ABSTRACT

This chapter demonstrates the extraordinary attentiveness to the work of Immanuel Kant, and explores the place of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in this historical development. Two impulses animate the strategy. The first is to exploit the widely received notion of a "Gottingen School" in science developed some time ago by Timothy Lenoir. The chapter contends that it was the turn to paleontology in Blumenbach's natural history over the course of the 1780s and 1790s that instigated their eventual research programs. The second and defining strategic impulse is to connect Blumenbach's ideas on paleontology with the Genevan geologist Jean-Andre Deluc. The chapter suggests that, among many other naturalists in the field, it was the specific hypotheses of Deluc which stimulated the turn toward paleontology in Blumenbach's work. The great impediment in history of science to recognizing the late eighteenth-century historicization of nature has been the strong resistance to the anachronistic pursuit of "transformism" or of "forerunners" of Darwin, in these developments.