200 Years of Life I

Instructor: Ben Woodard
Program: History, Design & Worldmaking, Critical Philosophy
Credit(s): 1
Date: August 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th
Time: 09:00-11:30 ET

Enroll – 225 USD

DESCRIPTION: This two-part Seminar will track the history, politics, and philosophy of biology over the course of the last 200 years since biology cohered as a scientific discipline. We will attempt to break out of two critical dead-ends in interpreting biology – political and historical limitations of analytic treatments of biology and disregard for biological history and scientific detail in continental philosophical discourses around the life sciences.

Session 1: The Aristotle/Kant Sandwich (pre-1800 thoughts on life)
Topics: The organic as special, the beginning of the species problem, teleology, and agency,
the limits of analytic-style philosophy of biology

Session 2: What Darwin Did and Didn’t Do (1859-1880)
Topics: the newness of natural selection, theory-laden empiricism, the Darwin industry, Galton
and the birth of eugenics

Session 3: Darwinisms and Lamarckianisms (1860-1920)
Topics: The so-called Eclipse of Darwinism, the Bone Wars, Weissman and Neo- and Psycho-
Lamarckianism, Bergson as a philosopher of biology, the vitalist boogeyman

Session 4: The Modern Synthesis (1920-1940)
Topics: The Huxley Brothers, the victory of biometrics, the diminishing of development,
forgetting cell biology”

IMAGE: Anatomy of Human Torso, Unisex.

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Enroll – 225 USD