inherited traits requires a means of combining or choosing (...)
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  • Die Metamorphose der Bilder: Die Verwandlung der Insekten und ihre Darstellung vom Ende des 17. bis zum Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts.Janina Wellmann - 2008 - NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 16 (2):183-211.
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  • (1 other version)O jogo do erro e da verdade nos diálogos filosóficos de Voltaire.Stéphane Pujol - 2012 - Doispontos 9 (3).
    Tudo se passa como se a escrita filosófica de Voltaire se desenvolvesse em uma dupla oposição: de um lado, ela visa denunciar o palavrório dos fazedores de sistemas e a cacofonia a que ele conduz, opondo-lhes a prudência e a modéstia; de outro, ela pretende restaurar, contra a tentação cética, o direito à busca da verdade. Em Voltaire, o discurso filosófico nasce desta tensão, do desejo de dizer o mundo e da vontade de se calar, tensão que a escolha do (...)
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  • Species as a process.Olivier Rieppel - 2008 - Acta Biotheoretica (1-2):33-49.
    Species are generally considered to be the basic units of evolution, and hence to constitute spatio-temporally bounded entities. In addition, it has been argued that species also instantiate a natural kind. Evolution is fundamentally about change. The question then is how species can remain the same through evolutionary change. Proponents of the species qua individuals thesis individuate species through their unique evolutionary origin. Individuals, or spatio-temporally located particulars in general, can be bodies, objects, events, or processes, or a combination of (...)
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  • Can Matter Mark the Hours? Eighteenth-Century Vitalist Materialism and Functional Properties.Timo Kaitaro - 2008 - Science in Context 21 (4):581-592.
    ArgumentEighteenth-century Montpellerian vitalism and contemporaneous French “vitalist” materialism, exemplified by the medical and biological materialism of La Mettrie and Diderot, differ in some essential aspects from some later forms of vitalism that tended to postulate immaterial vital principles or forces. This article examines the arguments defending the existence of vital properties in living organisms presented in the context of eighteenth-century French materialism. These arguments had recourse to technological metaphors and analogies, mainly clockworks, in order to claim that just as machines (...)
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  • (1 other version)Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology.Amanda Jo Goldstein - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):1-27.
    Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique (...)
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  • Ageing in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.Sarah Carvallo - 2010 - Science in Context 23 (3):267-288.
    ArgumentAt the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, ageing was specifically a medical issue. Indeed, on the one hand, ageing is a normal process of living; on the other hand, old age often entails specific pathologies. Is it really possible to dissociate old age from pathology? If so, how can we think of old age and explain both the necessity and the normality of it? If not, what is the cause of this dysfunction? Modern medical controversies (...)
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  • Irritability and Sensibility: Key Concepts in Assessing the Medical Doctrines of Haller and Bordeu.Dominique Boury - 2008 - Science in Context 21 (4):521-535.
    ArgumentThis article addresses the doctrinal controversy over the various characterizations of irritability and sensibility. In the middle of the eighteenth century, this scientific debate involved some encyclopaedist physicians, Albrecht von Haller (1709–1777), Jean-Jacques Ménuret de Chambaud (1733–1815), and Théophile de Bordeu (1722–1776). The doctor from Bern described irritability as an experimental property of the muscle fibers and made it the basis of a neo-mechanism in which organic reactions are related to the degree of irritation of the fibers. The practitioners from (...)
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  • In the Cradle of Heredity; French Physicians and L'Hérédité Naturelle in the Early 19th Century.Carlos López-Beltrán - 2004 - Journal of the History of Biology 37 (1):39 - 72.
    This paper argues that our modern concept of biological heredity was first clearly introduced in a theoretical and practical setting by the generation of French physicians that were active between 1810 and 1830. It describes how from a traditional focus on hereditary transmission of disease, influential French medical men like Esquirol, Fodéré, Piorry, Lévy, moved towards considering heredity a central concept for the conception of the human bodily frame, and its set of physical and moral dispositions. The notion of heredity (...)
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  • Images and Ideas: Leeuwenhoek’s Perception of the Spermatozoa.Edward G. Ruestow - 1983 - Journal of the History of Biology 16 (2):185-224.
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  • « What is the best theory of generation? » : Argumentation et débats d’étudiants en médecine à La Société Royale de médecine d’Édimbourg au dix-huitième siècle.Sophie Vasset - 2016 - Revue de Synthèse 137 (3):301-319.
    RésuméCet article propose d’aborder différemment la longue querelle de la génération, qui divise les ovistes, les spermistes et les partisans de l’épigénèse tout au long des 17e et 18e en Europe. Plutôt que d’en définir les acteurs à partir des publiants, à savoir les médecins ou naturalistes français, anglais et européens qui contredisent les théories ovistes ou spermistes de leurs pairs, je chercherai à poser quelques questions en marge de cette querelle : que reste-t-il d’une querelle une fois qu’elle semble (...)
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  • D’Alembert et la chaîne des sciences.François de Gandt - 1994 - Revue de Synthèse 115 (1-2):39-53.
    D’Alembert a plusieurs fois exprimé sa conviction qu’une chaîne unissait tous les êtres naturels. C’est un thème métaphysique traditionnel, qui revient à la mode vers 1750, et qui manifeste l’influence de Leibniz. S’agit-il d’une chaîne des êtres ou des sdences? D’Alembert s’inspire de Descartes dans la description de l’ordre du savoir.
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  • Bonnet and Buffon: Theories of generation and the problem of species.Peter J. Bowler - 1973 - Journal of the History of Biology 6 (2):259-281.
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  • How to make oneself nature's spokesman? A Latourian account of classification in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century natural history.Dirk Stemerding - 1993 - Biology and Philosophy 8 (2):193-223.
    Classification in eighteenth-century natural history was marked by a battle of systems. The Linnaean approach to classification was severely criticized by those naturalists who aspired to a truly natural system. But how to make oneself nature''s spokesman? In this article I seek to answer that question using the approach of the French anthropologist of science Bruno Latour in a discussion of the work of the French naturalists Buffon and Cuvier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These naturalists followed very (...)
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  • (2 other versions)The organism as reality or as fiction: Buffon and beyond.Boris Demarest & Charles T. Wolfe - 2016 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (1):3.
    In this paper, we reflect on the connection between the notions of organism and organisation, with a specific interest in how this bears upon the issue of the reality of the organism. We do this by presenting the case of Buffon, who developed complex views about the relation between the notions of “organised” and “organic” matter. We argue that, contrary to what some interpreters have suggested, these notions are not orthogonal in his thought. Also, we argue that Buffon has a (...)
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  • Rationalité Contextuelle et Présupposé Cognitif le cas Lombroso.Marc Renneville - 1997 - Revue de Synthèse 118 (4):495-529.
    Il est proposé une réflexion épistémologique sur la posture que l'historien des sciences humaines peut adopter vis-à-vis de ses objets d'investigation. La théorie du « criminel-né » de Cesare Lombroso, produite dans le dernier tiers du x1xe siècle est prise ici comme exemple et support pour la discussion parce qu'elle apparaît comme un cas limite, presque caricatural, tant par sa formulation initiale que par son traitement dans la mémoire disciplinaire. Les approches normatives ou « présentistes » ne pouvant rendre compte (...)
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  • (1 other version)Secrets of God, nature, and life1.Keller Evelyn Fox - 1990 - History of the Human Sciences 3 (2):229-242.
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  • Metaphoric BotaniesConjectures on the Renaissance Fœtus.Taylor Yoonji Kang - 2022 - Revue de Synthèse 143 (1-2):179-204.
    The Renaissance witnessed a proliferation in medical discourse, pedagogical illustration, and popular rhetoric – what I refer to here as “metaphoric botanies” – comparing the human fœtus, or embryo, to a plant. Far from being a mere linguistic inheritance from ancient medicine, such “metaphoric botanies” not only allowed early moderns to conceive of the unobservable development of the human fœtus, but also emphasized the relation of the mother to the unborn child. Much of the “metaphoric botanies” surrounding the fœtus throughout (...)
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