Séminaire – H&P Bio

Ideology and Methodology in the Search for Protoplasmic Structure, 1850-1899, Daniel Liu – (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München)

Résumé :

The theory that a fluid “protoplasm” was the material bearer of life took shape in the 1850s, and over the course of the 1860s it became a biological dogma on par with Darwinian evolutionary theory and the early cell theory. Historians and philosophers have correctly focused on the impact of protoplasm theory as a doctrine and for its impact in European cultural modernism. In this presentation I will focus instead on the attempts to study protoplasm itself, and the methodological debates generated by the theory, especially in the decades after 1869. I will show how the so-called “structure of protoplasm” became an intractable problem for microtechnique and microscopic methodology, precisely during the years of its greatest rhetorical success. 

Lieu : salle 646A (Mondrian) – bâtiment Condorcet

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