In “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist”, Frederick Amrine claims that Goethe not only “anticipates many of the central tenets of the most recent philosophy of science, he also offers solutions to its central dilemmas in both theory and practice”. The central tenets Amrine has in mind in this bold claim are those of Thomas Kuhn’s conception of a scientific paradigm presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; the dilemmas are that this work “cannot account for the structure of scientific revolutions because they are ultimately unstructured and extra-scientific”. Remarkably, despite being
written three decades ago, Amrine’s essay remains one of the few attempts to bring Goethe’s scientific studies and Kuhn’s philosophy of science into dialogue. It thus provides a welcome starting point for a promising endeavour that will be taken up here.