Max Scheler’s Biologievorlesung (1908/09)

Abstract

The text, known as Biologievorlesung (1908/09), written by the German phenomenologist Max Scheler appeared in 1993 in volume XIV of the Schelerian Gesammelte Werke by M.S. Frings. It collects the surviving fragments of the notes on the “Gnoseological foundations of biology” elaborated by Scheler for the cycle of lectures, which were held as Privatdozent at the University of Munich in the winter semester of the academic year 1908-1909. Despite being interesting in many respects, the text is still largely unexplored to the very day. In this article I intend to focus on two points: 1) demonstrate the relatively advanced state of progress of the proposal expressed therein by the author compared to his real first phenomenological production between the publication in 1912 of the long article Über Selbsttäuschungen and 1922, the year that marks Scheler's open detachment from the Catholic cultural horizon hitherto embraced, and 2) bring out the systematic unity of the epistemological, ontological and phenomenological themes, articulated here, in a first attempt to develop an ontology of modern science, understood as the product of a vision of a historically located world, through a descriptive analysis of the intentional structures of consciousness implicated in intellectual knowledge.