Axiomatic Natural Philosophy and the Emergence of Biology as a Science
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Axiomatic Natural Philosophy and the Emergence of Biology of a Science Hein van den Berg1 · Boris Demarest2
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Ernst Mayr argued that the emergence of biology as a special science in the early nineteenth century was possible due to the demise of the mathematical model of science and its insistence on demonstrative knowledge. More recently, John Zammito has claimed that the rise of biology as a special science was due to a distinctive experimental, anti-metaphysical, anti-mathematical, and anti-rationalist strand of thought coming from outside of Germany. In this paper we argue that this narrative neglects the important role played by the mathematical and axiomatic model of science in the emergence of biology as a special science. We show that several major actors involved in the emergence of biology as a science in Germany were working with an axiomatic conception of science that goes back at least to Aristotle and was popular in mid-eighteenth-century German academic circles due to its endorsement by Christian Wolff. More specifically, we show that at least two major contributors to the emergence of biology in Germany—Caspar Friedrich Wolff and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus—sought to provide a conception of the new science of life that satisfies the criteria of a traditional axiomatic ideal of science. Both C.F. Wolff and Treviranus took over strong commitments to the axiomatic model of science from major philosophers of their time, Christian Wolff and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, respectively. The ideal of biology as an axiomatic science with specific biological fundamental concepts and principles thus played a role in the emergence of biology as a special science. Keywords Axiomatic ideal of science · Classical model of science · Axiomatic biology · Christian Wolff · Caspar Friedrich Wolff · Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus
* Hein van den Berg [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Oude Turfmarkt 145, 1012 GC Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
Philosophisches Seminar, Heidelberg University, Schulgasse 6, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
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H. van den Berg, B. Demarest
Introduction The emergence of the science of biology in France and Germany in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries continues to attract attention from historians and philosophers of the life sciences. The fact that, compared to the physical sciences, the idea of a distinct science of life emerged so late in our history raises vexing questions. Why did people in the eighteenth century begin to regard the domain of “life” as something amenable to proper scientific inquiry, such that there could be a true “science” of “life”? And why did they begin to regard “life” as a distinct domain of phenomena that can be the object of a special science? Before the emergence of biology as an autonomous science, biological phenomena were, of course, an object of scientific study; however, in the early modern period s
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