Staffan Müller-Wille
Biographic Data
| ID | 232667 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Staffan Müller-Wille |
| GIVEN NAMES | Staffan |
| FAMILY NAME | Müller-Wille |
| SIGNATURE | MÜLLER-WILLE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4929-8373 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 138 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Book Forum
In the shadow of the tree
The preferred tool for conceptualizing, determining, and claiming relations of kinship, ancestry, and descent among humans are diagrams. For this reason, and at the same time to avoid a reduction to biology as transported by terms such as kinship , ancestry , and descent , we introduce the expression diagrammatics of relatedness . We seek to understand the enormous influence that especially tree diagrams have had as a way to express and engage wi…
The Politics of Making Kinship
The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no lon…
Chapter 3. Race and Kinship
Hospitality and Knowledge
Recent science studies emphasize that knowledge is generated through transit and encounters. If so, knowledge production depends on forms and dynamics of hosting and hospitality. We suggest hospitability is a crucial factor shaping intercultural knowledge creation and transfer. Using results from a research project on Carl Linnaeus's Laplandic Journey , we address the relationship between hospitability and knowledge construction. While in later r…
Cycles and circulation
We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biol…
Punnett squares and hybrid crosses
The rapid reception of Gregor Mendel's paper ‘Experiments on plant hybrids’ (1866) in the early decades of the twentieth century remains poorly understood. We will suggest that this reception should not exclusively be investigated as the spread of a theory, but also as the spread of an experimental and computational protocol. Early geneticists used Mendel's paper, as well as reviews of Mendelian experiments in a variety of other publications, to …
Of elephants and errors
Handbuch Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Handbuch Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Names and Numbers
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the transition from natural history to the history of nature. This essay analyzes institutional, social, and technological changes in natural history associated with this epochal change. Focusing on the many posthumous reeditions of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae that began to appear throughout Europe and beyond from the 1760s onward, I will argue that Linnaean nomenclature and classificatio…
Worlds of Paper
No description available
Carl Linnaeus's botanical paper slips (1767–1773)
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Intellectual History Review on 02/06/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17496977.2014.914643
Race and History
The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus's (1735) Systema naturae and the demise of racial typologies after World War II (WWII) in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quotation marks that almost invariably surround the term. "Race" is placed outside of rational disco…
Systems and How Linnaeus Looked at Them in Retrospect
A famous debate between John Ray, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Augustus Quirinus Rivinus at the end of the seventeenth century has often been referred to as signalling the beginning of a rift between classificatory methods relying on logical division and classificatory methods relying on empirical grouping. Interestingly, a couple of decades later, Linnaeus showed very little excitement in reviewing this debate, and this although he was the fi…
A Cultural History of Heredity
It was only around 1800 that heredity began to enter debates among physicians, breeders, and naturalists. Soon thereafter it evolved into one of the most fundamental concepts of biology. Here Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger offer a succinct cultural history of the scientific concept of heredity. They outline the dramatic changes the idea has undergone since the early modern period and describe the political and technological develo…
Thinking plants
Peter Ayres, The aliveness of plants: the Darwins at the dawn of plant science. Pickering & Chatto, London, 2007. Pp. xiii + 227, £60.00 (hardback). ISBN-978-1-85196-970-8. It has often been noted that the synthetic theory of evolution in the 1930s and 1940s was mainly the work of zoologists such
Rezension
Lists as Research Technologies
The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is famous for having turned botany into a systematic discipline, through his classification systems--most notably the sexual system--and his nomenclature. Throughout his life, Linnaeus experimented with various paper technologies designed to display information synoptically. The list took pride of place among these and is also the common element of more complex representations he produced, such as …
Making sense of essentialism
Natural history and information overload
Natural History can be seen as a discipline paradigmatically engaged in 'data-driven research.' Historians of early modern science have begun to emphasize its crucial role in the Scientific Revolution, and some observers of present day genomics see it as engaged in a return to natural history practices. A key concept that was developed to understand the dynamics of early modern natural history is that of 'information overload.' Taxonomic systems,…
Appropriating and Translating Darwin
Rezension
Claude Lévi-Strauss on race, history and genetics
The cell as nexus
Natural history and information overload
Natural History can be seen as a discipline paradigmatically engaged in 'data-driven research.' Historians of early modern science have begun to emphasize its crucial role in the Scientific Revolution, and some observers of present day genomics see it as engaged in a return to natural history practices. A key concept that was developed to understand the dynamics of early modern natural history is that of 'information overload.' Taxonomic systems,…
Nature as a Marketplace
Research Article| December 01 2003 Nature as a Marketplace: The Political Economy of Linnaean Botany Staffan Müller-Wille Staffan Müller-Wille Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2003) 35 (Suppl_1): 154–172. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-35-Suppl_1-154 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Staffan Müller-Wille; Nature as a Marketpla…
Lists as Research Technologies
The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is famous for having turned botany into a systematic discipline, through his classification systems--most notably the sexual system--and his nomenclature. Throughout his life, Linnaeus experimented with various paper technologies designed to display information synoptically. The list took pride of place among these and is also the common element of more complex representations he produced, such as …
Collection and collation
Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland
Argument During the early modern period, European naturalists were confronted with a rapidly growing body of new objects due to the recent geographic discoveries. According to Bruno Latour's model of "action at a distance" naturalists managed this situation by mobilizing and stabilizing specimens and inscriptions at the periphery of the known world, as well as accumulating, reshuffling, and processing that material in "centers of calculation." Th…
Carl Linnaeus's botanical paper slips (1767–1773)
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Intellectual History Review on 02/06/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17496977.2014.914643
Names and Numbers
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the transition from natural history to the history of nature. This essay analyzes institutional, social, and technological changes in natural history associated with this epochal change. Focusing on the many posthumous reeditions of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae that began to appear throughout Europe and beyond from the 1760s onward, I will argue that Linnaean nomenclature and classificatio…
Systems and How Linnaeus Looked at Them in Retrospect
A famous debate between John Ray, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Augustus Quirinus Rivinus at the end of the seventeenth century has often been referred to as signalling the beginning of a rift between classificatory methods relying on logical division and classificatory methods relying on empirical grouping. Interestingly, a couple of decades later, Linnaeus showed very little excitement in reviewing this debate, and this although he was the fi…
Cycles and circulation
We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biol…
Hybrids, pure cultures, and pure lines
Early Mendelism and the subversion of taxonomy
Race and History
The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus's (1735) Systema naturae and the demise of racial typologies after World War II (WWII) in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quotation marks that almost invariably surround the term. "Race" is placed outside of rational disco…
Cell theory, specificity, and reproduction, 1837–1870
Worlds of Paper
No description available
A translation of Carl Linnaeus’s introduction to Genera plantarum (1737)
Hospitality and Knowledge
Recent science studies emphasize that knowledge is generated through transit and encounters. If so, knowledge production depends on forms and dynamics of hosting and hospitality. We suggest hospitability is a crucial factor shaping intercultural knowledge creation and transfer. Using results from a research project on Carl Linnaeus's Laplandic Journey , we address the relationship between hospitability and knowledge construction. While in later r…
Of elephants and errors
History Redoubled
As Michel Foucault has shown in his classic Les mots et les choses , natural history evolved over this period into ?a general science of order? possessing its own ?area of empiricity?, organized by ?taxinomia? or the ?arrangement of identities and differences into ordered tables?. Foucault?s observation draws attention to two aspects of the Baconian legacy. First, it depended on the development of novel technologies of formalizing and arranging i…
Qualitates vegetabilium," "vires medicamentorum" und "oeconomicus usus plantarum" bei Carl von Linné (1707-1778)
"Plantae quaecunque genere conveniunt, etiam viribus propius accedunt" (Whatever plants agree generically also approach each other in their powers). Even this apparently self-evident principle of analogical reasoning guiding pharmacology in its search for new drugs has a historical origin: it was not formulated in a prominent and influential place before 1735, the year in which Carolus Linnaeus, then a twenty-eight-year-old student of medicine fr…
Nature as a Marketplace
Research Article| December 01 2003 Nature as a Marketplace: The Political Economy of Linnaean Botany Staffan Müller-Wille Staffan Müller-Wille Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2003) 35 (Suppl_1): 154–172. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-35-Suppl_1-154 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Staffan Müller-Wille; Nature as a Marketpla…
Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland
Argument During the early modern period, European naturalists were confronted with a rapidly growing body of new objects due to the recent geographic discoveries. According to Bruno Latour's model of "action at a distance" naturalists managed this situation by mobilizing and stabilizing specimens and inscriptions at the periphery of the known world, as well as accumulating, reshuffling, and processing that material in "centers of calculation." Th…
Early Mendelism and the subversion of taxonomy
Heredity Produced
A translation of Carl Linnaeus’s introduction to Genera plantarum (1737)
Hybrids, pure cultures, and pure lines
Collection and collation
Rezension
History Redoubled
As Michel Foucault has shown in his classic Les mots et les choses , natural history evolved over this period into ?a general science of order? possessing its own ?area of empiricity?, organized by ?taxinomia? or the ?arrangement of identities and differences into ordered tables?. Foucault?s observation draws attention to two aspects of the Baconian legacy. First, it depended on the development of novel technologies of formalizing and arranging i…
Claude Lévi-Strauss on race, history and genetics
The cell as nexus
Cell theory, specificity, and reproduction, 1837–1870
Rezension
Making sense of essentialism
Natural history and information overload
Natural History can be seen as a discipline paradigmatically engaged in 'data-driven research.' Historians of early modern science have begun to emphasize its crucial role in the Scientific Revolution, and some observers of present day genomics see it as engaged in a return to natural history practices. A key concept that was developed to understand the dynamics of early modern natural history is that of 'information overload.' Taxonomic systems,…
Appropriating and Translating Darwin
Rezension
A Cultural History of Heredity
It was only around 1800 that heredity began to enter debates among physicians, breeders, and naturalists. Soon thereafter it evolved into one of the most fundamental concepts of biology. Here Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger offer a succinct cultural history of the scientific concept of heredity. They outline the dramatic changes the idea has undergone since the early modern period and describe the political and technological develo…
Thinking plants
Peter Ayres, The aliveness of plants: the Darwins at the dawn of plant science. Pickering & Chatto, London, 2007. Pp. xiii + 227, £60.00 (hardback). ISBN-978-1-85196-970-8. It has often been noted that the synthetic theory of evolution in the 1930s and 1940s was mainly the work of zoologists such
Rezension
Lists as Research Technologies
The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is famous for having turned botany into a systematic discipline, through his classification systems--most notably the sexual system--and his nomenclature. Throughout his life, Linnaeus experimented with various paper technologies designed to display information synoptically. The list took pride of place among these and is also the common element of more complex representations he produced, such as …
Systems and How Linnaeus Looked at Them in Retrospect
A famous debate between John Ray, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Augustus Quirinus Rivinus at the end of the seventeenth century has often been referred to as signalling the beginning of a rift between classificatory methods relying on logical division and classificatory methods relying on empirical grouping. Interestingly, a couple of decades later, Linnaeus showed very little excitement in reviewing this debate, and this although he was the fi…
Worlds of Paper
No description available
Carl Linnaeus's botanical paper slips (1767–1773)
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Intellectual History Review on 02/06/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17496977.2014.914643
Philosophy (25 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Biology (15 works) · History (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · History (10 works) · History of Science and Natural History (10 works) · Political science (9 works)