Experimenting at the boundaries of life : organic vitality in Germany around 1800 / Joan Steigerwald.

By:

Steigerwald, Joan [author.]

Material type: Text

TextSeries: Science and culture in the nineteenth centuryPublisher: Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2019]Copyright date: ©2019Description: 1 online resource (ix, 460 pages)Content type:

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

9780822986621
0822986620

Subject(s): Genre/Form:

DDC classification:

570.943/09034 23

LOC classification:

QH305.2.G3 S74 2019eb

Online resources:

Click here to access online

Contents:

Organic vitality in the late eighteenth century : Lebenskräfte and experimental reasoning -- Kant's Critique of the power of judgment : organisms as reciprocally means and ends of themselves -- Blurring the boundaries of life : organic vitality and instruments of inquiry in the 1790s -- Jena connections : a science of knowledge, romantic aesthetics, and languages of nature -- Schelling's philosophy of life : boundary concepts and the natural history of the world soul -- The science of biology : organic vitality and the boundaries of life -- Conclusion: Afterlife.

Summary: "Attempts to distinguish a science of life at the turn of the nineteenth century faced a number of challenges. A central difficulty was clearly demarcating the living from the nonliving experimentally and conceptually. The more closely the boundaries between organic and inorganic phenomena were examined, the more they expanded and thwarted any clear delineation. Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life traces the debates surrounding the first articulations of a science of life in a variety of texts and practices centered on German contexts. Joan Steigerwald examines the experiments on the processes of organic vitality, such as excitability and generation, undertaken across the fields of natural history, physiology, physics and chemistry. She highlights the sophisticated reflections on the problem of experimenting on living beings by investigators, and relates these epistemic concerns directly to the philosophies of nature of Kant and Schelling. Her book skillfully ties these epistemic reflections to arguments by the Romantic writers Novalis and Goethe for the aesthetic aspects of inquiries into the living world and the figurative languages in which understandings of nature were expressed"-- Provided by publisher

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Materials specified	Status	Date due	Barcode
Electronic-Books	OPJGU Sonepat- Campus	E-Books EBSCO			Available

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Attempts to distinguish a science of life at the turn of the nineteenth century faced a number of challenges. A central difficulty was clearly demarcating the living from the nonliving experimentally and conceptually. The more closely the boundaries between organic and inorganic phenomena were examined, the more they expanded and thwarted any clear delineation. Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life traces the debates surrounding the first articulations of a science of life in a variety of texts and practices centered on German contexts. Joan Steigerwald examines the experiments on the processes of organic vitality, such as excitability and generation, undertaken across the fields of natural history, physiology, physics and chemistry. She highlights the sophisticated reflections on the problem of experimenting on living beings by investigators, and relates these epistemic concerns directly to the philosophies of nature of Kant and Schelling. Her book skillfully ties these epistemic reflections to arguments by the Romantic writers Novalis and Goethe for the aesthetic aspects of inquiries into the living world and the figurative languages in which understandings of nature were expressed"-- Provided by publisher

Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO; viewed July 2, 2019)

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