摘要：Organisms receded from view in much of twentieth-century biology, only to undergo asort of renaissance at the start of the twenty-first. The story of why this should be so iscomplicated and fascinating, but belongs primarily to the history of biology. On the otherhand, to the extent that it is so, a question naturally arises: what, after all, are organisms?This question has a long and complicated history of its own, both within and without ofbiology; an investigation of this history yields some guidance as to how organisms mightyet be conceived today. One suggestion borne of these investigations is this: organismsare, for better or worse, normatively delineated unities.
