ABSTRACT
Building on the historical context established in Chapter 3, this chapter considers features of Goethe’s philosophy of biology with an eye to demonstrating how metamorphic organicism can be useful for philosophers of biology today. To that end, the chapter outlines the main features of Goethe’s organism concept, and demonstrates how this understanding of organisms entails—for Goethe—certain epistemological strategies for understanding them. This chapter argues that metamorphic organicism is radically perspectival and acknowledges the limits of human understanding, but offers methods of philosophical and empirical investigation meant to overcome some of those limits in order to construct multi-perspectival, historically and ecologically-indexed models of organisms and their transformations.
