"The word itself [biology] was introduced only in 1802 ... to designate the 'new science of life.' Such a designation was in turn prompted by Lamarck's advocacy of a new ontology -- one that emphasized the commonality of the forms of animal and plant life and stressed their distinctiveness in relation to the 'non-living'. But what was the significance of demarcating biology as a distinctive scientific discipline, with its own distinctive subject matter? One consequence, I suggest, was the establishment of an intellectual space from which the category of 'life' could be taken as a given, as a domain of natural phenomena declared to be itself 'natural' and hence one to be investigated without calling the limits of that category into question."

Slots and Values
ref	p15
source	Unnamed