Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology 10/2005

The name DGGTB (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte und
Theorie der Biologie; German Society for the History and Theory of
Biology) reflects recent history as well as German tradition.
The Society is a relatively late addition to a series of German
societies of science and medicine that began with the „Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften“,
founded in 1910 by Leipzig University‘s Karl Sudhoff (1853-1938), who
wrote: „We want to establish a ‚German‘ society in order to gather
German-speaking historians together in our special disciplines so that
they form the core of an international society…“. Yet Sudhoff, at this
time of burgeoning academic internationalism, was „quite willing“ to
accommodate the wishes of a number of founding members and
„drop the word German in the title of the Society and have it merge
with an international society“. The founding and naming of the
Society at that time derived from a specific set of historical circumstances,
and the same was true some 80 years later when
in 1991, in the wake of German reunification, the „Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie“ was founded.
From the start, the Society has been committed to bringing studies
in the history and philosophy of biology to a wide audience,
using for this purpose its Jahrbuch für Geschichte und Theorie der
Biologie. Parallel to the Jahrbuch, the Verhandlungen zur Geschichte und
Theorie der Biologie has become the by now traditional medium
for the publication of papers delivered at the Society‘s annual
meetings. In 2005 the Jahrbuch was renamed Annals of the History and
Philosophy of Biology, reflecting the Society‘s internationalist
aspirations in addressing comparative biology as a subject of historical
and philosophical studies.