Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), comparative anatomist, colleague and later antagonist of Darwin, and head of the British Museum of Natural History, was a major figure in Victorian science. Yet historians of science have found Owen a difficult subject, in part because he chose not to expound his views in a major theoretical work but rather presented them through annual lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons from 1837 to 1856. Nevertheless, Owen's views on the nature of life, the relations of form and function, the meaning of fossils, and the development of species gave his contemporaries such as Lyell, Grant, Huxley, Whewell, and Darwin a set of positions with which they could agree or disagree while developing their own views. Now, for the first time, modern readers how access to the opening series of Owen's Hunterian Lectures, in which he set out the larger framework of the theoretical reflections that occupied him during the next nineteen years. Presented to the public in the two months before Darwin began his first notebook on the species question, these lectures reveal the nature of the synthesis of French, German, and British biology taking place in metropolitan London in this crucial period in nineteenth-century life science. Phillip Reid Sloan has transcribed and edited the seven surviving lectures and has written an introduction and commentary situating the work in the context of Owen's life and the scientific and intellectual life of the time. Sloan pays particular attention to Owen's early relations to the German scientific and philosophical tradition, and in this respect contributes to an understanding of the relations between science and British Romanticism. In the lectures, Owen surveys the history of comparative anatomy up to his time and develops his views on the nature of life, species duration, physiological function, and the relation between embryology and classification. One can see the degree to which transcendental anatomy and the views of Von Baer, Johannes Müller, E. G. St.-Hilaire, and Cuvier were current in London in the late 1830s. -- from back cover.

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.

The word “biology” was first used to describe the scientific study of life in 1802, and as Davide Tarizzo demonstrates in his reconstruction of the genealogy of the concept of life, our understanding of what being alive means is an equally recent invention. Focusing on the histories of philosophy, science, and biopolitics, he contends that biological life is a metaphysical concept, not a scientific one, and that this notion has gradually permeated both European and Anglophone traditions of thought over the past two centuries. Building on the work undertaken by Foucault in the 1960s and ‘70s, Tarizzo analyzes the slow transformation of eighteenth-century naturalism into a nineteenth-century science of life, exploring the philosophical landscape that engendered biology and precipitated the work of such foundational figures as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin. Tarizzo tracks three interrelated themes: first, that the metaphysics of biological life is an extension of the Kantian concept of human will in the field of philosophy; second, that biology and philosophy share the same metaphysical assumptions about life originally advanced by F. W. J. Schelling and adopted by Darwin and his intellectual heirs; and third, that modern biopolitics is dependent on this particularly totalizing view of biological life. Circumventing tired debates about the validity of science and the truth of Darwinian evolution, this book instead envisions and promotes a profound paradigm shift in philosophical and scientific concepts of biological life.

A reevaluation of the history of biological systematics that discusses the formative years of the so-called natural system of classification in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shows how classifications came to be treated as conventions; systematic practice was not linked to clearly articulated theory; there was general confusion over the "shape" of nature; botany, elements of natural history, and systematics were conflated; and systematics took a position near the bottom of the hierarchy of sciences.