ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the historical formation of Goethe’s philosophy of biology. It illustrates how his collaborations with Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling resulted in a philosophy of biology that views organisms as actively transforming entities whose remarkable forms are the result, not of an extrinsic plan or determined end-state, but of their own endogenously generated purposes. The chapter also argues how Goethe, Herder, and Schelling’s commitment to organisms’ active productivity began to shape and recontextualize scientific terminology about organisms, like the notions of biological form and type.
