The Circulation of Morphological Knowledge
Understanding "Form" across Disciplines in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3452913 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marco Tamborini (0000-0001-7102-7479, Technische Universität Darmstadt, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 113 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 747-766 |
| Publication date | 2022-12-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Isis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/722439 |
| OpenAlex | W4313271667 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 38 |
This essay pushes the history of a scientific discipline, morphology, toward a broader philosophically informed and cross-disciplinarily engaged history of knowledge. It shows that by looking at how knowledge and practices circulated between scientific disciplines (such as biology) and technoscientific ones (like architecture and design) we can better understand how (morphological) knowledge was produced. By doing so, the analysis contributes to the study of the mechanisms of knowledge exchange between the organic and the technical worlds and, more broadly, to the study of the dynamics of knowledge circulation. First, the essay analyzes the engineering studies of organic form conducted by the Austro-Hungarian botanist Raoul Heinrich Francé (1874–1943) and the Scottish polymath D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948). Subsequently, the essay moves to twenty-first-century morphogenesis. It examines the transfer of the notion of morphospace, a paleontological practice of data visualization, into biology-inspired architectural design. The conclusion deals with the broader features of knowledge transfer and circulation. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century morphologists successfully translate and transfer morphogenetic processes from nature into technical artifacts to achieve technical solutions to given problems. In the translation of organic morphogenesis into a technical process, evolution's intrinsic historical contingency was deliberately left behind
Archaeology · Art history · Circulation (fluid dynamics · Contingency · Epistemology · Knowledge management · Knowledge transfer · Polymath · Process (computing · Sociology · Sociology of scientific knowledge · Architecture · Computer Science · Engineering · Historical and Literary Studies · History · History of Science and Natural History · Philosophy · Philosophy, Science, and History
Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influence 2023
Form and symbolism
The epistemic grammar of bioinspired technologies
The elephant in the room
Organic form and evolution
Selection, growth and form. Turing’s two biological paths towards intelligent machinery
The morphological paradigm in robotics
Towards an Ecology of Time
Landscapes and Labscapes
Beyond Representation
Fulfilling the Promise of the History of Knowledge
Series of forms, visual techniques, and quantitative devices
Neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but organicism
D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form and the Concept of Dynamic Form in Postwar Avant-Garde Art Theory
Making a Place for Science
Technoscientific approaches to deep time
The Return of the Organism as a Fundamental Explanatory Concept in Biology
The Image of Objectivity
Three truth-spots
| Citations per year | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |