Life forms: A keyword entry
Name
Helmreich_Life forms.pdf
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141.88 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Helmreich, Stefan
Roosth, Hannah Sophia
Date Issued
September 2010
Journal
Representations
Publisher
Regents of the University of California
Citation
Helmreich, Stefan, and Sophia Roosth. “Life Forms: A Keyword Entry.” Representations 112.1 (2010) : 27-53. © 2010 The Regents of the University of California.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We deliver a "keyword" account of the term life form as it has been used in natural philosophy and biology over the last two hundred years, beginning with its appearance in German as Lebensform. We argue that life form has, since its earliest enunciations, pointed to a space of possibility within which life might take shape, but that the way that space is imagined and theorized in biology has transformed substantially; life form originated as a term referring to idealized, aesthetic possibilities, then transformed to describe biogeographic and evolutionary potentialities, and today, in the age of synthetic biology and astrobiology, has come to signal conjectural and future possibilities.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anthropology Program
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2010.112.1.27
