Remapping Biology with Goethe, Schelling, and Herder: Romanticizing Evolution [Paperback]

This book recruits a Romantic philosophy of biology into contemporary debates to both integrate the theoretical implications of ecology, evolution, and development, and to contextualize the successes of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesiss genes-eye-view of biology.

Gregory Rupik is an historian and philosopher of biology whose research explores the intersections of Romantic and contemporary investigations of life. He has also written on perspectival pluralism and integrated history and philosophy of science (iHPS), and is co-editor of Scientonomy: The Challenge of Constructing a Theory of Scientific Change (2021). He is Director of the Office of the President at the University of St. Michaels College in Toronto, and a graduate of the University of Torontos Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.

Introduction?

1. What the Philosophy of Biology Is Not?

2. Introducing Metamorphic Organicism Why Romantic Biology??

3. The Formation of Metamorphic Organicism Active Productivity and Ateleological Propagation?

4. Features of Metamorphic Organicism?

5. What the Philosophy of Biology Could Be: Towards an Evolutionary Metamorphic Organicism?

Conclusion

In this critical but incredibly informed analysis, Gregory Rupik argues that, for over fifty years, philosophical analyses of biology have been cripplingly short-sighted. They ignore themes, pertaining to evolution and related subjects, that were highlighted and developed by Romantic thinkers, starting with the polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Rupik does not deny the contributions of Charles Darwin and others guided by a machine root metaphor, but he makes a very strong case for saying that those who ignore the Romantics organism root metaphor are impoverished thinkers. AglSÍ