From Organismic Biology as History and Philosophy to the History and Philosophy of Biology—the Work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in the German Context**

Abstract

In this paper, I ask about the broader context of the history and philosophy of biology in the German-speaking world as the place in which Hans-Jörg Rheinberger began his work. Three German philosophical traditions—neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and Lebensphilosophie—were interested in the developments and conceptual challenges of the life sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reflections were taken up by life scientists under the terms theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) and allgemeine Biologie (general biology), i. e., for theoretical and methodological reflections. They used historical and philosophical perspectives to develop vitalistic, organicist, or holistic approaches to life. In my paper, I argue that the resulting discourse did not come to an end in 1945. Increasingly detached from biological research, it formed an important context for the formation of the field of history and philosophy of biology. In Rheinberger's work, we can see the “Spalten” and “Fugen”—the continuities and discontinuities—that this tradition left there.