In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of \"The Critique of Judgment\" and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his \"cognitive\" turn, expanding the project from a \"Critique of Taste\" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an \"ethical\" turn. This \"ethical\" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and the \"Sturm und Drang\" movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a \"Kantian\" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. \"A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique.\"-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X \"An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the \"Critique of Pure Reason\" to the appearance of the \"Critique of Judgment.\"\"-John W. Burbidge, \"Review of Metaphysics\" \"There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's \"Critique of Judgment\"; Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it.\"-Frederick Beiser, \"Times Literary Supplement\

The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment.

This is the first major study of an episode in the development of the modern life sciences which — the author insists — has been deliberately written out of histories of the field up to now. The Th...

The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics

This paper presents what we call ‘Hegel's philosophy of biology’ to a target audience of both Hegel scholars and philosophers of biology. It also serves to introduce a special issue of the Hegel Bulletin entirely dedicated to a first mapping of this yet to be explored domain of Hegel studies. We submit that Hegel's philosophy of biology can be understood as a radicalization of the Kantian approach to organisms, and as prefiguring current philosophy of biology in important ways, especially with regard to the nature of biological organization, the role of teleology in biological explanation, and the relation between life and cognition.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/18429FDBB905BC2D0170E362AFB8C702/S2051536720000219a.pdf/div-class-title-hegel-s-philosophy-of-biology-a-programmatic-overview-div.pdf

Hegel's Philosophy of Biology? A Programmatic Overview

This paper seeks to characterize how the study of nutrition processes contributed to revisit the problem of vital organization in the late eighteenth century. It argues that focusing on nutrition leads to reformulate the problem of the relation between life and organization in terms of processes, rather than static or given structures. This nutrition-centered approach to life amounts to acknowledge the specific strategic role nutrition played in the development of a materialist approach to the generation of vital organization. The paper proposes a clarification of the multiple meanings of the concept of organization in the context of Enlightenment physiology and nascent biology, before focusing on the century long analogy between nutrition and generation. It shows how, by contrasting different uses of this analogy, nutrition was employed as a key vital phenomenon in the development of epigenetic theories of generation, i.e. how a nutritive modeling of generation was used in the undermining of preformationism. To this purpose I contrast two seemingly opposite theories of generation, Buffon’s and Bonnet’s, and show that despite the obvious metaphysical discontent, their views of generation share a common mechanical conceptual frame in which nutrition is conflated with growth and repair. I then turn to the role nutrition played in the epigenetic conception of generation in C. F. Wolff’s embryology and analyze this rival understanding of nutrition as an organizing process.

Between biology and chemistry in the Enlightenment: how nutrition shapes vital organization. Buffon, Bonnet, C.F. Wolff.

The mantra that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it” (attributed to the computer scientist Alan Kay) exemplifies some of the expectations from the technical and innovative sides of biomedical research at present. However, for technical advancements to make real impacts both on patient health and genuine scientific understanding, quite a number of lingering challenges facing the entire spectrum from protein biology all the way to randomized controlled trials should start to be overcome. The proposal in this chapter is that philosophy is essential in this process. By reviewing select examples from the history of science and philosophy, disciplines which were indistinguishable until the mid-nineteenth century, I argue that progress toward the many impasses in biomedicine can be achieved by emphasizing theoretical work (in the true sense of the word “theory”) as a vital foundation for experimental biology. Furthermore, a philosophical biology program that could provide a framework for theoretical investigations is outlined.

/pdf/analytic-philosophy-for-biomedical-research-the-imperative-16y0emgujj.pdf

Analytic Philosophy for Biomedical Research: The Imperative of Applying Yesterday’s Timeless Messages to Today’s Impasses

Philosophy of biology before biology
Edited by Cecilia Bognon-Kuss & Charles T. Wolfe 
 
Table of contents 


Cecilia Bognon-Kuss & Charles T. Wolfe. Introduction

1.	Cecilia Bognon-Kuss & Charles T. Wolfe. The idea of “philosophy of biology before biology”: a methodological provocation 

Part I. FORM AND DEVELOPMENT 

2.	Stephane Schmitt. Buffon’s theories of generation and the changing dialectics of molds and molecules
3.	Phillip Sloan. Metaphysics and “Vital” Materialism: The Gabrielle Du Châtelet Circle and French Vitalism
4.	John Zammito. The Philosophical Reception of C. F. Wolff’s Epigenesis in Germany, 1770-1790: Herder, Tetens and Kant

Part II. ORGANISM & ORGANIZATION
5.	Francois Duchesneau. Senebier and the Advent of General Physiology
6.	Tobias Cheung. Organization and Process. Living Systems Between Inner and Outer Worlds: Cuvier, Hufeland, Cabanis.

Part III. SYSTEMS
7.	Georg Toepfer. Philosophy of Ecology Long Before Ecology: Kant’s Idea of an Organized System of Organized Beings
8.	Ina Goy. "All is leaf". Goethe's plant philosophy and poetry
9.	Snait Gissis. ‘Biology’, Lamarck, Lamarckisms

POSTSCRIPTS
1.	Lynn Nyhart. A Historical Proposal Around Prepositions
2.	Philippe Huneman. Philosophy after Philosophy of Biology before Biology

Cecilia Bognon-Kuss and Charles T. Wolfe. Conclusion

Philosophy of Biology Before Biology

We argue for a conception of ‘philosophy of biology before biology’ which is neither internalist study of biological doctrines, nor a reconstruction of the role philosophical concepts might have played in the constitution of biology as science, but rather a kind of interplay between metaphysical and empirical issues. This should have an impact both on our present understanding of philosophy of biology, given that it is necessarily conditioned by a very specific history and historiography (particularly evolution-centred), and on our understanding of how biology as a science of life became unified.

The idea of ‘philosophy of biology before biology’

Vitalism was long viewed as the most grotesque view in biological theory: appeals to a mysterious life-force, Romantic insistence on the autonomy of life, or worse, a metaphysics of an entirely living universe. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to present a revised, lighter version that was not weighted down by revisionary metaphysics: " organicism ". And philosophers since the Vienna Circle (Schlick, Frank and later Nagel) criticized Driesch and Bergson's " neovitalism " as a too-strong ontological commitment to the existence of certain entities or " forces " , over and above the system of causal relations studied by mechanistic science, rejecting the weaker form, organicism, as well. But there has been some significant scholarly " push-back " against this orthodox attitude, notably pointing to the 18th-century Montpellier vitalists to show that there are different historical forms of vitalism, including how they relate to mainstream scientific practice (Wolfe and Normandin, eds. 2013). Additionally, some trends in recent biology that run counter to genetic reductionism and the informational model of the gene present themselves as organicist (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000, Moreno and Mossio 2015). Here, we examine Kairos. Journal of Philosophy & Science 20, 2018 Center for the Philosophy of Sciences of Lisbon University Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism 2 some cases of vitalism in the twentieth century and today, not just as a historical form but as a significant metaphysical and scientific model. We argue for vitalism's conceptual originality without either reducing it to mainstream models of science or presenting it as an alternate model of science, by focusing on historical forms of vitalism, logical empiricist critiques thereof and the impact of synthetic biology on current (re-)theorizing of vitalism.

/pdf/metaphysics-function-and-the-engineering-of-life-the-problem-35479tirut.pdf

Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism

We argue for a conception of ‘philosophy of biology before biology’ which is neither internalist study of biological doctrines, nor a reconstruction of the role philosophical concepts might have played in the constitution of biology as science, but rather a kind of interplay between metaphysical and empirical issues This should have an impact both on our present understanding of philosophy of biology, given that it is necessarily conditioned by a very specific history and historiography (particularly evolution-centred), and on our understanding of how biology as a science of life became unified

Cécilia Bognon-Küss

Papers

Between biology and chemistry in the Enlightenment: how nutrition shapes vital organization. Buffon, Bonnet, C.F. Wolff.

Philosophy of Biology Before Biology

The idea of ‘philosophy of biology before biology’

Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism

The idea of 'philosophy of biology before biology' : a methodological provocation