The concept of organization in the polemics of the analogous

Abstract

The conceptual differences that motivated the polemic about the problem of the unit of composition that Georges Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire held in the Academy of Sciences of Paris between February and June of 1830, are not properly clarified; and the reason of it is that no one rendered the due attention to the difference that exists between the concepts of organization that were supposed in the perspective of the contenders. Both, in fact, use that word; but they make it in order to designate different kinds of phenomena: for Cuvier, organization meant way of functioning; and for Geoffroy, that term designated way of composition. And that difference implied a radical divergence concerning the aims assigned to comparative anatomy. For Cuvier, this later was fundamentally the method of physiology; and for Geoffroy this discipline could also be used to understand the way by which the organic materials are articulated in the morphologic configuration of the living being.