Robert J. Richards

Robert J. Richards (born 1942) is an author and the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago. He has written or edited seven books about the history of science as well as dozens of articles.

In Nature is the Poetry of Mind, or How Schelling solved Goethe's Kantian Problems Richards describes Goethe's reception of Kant, his orientation on Spinoza, F. W. J. Schelling, and his contributions to evolutionary biology.

He has won several awards, including the Gordon J. Laing Award, the Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching, the Pfizer Award, the George Sarton Medal from the History of Science Society and the Laing Prize from the University of Chicago Press and earned a Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1992). The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (University of Chicago Press, 2002). The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Was Hitler a Darwinian? Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Articles

Nature is the Poetry of Mind, or How Schelling solved Goethe's Kantian Problems (2006)