Robert J. Richards

Robert John Richards (* 1942 ) is an American historian of science . He is a professor at the University of Chicago and studies the history and philosophy of biology (specifically evolutionary research) and psychology .

Life

Richards graduated from the University of Nebraska with a master's degree in biological psychology and the history of science from the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in the subject. He also received his PhD in philosophy from St. Louis University . He has been Assistant Professor since 1981, Associate Professor since 1984 and Professor at the University of Chicago since 1991 and Director of the Fishbein Center for the History of Science since 1992. In 2004 he became Morris Fishbein Professor of Science History and the History of Medicine in Chicago and in 2011 Distinguished Service Professor at the university. In 1983 he was visiting professor and in 1989 Fidia Lecturer at Harvard University .

Richards wrote a book about the influence of Romanticism on science in the early 19th century and by Charles Darwin on German intellectual life (especially with Ernst Haeckel and up to the National Socialists). He is currently working on a philosophical and scientific-historical commentary on Darwin's Origin of Species .

In 2011 he received the George Sarton Medal . In 2004/5 he was a Guggenheim Fellow . He is a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen (2010).

Fonts

• The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory , University of Chicago Press, 1992
• The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the struggle over evolutionary thought , University of Chicago Press, 2006, 2011
• The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe , University of Chicago Press 2003
• The Linguistic Creation of Man: Charles Darwin, August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and the Missing Link in Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Theory , in: M. Dörres (Ed.), Experimenting in tongues: Studies in Science and Language, Stanford University Press 2002
• Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, University of Chicago Press 1988 (received the Pfizer Award )
• Editor with Abigail Lustig, Michael Ruse: Darwinian Heresies , Cambridge University Press 2004
  • In it by Richards: If this be heresy. Haeckel's conversion to Darwinism , pp. 101-130
• Editor with Michael Ruse: Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species , Cambridge University Press 2008

Web links

• Homepage in Chicago
• Literature by and about Robert J. Richards in the WorldCat bibliographic database