Gambarotto Andrea
IHPST, 13, Rue du four, 75006 Paris, France.
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 2014 Dec;48 Pt A:12-20. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.07.007. Epub 2014 Aug 28.
The historical literature on German life science at the end of the 18th century has tried to rehabilitate eighteenth century vitalism by stressing its difference from Naturphilosophie. Focusing on the work of Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer this paper argues that these positions are based on a historiographical bias and that the clear-cut boundary between German vitalism and Naturphilosophie is historically unattested. On the contrary, they both belong to the process of conceptual genealogy that contributed to the project of a general biology. The latter emerged as the science concerned with the laws that regulate the organization of living nature as a whole. The focus on organization was, at least partially, the result of the debate surrounding the notion of "vital force", which originated in the mid-eighteenth century and caused a shift from a regulative to a constitutive understanding of teleology.
18世纪末关于德国生命科学的历史文献试图通过强调其与自然哲学的差异来恢复18世纪的活力论。本文以卡尔·弗里德里希·基尔迈尔的作品为重点，认为这些观点基于一种史学偏见，而且德国活力论与自然哲学之间的明确界限在历史上并无依据。相反，它们都属于概念谱系的过程，这一过程推动了普通生物学项目的发展。后者作为一门关注调节整个生物自然组织规律的科学而出现。对组织的关注至少部分是围绕“生命力”概念展开辩论的结果，该概念起源于18世纪中叶，导致了从对目的论的调节性理解向构成性理解的转变。
