Trail Blazing

Timothy Lenoir has done what all scholars dream of doing: he has changed fundamentally the way we think. He identifies and traces an aggressive new research program of the German romantic period: the teleomechanical program of German biologists that ran from Blumenbach to Leuckart and Bergmann. To date historians of the science of this era, in debating the relative importance for the development of science of philosophical attitudes versus experimental results, have either written extremely broad studies focused on the characteristics unique to romantic science or limited themselves to the narrower confines of biography. Lenoir has redefined not only the shape of science in the German romantic period and its aftermath but also the relevance of this science to current issues in the philosophy of biology. There is very little here about Schelling and Naturphilosophie. Lenoir found out quickly that this school had not influenced nineteenth-century German biology. Instead, employing Lakatos's notion of research program, Lenoir identifies a uniquely German teleomechanical approach to the life sciences that persisted throughout the nineteenth century. Central to this approach (and still central for those who continue to embrace the approach) was the complex conviction that human reason is so constituted that it cannot understand or explain the purposive organization encountered in living things through a strictly mechanical account of organism, that it must nevertheless carry mechanical explanation as far as it will possibly go, but that it must take the fact of purposive organization as an unexplained starting point. Lenoir relates how this conviction affected the development of German biological science in the nineteenth century both in content and in tendency. He thereby challenges decisively the received opinion that proponents of teleology in the nineteenth century were all vitalists and that therefore the Wissenschaftlichung of biology could take place only when the conceptual stumbling blocks of vitalism and teleological thinking were eliminated. Further, Lenoir wants to show that what motivated German teleomechanists to defend teleological thinking in biology was not religion, but what he calls a concern for good science. The reader must understand, however, that "good science" for the German teleomechanists, while thoroughly empirical, was not science that was first and foremost practical, but science that was philosophically justifiable. Epistemological issues are everywhere present throughout Lenoir's study. The teleomechanical program Lenoir describes did not remain a rigid orthodoxy from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, even though the conceptual hard core of the program persisted throughout this span of time. Lenoir's remarkable contribution is the identification and description of the successive phases through which the program passed: vital materialism, developmental morphology, and functional morphology. These positions differ in