IHPST Colloquium-Second Session- Winter 2025

You are cordially invited to attend the Winter 2025 Colloquium series of the Institute for the History and Philosohy of Science and Technology organized by Professor Denis Walsh

Joan Steigerwald will present Infusorians, Algae, Zoophytes

Hybrid Event

Abstract: Simple organisms were at the center of experimental natural histories at the turn of the nineteenth century. Animacules appeared in infusion experiments; investigations of polyps demonstrated the properties of both plants and animals; the translucent structure and rapid proliferation of algae made visible the formative drive of life. The empirical study of infusorians, zoophytes, and algae stimulated reimaginings of natural history. They drew attention not only to the variability of organic life but also to its connections to the physical world, and prospects of its transgressive modes of propagation, transformation, and even spontaneous generation. These simple forms of life were media which provided occasions for remarkable encounters with the agency of life. They also gave rise to fictive experiments in natural history, speculative renderings of the history of life and its implications for human life. Such humble organisms played an outsized role in the development of an experimental natural history, both empirical and speculative, from Buffon and Tremblay, through Diderot and Erasmus Darwin, to Lamarck and Treviranus.

Joan Steigerwald is professor in humanities and science and technology studies at York University. She is the author of Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life: Organic Vitality in Germany around 1800 (2019). She has edited a special issue of Kabiri, “Schelling and Philosophies of Life” (2024), as well as two special issues for Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, “Entanglements of Instruments and Media in Exploring Organic Worlds” (2016), and “Kantian Teleology and the Biological Sciences” (2006). She has published widely on Kant, Schelling, Goethe, and the German life sciences. Her current project is A Romantic Natural History. The project focuses on material entities newly encountered through natural historical and recognized through new openings in cultural perspectives that cannot be simply individuated as objects and that cannot be understood as distinctly natural, artificial, or cultural.

Please note this is a hybrid event. To get the Zoom link please contact: IHPST.info@utoronto.ca

Wednesday April 9, from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Victoria College, Room VC115. 91 Charles Street West