Tübingen’s Place in the Formation of Biology: Kielmeyer, Schelling, and German Contributions at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Joan Steigerwald

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the University of Tübingen became a center for the development of both biology and philosophy, significantly influenced by Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Kielmeyer presented a new approach to biology in a series of renowned lectures in the 1790s. He proposed that individual living organisms are constituted by a balance of vital powers and developed ideas on the connection between embryology and the transformation or evolution of organic kinds. Schelling gave philosophical articulation to these ideas for a science of life. Regarding the nature as a dynamic, interdependent whole, he asked how we are to conceive the individuation, development, and transformation of organisms in relationship to their physical environments. Together Kielmeyer and Schelling influenced nineteenth-century science and philosophy and laid the groundwork for interdisciplinary approaches to studying life.