John H. Zammito. The Gestation of German Biology

How different was the scientific study of life in the eighteenth century from that of the nineteenth century? This question has long been accorded special significance owing to the nearly simultaneous appearance of the word “biology” in the writings of several naturalists in the years immediately surrounding 1800. New word, new science, a new modernity—the debut of “biology” invokes one of history’s most iconic moments, with faint echoes of revolution in the background. John H. Zammito, whose distinguished career as an intellectual historian has focused mainly on investigations of Immanuel Kant’s thought and its context in the second half of the eighteenth century, wants readers to bear the question of biology in mind when approaching his book The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling. Accordingly, he opens with the (in)famous passage from Foucault’s Order of Things, in which Foucault denies that a concept of “life” as such existed before 1800. The choice of Foucault as epigrammatic straw man is certainly appropriate for Zammito’s narrative purposes, although by now this particular straw man has lost nearly all its stuffing. Yet even if we set Foucault aside, Zammito rightly claims that no synthetic treatment of the origins of biology has been attempted that closely links developments before 1800 to what came after. Most historians of science merely peer across 1800 into the foreign territory on the other side; they do not seek much to inhabit it.

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