The gestation of German biology -- Animism and organism: G. E. Stahl and the Halle medical faculty -- Making life science Newtonian: Albrecht von Haller's self-fashioning as natural scientist -- Albrecht von Haller as arbiter of German medicine: Göttingen and Bern (1736-1777) -- French vital materialism -- Taking up the French challenge: the German response -- From natural history to history of nature: from Buffon to Kant and Herder (and Blumenbach) -- Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the life sciences in Germany: his rise to eminence from the 1770s -- Blumenbach, Kant, and the "daring adventure" of an "archaeology of nature" -- Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer and "an entirely new epoch of natural history" -- Polarität und Steigerung: the self-organization of nature and the actualization of life -- Naturphilosophie and physiology
