Essays in Philosophical Zoology. The Living Form and the Seeing Eye

"Why should we elect the late renowned Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann one of our most cherished teachers? Because of his vision of the mystery of the manifest and his effort to give biology an orientation that is ethical and aesthetic and that goes beyond the perilous narrowness of mechanistic Darwinism. . . . Read Portmann on Goethe and the poetry of plants, bird navigation, sex, fish display, and human infancy, to mention just a few topics, for a sense of relief and rejuvenation in biological and zoological vision that may be tantamount to a seeing for the first time of what was always there. Carter has done an essential service in making Portmann, worthy antagonist to Descartes and Darwin, available to us in English." - Roger A. Lewin in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

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