Type Concept Revisited. A Survey of German Idealistic Morphology in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 11 (1):23 - 42 (1989)
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Abstract

This article concerns a number of relatively important German zoologists and anatomists, who belonged to the group of idealistic morphologists, a group of scientists forming a counterpart to the experimental sciences on the European continent in the first half of the twentieth century. Idealistic morphology employed the type concept, i.e. the theoretical construct of an ideal form, which could be used as a unifying principle for ordering the multitude of actually existing forms. Given the logical primacy of the type concept, the idealistic morphologists constructed a number of kindred concepts, as e.g. the concept of homology, finality and holism. Idealistic morphology can be seen as a reaction to the rise of the reductionistic experimental sciences in the first decades of our century. Although the idealistic morphologists were a relatively subordinated group of scientists, they were an influential counterpart to the dominant experimental disciplines. On account of the influence of idealistic morphology, the development of the life sciences on the continent deviated from the development in the Anglo-American countries. Because of the reinvigorated interest in the morphological tradition, the growth of the experimental sciences on the continent was not as extreme as in the Anglo-American countries

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