Architecture and Knowledge: Charles Barry and the World of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Science

2017 ◽  
pp. 54-86
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Century Science

Science, 19th century philosophy of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Butts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
John Herschel ◽  
The World ◽  
Century Science

In the nineteenth century, science was organized, it tested and confirmed positive knowledge of the natural world and achieved remarkable theoretical development and hitherto unimagined practical application. Science drove industry and free enterprise, and became a powerful catalyst in the battle between defenders of knowledge as power and advocates of knowledge as love. Fruitful scientific theories and observations were plentiful. Darwin, Wallace and Spencer caused a revolution in biology. Faraday, Maxwell and Hertz contributed seminal ideas in electromagnetic theory. Hermann von Helmholtz studied the physiology of tones and discovered a principle of the conservation of force. Lyell’s efforts established geology as a science. Ernst Mach argued for the elimination of absolute space in favour of a space and time consisting of observable relations between things, thus providing incentive for Einstein’s theory of relativity. Sir John Herschel added many observed double stars to the growing catalogue of celestial bodies. These and other observational, theoretical and applied achievements in nineteenth-century science were replete with philosophical consequences. Until the nineteenth century natural philosophy and science coexisted as a single discipline. Now science and traditional philosophy drew apart. Some held that henceforth science would deal with the world revealed in experience, and philosophy with the world existing (if any does) beyond what we experience. Others (including prominent scientists) were unwilling to yield to philosophy licence to speculate beyond the limits of what could be ascertained by means of observation and experimentation: even if science and philosophy were no longer one unified intellectual enterprise, philosophy had a substantial role to play in philosophizing about science. To satisfy changing expectations, a new intellectual discipline was created in the nineteenth century: the philosophy of science. Unlike previous philosophy, whose subject matter was everything that is (or is not), the philosophy of science had a distinct and determinate subject matter: theoretical texts and experimental and observational reports of scientists (the word ‘scientist’ having been invented by William Whewell). Theoretical scientific systems and their logical structure were one focus of attention. Science was also said to discover laws. Were such laws timeless and exceptionless truths about nature, or simply convenient, economical ways of cataloguing information? These laws were discovered (or invented) generalizations that provided tested information about nature. This discovery and confirmation relied upon the method of induction – thought by most nineteenth-century philosophers of science to have a logic – to involve decisions concerning the validity or invalidity of inferences based on knowledge from experience. Was this alleged logic trustworthy? These questions exemplify the complex problems concerning the epistemic reliability of scientific explanation.

Siren canora: the mermaid and the mythical in late nineteenth-century science

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. BRINK-ROBY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
British Association ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Darwinian Theory ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Century Science

This paper argues that, for a number of naturalists and lay commentators in the second half of the nineteenth century, evolutionary – especially Darwinian – theory gave new authority to mythical creatures. These writers drew on specific elements of evolutionary theory to assert the existence of mermaids, dragons and other fabulous beasts. But mythological creatures also performed a second, often contrapositive, argumentative function; commentators who rejected evolution regularly did so by dismissing these creatures. Such critics agreed that Darwin's theory legitimized the mythological animal, but they employed this legitimization to undermine the theory itself. The mermaid, in particular, was a focus of attention in this mytho-evolutionary debate, which ranged from the pages of Punch to the lecture halls of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Crossing social boundaries and taking advantage of a range of venues, this debate arose in response to the indeterminate challenge of evolutionary theory. In its discussions of mermaids and dragons, centaurs and satyrs, this discourse helped define that challenge, construing and constructing the meanings and implications of evolutionary theory in the decades following Darwin's publication.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

The Whole World in a Book

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
White Men ◽  
Nation State ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Brazilian Sign Language

The nineteenth century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn’t just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervour, and utopian imaginings. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. This volume investigates dictionaries in the nineteenth century covering languages as diverse as Canadian French, English, German, Frisian, Japanese, Libras (Brazilian sign language), Manchu, Persian, Quebecois, Russian, Scots, and Yiddish.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

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