Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
![Loading indicator](/images/ajax-loader-bar.gif)
Richard Owen (1804-92) was, after Darwin, the most important figure in Victorian natural history. He was, for most of the six decades of his career, Britain's foremost comparative anatomist and vertebrate palaeontologist. Leader of the nineteenth-century museum movement, he founded London's monumental Natural History Museum, wrote and published copiously and won every professional honour.
Positioned at the cutting edge of Victorian science, his work attracted enormous general interest, and he himself came to symbolise 'natural history' in the public mind. His company was sought by royalty (Prince Albert), prime ministers (especially Sir Robert Peel), and by contemporary literati such as Charles Dickens.
.
Owen was, however, a controversial figure whose disagreements with colleagues developed into epic power struggles, the most notorious of which were with Darwin and Huxley. As the most renowned opponent of natural selection, Owen was type-cast as a Cuvierian creationist and became the bete noire of the Darwinian evolution debate.
In this comprehensive intellectual and scientific biography, Nicolaas Rupke argues that Owen was no simple-minded anti-evolutionist and, moreover, should be freed from the distortion of the evolution dispute that was only a minor part of his work, yet has come to dominate his memory.
Using the museum movement as the primary context of explanation, Rupke throws new light on a wide area of Owen's activities. He reveals the central division in Owen's scientific oeuvre between the functionalism of Oxbridge natural theology and the transcendentalism of German nature philosophy. This epistemological duality confused and puzzled his contemporaries as well as later historians.
But as Rupke convincingly demonstrates, it was a fundamental extension of the intellectual and political manoeuvering for control of Victorian cultural institutions, and an inextricable part of the rise to public authority of the most articulate proponents of the scientific study of nature.
Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
![Loading indicator](/images/ajax-loader-bar.gif)
Previews available in: English
People
Richard Owen (1804-1892)Places
Great BritainShowing 4 featured editions. View all 4 editions?
Edition | Availability |
---|---|
1
Richard Owen: Biology Without Darwin
2010, University of Chicago Press
in English
1282422448 9781282422445
|
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
2
Richard Owen: Biology Without Darwin
2009, University of Chicago Press
in English
0226731782 9780226731780
|
aaaa
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
3
Richard Owen: biology without Darwin
2008, University of Chicago Press
in English
- Rev. ed.
0226731774 9780226731773
|
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
4 |
eeee
|
Book Details
Classifications
The Physical Object
ID Numbers
Community Reviews (0)
Feedback?History
- Created December 30, 2021
- 1 revision
Wikipedia citation
×CloseCopy and paste this code into your Wikipedia page. Need help?
December 30, 2021 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from Better World Books record |