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

Joan Steigerwald

Kielmeyer was professor of zoology, and later chemistry, at the Karlsschule in Tübingen. His lectures on organic agency and natural history in the 1790s became renowned for presenting a new vision for the history of living organisms. Schelling came of age at the Tübinger Stift, drafting together with Hegel and Hölderlin “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” in 1797. The short fragment touched on many contemporary concerns—from Kant’s transcendental idealism and the philosophy of nature to the relationship of moral philosophy and aesthetics for reimagining the world as a whole. Schelling took up Kielmeyer’s account of the agency and transformation of life as a central part of this larger project, to provide a philosophical basis for an emerging science of life at the turn of the nineteenth century.