4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hidden dimension of evolution, February 15, 2008
I got a lot more from this book than I expected, though it's less than it promises. It reads like droppings from the author's hobbies of researching German romanticism and evolutionary theory. It comes in disconnected chunks that could be separate books.
But I loved learning about "Bildungstreib," the romantic root behind Humbolt's travels and his journals of those travels that so inspired Darwin. It accounted for the "grandeur" Darwin saw in his evolutionary theories that is so at odds with the grubby mechanism of natural selection he came up with. That sense of grandeur Darwin got from German romanticism he used to sell his mechanism along with the really-grand theory of evolution itself.
I have long been curious about Goethe, but the extended treatment in this book read as if for specialists. In general I felt there was material here for a popular book on the German-romantic contribution to biology pre-evolutionary theory, but this book isn't it. There is in fact little about Humbolt.
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20 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well-meant but unbalanced, June 2, 2004
This review is from: The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series) (Hardcover)
Richards presents two major theses here. First, that German Romantic science was not a dead end, but led directly to Darwin's theories of evolution. Second, that the personal sexual behavior of the Romantics was linked to a view of nature itself as sexualized. The present reviewer actually agrees with Richards on these points, yet still found this a disappointing and unbalanced book.
Richards is obsessed with Goethe. This is all very proper and German, and no doubt leads to brownie points in the form of research grants. It is also a woefully unfair and lopsided view. We get all the details about Goethe's mistresses, such deathless poetry as "I have fallen so in love with her/It's if I had drunk her blood" (where is Buffy when you really need her?), the intermaxillary bone, the Urplanze, and so on and on. This maximization comes at the price of minimizing every other contemporary thinker. Herder is dismissed as merely a sidekick of Goethe - indeed, since the bibliography doesn't list the Suphan edition (page 562) one may wonder if Richards even bothered to read the "Ideen" in full. Among the younger Romantics, only Schelling receives anything like a fair discussion. Alexander von Humboldt, who as a scientist and explorer had enormous and lasting influence not only on the German but European and American scientific scene, and whom Darwin himself credited with inspiring him, is given particularly derisive and cursory treatment, and one suspects more than a whiff of homophobia here. Chamisso, who was inferior to Goethe as a poet, but overwhelmingly superior to him as a scientist, doesn't even get so much as a footnote.
There could be a good book written on romantic science and its continuing if unacknowledged influence - but this isn't it.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Multi-Faceted Affair, July 11, 2008
By Richards' own account this book is not your traditional history of the philosophy of science. It is trying to please many masters, is trying to be accessible to people interested in many different types of things, and I think that it does it very well.
The first point that I wish to focus on is the biographic information presented in this work. This is the most impressive and well-executed part of the text. Much of it (around 200 odd pages) is simply and unabashedly a biography of several key figures in the history of Romanticism. The first 100 pages of the book gives an account of the lives of the main Romantics, and towards the end we get another impressive slog of information specifically about Goethe. Interspersed through the other sections, however, are discussions on the biography of the key scientists of the time, so that section seems more like an intellectual biography. The weight of information that he brings to bear on these discussions is impressive. My only concern is why Kant and Schiller were left out of this. Kant's first and third critique get continual mention throughout, and the reactions people had to the third critique was what really glued this book together. I would have liked to have seen more of a discussion of Kant, but then most people who would read this book should know it already, so its probably not a big issue. But my main concern was Schiller's absence. Many authors (Pinkard, Beiser, Henrich etc.) write books on this time, and all mention how big an influence Schiller is, and yet no-one ever dedicated a whole chapter to him. You find out a lot about him here, but its spread our throughout the work.
The second emphasis on this text is the history of the philosophy. By philosophy here I am referring to the metaphysics and the idealism of the time, rather than the philosophy of science. Given the difficulty of the philosophy he is dealing with Richards does a very admirable job of making it lucid, and treading that fine line between detail and generalisation. My only concern is that the idealist conception of nature, and how representations gain their content without referring to a thing-in-itself, though central to the thesis, was probably underdeveloped. But besides that, this is a really excellent introduction, particularly to the works of Schelling, and it has some great gems about Kant's third critique.
Finally this book is a history of the philosophy of science. This is the area I know least amount, but it is the centre of this work. I can't comment too much on the accuracy of the work, but I thought that the discussion of the development of the concept of organicism was incredibly interesting, and I thought that the concluding arguments of the book, regarding Darwin's relationship to the Idealists, was well put forward. It certainly made me interested in exploring these issues more.
One last comment I'd like to make, which I see has been made by other reviewers, regards why Goethe was chosen as the focus of this book. He was a great poet, indeed, but I do think that his scientific nor philosophical acheivements were so great that fully half of the book should be dedicated to him specifically. He was an integral figure in these times, and for someone of his stature to have supported a Romantic conception of organicism would certainly have put it in good stead on the Continent, and beyond (as it seemed to have done). But I really thought more focus on Reil and the other biologists would have been welcome.
Overall this is a very impressive work, and in structure it is a testament to philosophical simplicity. Give a personal biography, then an intellectual biography, then examine the impacts on others. It is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in Romanticism, or the philosophy of science, and even, as I mentioned, for those who like to read intellectual biographies (which I love).
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