Abstract
In 1802 Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus announced the birth of a new scientific discipline. He called it “biology,” the science whose aim was to determine the conditions and laws under which the different forms of life exist and their causes. Treviranus was not alone in forging the outlines of the new science of life. He was in fact consciously synthesizing discussions that had been going on for at least a decade in Germany involving such persons as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Heinrich Friedrich Link, and the von Humboldt brothers (Lenoir, 1981). But one of the most distinguished co-workers in this enterprise was the man whose scientific work we are celebrating in this volume; namely, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Originally presented at the symposium ‘Goethe as a Scientist’ held at the University of California at Los Angeles and the California Institute of Technology, 12–13 April 1982, and initially published in the Journal of Social and Biological Structures 7 (1984) 307–324; 345–356. It appears with the kind permission of the editors of JSBS.
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Lenoir, T. (1987). The Eternal Laws of Form: Morphotypes and the Conditions of Existence in Goethe’s Biological Thought. In: Amrine, F., Zucker, F.J., Wheeler, H. (eds) Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 97. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3761-1_2
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