Epigenesis by experience: Romantic empiricism and non-Kantian biology

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):13 (2017)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

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 amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought’s critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of “self-organization,” allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Kant on epigenesis, monogenesis and human nature: The biological premises of anthropology.Alix A. Cohen - 2006 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (4):675-693.
Kant’s epigenesis: specificity and developmental constraints.Boris Demarest - 2016 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (1):3.
Epigenesis as Spinozism in Diderot’s biological project (draft).Charles T. Wolfe - 2014 - In O. Nachtomy J. E. H. Smith (ed.), The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford University Press. pp. 181-201.
The Romantic Conception of Robert J. Richards.Ruse Michael - 2004 - Journal of the History of Biology 37 (1):3 - 23.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-12-14

Downloads
27 (#506,730)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

Introduction: sketches of a conceptual history of epigenesis.Antonine Nicoglou & Charles T. Wolfe - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (4):64.
Humboldt, Darwin, and romantic resonance in science.Xuansong Liu - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 92 (C):196-208.
Hölderlin’s higher enlightenment.Camilla Flodin - 2020 - In Karl Axelsson, Camilla Flodin & Mattias Pirholt (eds.), Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. pp. 258-276.
Conceiving reproduction in German Naturphilosophie. Introduction.Susanne Lettow - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-15.

Add more citations