Utility and Audience in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry: Case Studies of William Cullen and Joseph Priestley

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. V. Golinski
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Degree Of Coherence ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
William Cullen

Historians of science are less inclined now than they were a few years ago to regard chemistry as having sprung full-grown from the mind of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Many of the contours of pre-Lavoisierian chemistry have recently been mapped, its Newtonian and Stahlian theoretical traditions have been delineated, and the degree of coherence enforced on the subject by its didactic role has been argued. In addition, the social prominence and cohesion achieved by chemists in various national contexts, such as France, Scotland and Germany, have been investigated. Karl Hufbauer (arguing specifically from the case of Germany) and Christoph Meinel have proposed that the cultural climate of the European Enlightenment provided the language and the social settings in which chemistry could be detached from its previous role as a service-art for medicine, and presented as a science with diverse practical applications.

scholarly journals II.—The Insect Association of a Local Environmental Complex in the District of Holmes Chapel, Cheshire

1918 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred E. Cameron
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ecological Study ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Insect Fauna ◽  
The Social ◽  
Study And Teaching ◽  
Animal Activity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind

That there is a decided need for the ecological study of insects and other animals was first brought home to the mind of the author whilst engaged upon the subject of a “General Survey of the Insect Fauna of the Soil” (vide Jour. Econ. Biol., vol. viii, part 3, 1913). Much information has been collected at various times by numerous authors, and especially those who have treated of the habits and behaviour of animals, but very little attempt has been made to systematise the data variously gathered, to explain the cause and effect of many obscure phenomena, or to make important observations accessible for the use of the animal ecologist. Thus, at present, we find ourselves on the threshold of practically a new and undisputed field, with opportunities for original and interesting research extending in innumerable directions. Dr C. C. Adams, now of Syracuse University, New York, who has written a most useful work, “the outgrowth of the effort as it has developed in the study and teaching of animal ecology,” in which is listed most of the literature applicable to the science, says (p. 10): “The associational is the phase of animal activity which may be considered as the form of animal behaviour which has developed into the human social relations,” and concludes that, because of the social character of human society, those interested in matters pertaining to the welfare of mankind, such as the sociologist, the physician, the sanitarian, and the agriculturist, will ultimately participate in a keener appreciation of the associational aspect.

Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–88)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Beiser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Friedrich Schlegel ◽  
Sturm Und Drang ◽  
German Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Mind

Hamann was one of the most important critics of the German Enlightenment or Aufklärung. He attacked the Aufklärung chiefly because it gave reason undue authority over faith. It misunderstood faith, which consists in an immediate personal experience, inaccessible to reason. The main fallacy of the Aufklärung was hypostasis, the reification of ideas, the artificial abstraction of reason from its social and historical context. Hamann stressed the social and historical dimension of reason, that it must be embodied in society, history and language. He also emphasized the pivotal role of language in the development of reason. The instrument and criterion of reason was language, whose only sanction was tradition and use. Hamann was a sharp critic of Kant, whose philosophy exemplified all the sins of the Aufklärung. Hamann attacked the critical philosophy for its purification of reason from experience, language and tradition. He also strongly objected to all its dualisms, which seemed arbitrary and artificial. The task of philosophy was to unify all the various functions of the mind, seeing reason, will and feeling as an indivisible whole. Although he was original and unorthodox, Hamann’s critique of reason should be placed within the tradition of Protestant nominalism. Hamann saw himself as a defender of Luther, whose reputation was on the wane in late eighteenth-century Germany. Hamann was also a founder of the Sturm und Drang, the late eighteenth-century literary movement which celebrated personal freedom and revolt. His aesthetics defended creative genius and the metaphysical powers of art. It marked a sharp break with the rationalism of the classical tradition and the empiricism of late eighteenth-century aesthetics. Hamann was a seminal influence upon Herder, Goethe, Jacobi, Friedrich Schlegel and Kierkegaard.

Revealing sparks: John Wesley and the religious utility of electrical healing

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAOLA BERTUCCI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Applications ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
Therapeutic Uses ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Fear Of God

In the eighteenth century, dramatic electrical performances were favourite entertainments for the upper classes, yet the therapeutic uses of electricity also reached the lower strata of society. This change in the social composition of electrical audiences attracted the attention of John Wesley, who became interested in the subject in the late 1740s. The paper analyses Wesley's involvement in the medical applications of electricity by taking into account his theological views and his proselytizing strategies. It sets his advocacy of medical electricity in the context of his philanthropic endeavours aimed at the sick poor, connecting them to his attempts to spread Methodism especially among the lower classes. It is argued that the healing virtues of electricity entailed a revision of the morality of electrical experiment which made electric sparks powerful resources for the popularization of the Methodist way of life, based on discipline, obedience to established authorities and love and fear of God.

Comment

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 229-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intellectual Challenge

The Articles By David Sorkin and Edmund Kern have a common starting point. Both address aspects of the reform movement that unfolded in the Habsburg lands under Maria Theresa. They underline an argument made by much recent work on the subject that the movement in question, though committed to substantial changes in the social and cultural fabric, was fundamentally Catholic in its inspiration and only loosely and partially aligned with either the great intellectual challenge of the Enlightenment or the fuller and later program of reconstruction that has come to be known in the Austrian context as Josephinism. Both writers acknowledge the powerful contributory stimulus from abroad to the new climate of ideas generated in the monarchy by the travails of the mid-eighteenth century, but submit that those ideas besically arose out of a domestic evolution, especially within ecclesiastical circles.

The Church of England in the eighteenth century

2002 ◽  
Vol 75 (187) ◽  
pp. 47-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viviane Barrie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
The South ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

Abstract This article is an attempt to study the position of the Church of England in one particular region – the diocese of London in the south-east of England – throughout the eighteenth century. It considers three problems which the author came across when first researching the subject several years ago: firstly, the social and economic status of parishes; secondly, clerical recruitment and the careers of the clergy; and finally, the pastoral life and work of the Church, especially through the corpus of episcopal visitations.

scholarly journals The Post-Human Lyric: Diffractive Vision and the Ethics of Mattering in Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (s2) ◽  
pp. 375-401
Author(s):  
Paulina Ambroży
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology ◽  
Bodily Fluids ◽  
Medical Gaze ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Burden Tests ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Abstract The aim of my inquiry is to discuss Adam Dickinson’s revisionist approach to the lyric autobiography as shown in his most recent volume Anatomic (2018a). Informed by an eco-critical sensibility, the biotechnological gaze, and post-humanist notions of subjectivity, this highly experimental conceptual project reveals porous boundaries of the autobiographical self caught up in the entanglement of the mind and matter. Based on burden tests of the poet’s own bodily fluids, Anatomic offers a philosophical speculation on the nature of the human, asking us to go beyond anthropocentric positioning of the subject and to consider ethical alongside onto-epistemological implications of this new direction. The methodology employed in my analyses of Dickinson’s poems derives from the influential notions of agential realism, diffractive vision, and intra-action formulated by Karan Barad – a trained quantum physicist and feminist philosopher working in the field of science and technology. Barad’s theories fuel New Materialist paradigms of thought as they propose the inherent indeterminacy of matter as well as question the established views of identity and the social. The particular focus of my interrogations will be the relationship between diffractive perception and the medical gaze used by the Canadian conceptualist to see himself non-anthropologically and thus to destabilize the perimeters of the autobiographical self.

Beauty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Developmental Biology ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Philosophic Tradition ◽  
Independent Property

On the subject of beauty, theorists generally agree only on rudimentary points about the term: that it commends on aesthetic grounds, has absolute and comparative forms, applies to parts, aspects and wholes, and so forth. Beyond this, dispute prevails. Realists hold that judgements of beauty ascribe to their subjects either a response-independent property inherent in things or a capacity of things to affect respondents in a way that preserves objectivity. In both cases acute problems arise in defining the property and in explaining how it can be known. Classical Platonism holds that beauty exists as an ideal supersensible ‘form’, while eighteenth-century theorists view it as a quasi-sensory property. Kant’s transcendental philosophy anchors the experience of beauty to the basic requirements of cognition, conferring on it ‘subjective universality and necessity’. Sceptics complain that the alleged property is merely a reflection of aesthetic pleasure and hence lacks objective standing. Partly due to its preoccupation with weightier matters, the philosophic tradition has not yet developed a theory of beauty as fully and deeply as it has, say, theories in the domain of morality. For most of the twentieth-century the generally subjectivistic and relativistic bent of the social sciences and humanities, as well as the scorn heaped on beauty by avant-gardism in the arts, discouraged concentration on beauty. However, the turn of the century has brought a remarkable reawakening of interest in theorizing about beauty. The burgeoning fields of cognitive science and evolutionary developmental biology have played a part.

Beauty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
Sensory Property ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Philosophic Tradition

On the subject of beauty, theorists generally agree only on rudimentary points about the term: that it commends on aesthetic grounds, has absolute and comparative forms, and so forth. Beyond this, dispute prevails. Realists hold that judgments of beauty ascribe to their subjects either a nonrelational property inherent in things or a capacity of things to affect respondents in a way that preserves objectivity. In both cases acute problems arise in defining the property and in explaining how it can be known. Classical Platonism holds that beauty exists as an ideal supersensible Form, while eighteenth-century theorists view it as a quasi-sensory property. Kant’s transcendental philosophy anchors the experience of beauty to the basic requirements of cognition, conferring on it ‘subjective universality and necessity’. Sceptics complain that the alleged property is merely a reflection of aesthetic pleasure and hence lacks objective standing. Partly due to its preoccupation with weightier matters, the philosophic tradition has never developed any theory of beauty as fully and deeply as it has, say, theories in the domain of morality. Comparative neglect of the subject has been encouraged by the generally subjectivistic and relativistic bent of the social sciences and humanities, as well as by avant-gardism in the arts. However, several recent and ambitious studies have given new impetus to theorizing about beauty.

Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind

1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Pippin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
The Self ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
General Issue ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Recent Attention

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant refers often and with no apparent hesitation or sense of ambiguity to the mind (das Gemüt). He does so not only in his justly famous destruction of rationalist proofs of immaterialism, but throughout his own, positive, ‘transcendental’ account in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. In the first edition of the Critique, he even proposed what he adventurously called a ‘transcendental psychology’ and, although this strange discipline seemed to disappear in the second edition, he left in that edition all his frequent references to forms ‘lying in the mind,’ and to the mind, or the self, or the subject of experience, or the ego, doing this or that. Curiously, though, despite an extensive secondary literature, there is in that literature relatively little discussion of what these expressions, in a proper, strictly Kantian sense, are supposed to refer to. There are two imaginative, extremely suggestive articles by Sellars, some hints at connections with eighteenth century psychology offered by Weldon, a tenebrous book by Heidemann, and some recent attention to the general issue of ‘Kant's theory of mind’ by Ameriks and Kitcher.

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