ABSTRACT
C. F. Wolff’s dissertation of 1759, Theoria Generationis, is widely recognized as the most important formulation of epigenesis in embryology in the mid-eighteenth century. It achieved even greater significance through his controversy with Albrecht von Haller, prompting him to the defense of his views in Theorie von der Generation (1764). He would be vindicated a generation later by the publication by his admirer, Johannes Meckel the younger, in his great work on the development of the intestine, and its recognition by Karl Ernst von Baer as the greatest work in empirical physiology of the epoch. In his own time, under the critical assault by Haller and the condescending dismissal by Haller’s ally, Charles Bonnet, Europe’s most widely read advocate of preformation, Wolff’s claims found no ready reception. I wish to explore in this chapter the range of receptions Wolff’s views found in the German philosophical community, starting in the 1770s: from the enthusiasm of Johann Gottfried Herder through the skepticism of Johann Nicolaus Tetens to the strategic appropriation of Immanuel Kant. I conclude with a brief gesture to the displacement of Wolff by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach as the leading spokesman of epigenesis after 1790, and the ambiguities that arise from this displacement.
