Morphogenesis is one of the fundamental processes of developing life. Gastrulation, especially, marks a period of major translocations and bustling rearrangements of cells that give rise to the three germ layers. It was also one of the earliest fields in biology where cell movement and behaviour in living specimens were investigated. This article examines scientific attempts to understand gastrulation from the point of view of cells in motion. It argues that the study of morphogenesis in the twentieth century faced a (...) major dilemma, both epistemological and pictorial: representing form and understanding movement are mutually exclusive, as are understanding form and representing movement. The article follows various ways of modelling, imaging, and simulating gastrular processes, from the early twentieth century to present-day systems biology. The first section examines the tactile modelling of shape changes, the second cell cinematography, mainly the pioneering work of the German embryologists Friedrich Kopsch and Ernst Ludwig Gräper in the 1920s but also a series of classic, yet not widely known, studies of the 1960s. The third section deals with the changes that computer simulation and live-cell imaging introduced to the modelling of shape change and the study of cell movement at the turn of the twenty-first century. Although live-cell imaging promises to experiment upon and represent the living body simultaneously, I argue that the new visuals are an obstacle rather than a solution to the puzzle of understanding cell motion. (shrink)

This issue ofScience in Contextis dedicated to the question of whether there was a “cinematographic turn” in the sciences around the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1895, the Lumière brothers presented their projection apparatus to the Parisian public for the first time. In 1897, the Scottish medical doctor John McIntyre filmed the movement of a frog's leg; in Vienna, in 1898, Ludwig Braun made film recordings of the contractions of a living dog's heart (cf. Cartwright 1992); in 1904, Lucien (...) Bull filmed in slow motion a bullet entering a soap bubble. In 1907 and 1908, respectively, Max Seddig and Victor Henri recorded Brownian motion with the help of a cinematograph (Curtis 2005). In 1909, the Swiss Julius Ries was one of the first to film fertilization and cell division in sea urchins (Ries 1909). In that same year in Paris, Louise Chevroton and Frédéric Vlès used a film camera to observe cell division in the same object (Chevroton and Vlès 1909). As early as 1898, the Parisian surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen began filming several of his operations, among them the spectacular separation of the Siamese twins Doodica and Radica (Bonah and Laukötter 2009). And in England, the scientist and zoologist Francis Martin Duncan produced an array of popular-scientific films for Charles Urban: “The unseen world: A series of microscopic studies” was presented to the public in the Alhambra Theatre in London for the first time in 1903 (see Gaycken in this issue). (shrink)

With the recent advent of systems biology, developmental biology is taking a new turn. Attempts to create a ‘digital embryo’ are prominent among systems approaches. At the heart of these systems-based endeavours, variously described as ‘in vivoimaging’, ‘live imaging’ or ‘in totorepresentation’, are visualization techniques that allow researchers to image whole, live embryos at cellular resolution over time. Ultimately, the aim of the visualizations is to build a computer model of embryogenesis. This article examines the role of such visualization techniques (...) in the building of a computational model, focusing, in particular, on the cinematographic character of these representations. It asks how the animated representation of development may change the biological understanding of embryogenesis. By situating the animations of the digital embryo within the iconography of developmental biology, it brings to light the inextricably entwined, yet shifting, borders between the animated, the living and the computational. (shrink)

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. (...) Presenting Christian Heinrich Pander’s and Karl Ernst von Baer’s theory of germ layers, I argue that Pander and Baer regarded folding as an organizing principle of ontogenesis, and that the principle’s explanatory power stems from their understanding of folding as a rhythmical figuration. In a brief discussion of the notion of rhythm in contemporary music theory, I identify an underlying physiological epistemology in the new musical concept of rhythm around 1800. The paper closes with a more general discussion of the relationship between the rhythmic episteme, conceptions of life, and aesthetic theory at the end of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Allgemeine einleitung. Vorsokratische philosophie. 6. aufl. 1. hälfte. Mit unterstüzung von dr. Franz Lorzing hrsg. von dr. Wilhelm Nestle. 2. hälfte. Hrsg. von dr. Wilhelm. Nestle. 1919-20.--2. t., abt. Sokrates und die Sokratiker. 5. aufl. (obraldruck) Mit einem anhang von dr. Ernst Hoffmann: Der gegenwärtige stand der Platon-forschung. 1922.--2. t., 2. abt. Aristoteles und die Alten peripatetlker. 4. aufl. (obraldruck) 1921.--3. t., 1 abt Die nacharistotellsche philosophie, 1. hälfte. 4. aufl., hrsg. von dr. Eduard Wellmann. 1909.--3. t., 2. abt. Die (...) nacharistotellsche philosophie. 2.hälfte. 4. aufl. 1903. (shrink)

Over the course of the last three decades, computer simulations have become a major tool of doing science and engaging with the world, not least in an effort to predict and intervene in a future to come. Born in the context of the Second World War and the discipline of physics, simulations have long spread into most diverse fields of enquiry and technological application. This paper introduces a topical collection focussing on simulations in the life sciences. Echoing the current state (...) of tinkering, fast developments, segmentation of knowledge and interdisciplinary collaboration, and in an effort to bridge the science-humanities divide, the contributors to this collection come from multiple disciplinary backgrounds, including information studies, cognitive sciences, philosophy and biology. The ambiguous character of simulations, their cutting across scientific disciplines, analysis and prediction, understanding and doing, gave rise to their success in contemporary life sciences and has been the object of much scientific debate. One of the main aims of this topical collection, by contrast, is to call into question the assumption of an obvious use and easy transfer of methods between fields of knowledge as diverse as, e.g. physics and biology. The collection presents historical case studies from various biological sub-fields. The articles study how simulations are used and the ways they contribute specifically to our understanding of life. Taking up Sergio Sismondo’s description of simulations as “compromises” and “glue”, they also critically engage with the question of what exactly the life sciences have been gluing together over the last two decades. (shrink)

Issue number 4 of "SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" is devoted to the Dutch philosopher François Hemsterhuis and 250th anniversary of the birth of the German romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. This fourth issue of the journal contains nearly 600 pages of new research articles, translations, review-essays, and book reviews. The main section on Hemsterhuis among the German Romantics was guest edited by Daniel Whistler (Royal Holloway, University of London).

This third 2021 issue of "SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" contains a main dossier of new research articles guest edited by Leif Weatherby (New York University) and devoted to the topic of early German romanticism and science. In addition to the papers of this main section issue number 3 of SYMPHILOSOPHIE includes translations of primary sources and book reviews. All contents are freely available online.

Die Entdeckung des Straßburger Empedokles-Papyrus und seine 1999 erfolgte Publikation war für die Erforschung der antiken Philosophie ein einzigartiger Glücksfall. Die neu hinzugekommenen Texte ergänzten die fragmentarische Überlieferung von Empedokles’ naturphilosophischem Lehrgedicht Physika (so der in der Antike gebräuchliche Titel) an entscheidenden Stellen. Allerdings wurde das Potenzial des Papyrus zur Klärung ungelöster Interpretationsprobleme in der auf die Veröffentlichung folgenden Forschungsdiskussion noch nicht ausgeschöpft. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird auf der Basis einer kontinuierlichen inhaltlichen und sprachlichen Analyse des Textes eine Gesamtrekonstruktion (...) des empedokleischen Theoriegebäudes vorgelegt. Untersucht werden dabei vor allem die zyklische Struktur allen Werdens, die Funktionen von Liebe und Streit, die einzelnen Stadien von Kosmogonie und Zoogonie und das inhaltliche Verhältnis von Physika und einem weiteren Gedicht des Autors, den Katharmoi. Die Ergebnisse werden abschließend auch in einer neuen Übersetzung der durch Einbeziehung des Straßburger Papyrus wiedergewonnenen Teile des Gedichts zusammengeführt. (shrink)

The IVR did not spring into existence instantaneously. In 1907, Dr. iur. Josef Kohler and Dr. iur. Fritz Berolzheimer observed that the interest in the philosophy of law and in economic philosophy had grown over the past few years and that its future development required the international cooperation of many scholars. Therefore they decided to found the Internationale Vereinigung für Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie, to be known as the IVR, and its journal, the Archiv für Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie. Although the journal (...) was established before the end of 1907, the IVR did not come into existence until 1909, when its constitution was officially registered in Berlin by Josef Kohler, Fritz Berolsheimer and Carl Fürstenberg. (shrink)

In the wake of the massive criticism of Kant’s deduction of the categories in the first Critique, Fichte starts providing what he takes an improved version of such a deduction to be. This article aims at investigating the transformation he thereby introduces into the Kantian thought. I will do so mainly with respect to the deduction’s architectonical dimension, i.e. by investigating the role of the deduction for the Wissenschaftslehre as a whole. Concretely, I will defend the following theses: (1) By (...) identifying the deduction of the categories and the metaphysical system, Fichte moves away both from Kant’s conception of a system and from that of a deduction. (2) It is the unique character of Fichte’s conception of a first principle of a system that allows for an identification between system and deduction. (shrink)

This issue 23 of FICHTEANA is dedicated to Daniel Breazeale, who passed away on 30 December 2023. -/- "FICHTEANA Review of J.G. Fichte Research" is an annual online publication in English devoted to new scholarship on the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It publishes information and reviews of the latest Fichte editions, books, publications, conferences, and Calls for Papers. Originally founded by Daniel Breazeale in 1993, since issue 22 (2022), FICHTEANA has appeared in an expanded form with book reviews. Editors: Daniel (...) Breazeale (†) and David W. Wood; with associate editors Kienhow Goh and Gesa Wellmann. -/- . (shrink)