Introduction

The book argues that the professional philosophy of biology’s alignment with the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (MES) since the 1970s has created an unnecessarily narrow ontology for biological theory that remains today, and that a fresh engagement with 19th-century Romantic philosophy of biology can offer resources in the present to more capaciously think about and investigate life, evolution, and their study. The introduction maps the course of the argument over the book’s chapters and introduces the ways in which evolution might be “romanticized”.