Article ID: CBB761453373

Epigenesis by Experience: Romantic Empiricism and Non-Kantian Biology (2017)

unapi

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought’s critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of “self-organization,” allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.

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Authors & Contributors
Goldstein, Amanda Jo
Faflak, Joel
Stuart Mathieson
Lansley, Charles Morris
Gillott, David
Jenkins, Bill
Concepts
Evolution
Romanticism
Controversies and disputes
Science and literature
Lamarckism
Darwinism
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
20th century, early
17th century
Places
Great Britain
London (England)
United States
Spain
Germany
France
Institutions
Victoria Institute
Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris
University of Edinburgh
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