DREADFUL ENEMIES: THE “BEAST,” THE HYENA, AND NATURAL HISTORY IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-61
Author(s):  
JAY M. SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Southern France ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Hybrid Character ◽  
Century Science

The hypothesis that the beast of the Gévaudan (an intriguingly mysterious killer that roamed southern France in the 1760s) might be an African hyena was not simply a popular and amusing misconception; it reflected an important dimension of the critical spirit driving eighteenth-century science. By historicizing natural discovery and its motivations, this essay uncovers aspects of Enlightenment natural history—namely an attraction to the unknowable and a desire for uncertainty, both reflected in the fascination with the sublime—that only became more marked as the frontiers of knowledge receded. In doing so, the essay shows the distinctively hybrid character of an Enlightenment mentality that savored both illumination and darkness.

Scientific Culture and Mineralogical Sciences in the Luso-Brazilian Empire: The Work of João da Silva Feijó (1760–1824) in Ceará

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Margaret Lopes ◽  
Clarete Paranhos da Silva ◽  
Silvia Fernanda de M. Figueirôa ◽  
Rachel Pinheiro
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Scientific Context ◽  
Political Project

This paper argues that eighteenth-century Portuguese scientific policies promoted the inclusion of its main colony, Brazil, in the Enlightenment environment. This was accomplished by innovative initiatives, such as voyages to explore the colonial territory. Natural history activities, especially in mining, remained at the center of this political project and relied on co-opting groups of Portuguese in America. Based on the life of João da Silva Feijó, this article outlines the relevant connections between Feijó's scientific activities and the first Brazilian national expedition in the 1850s, which led to discussion about developing the Brazilian nation. This analysis is aimed toward the growing consensus in historiography of the sciences that scientific activities practiced outside European centers gave rise to complex interactions involving the processes of mondialization of sciences and the construction of a local scientific context.

scholarly journals Second Nature and the Sonic Sublime

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 178-196
Author(s):  
Miranda Stanyon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Second Nature ◽  
Michel De Certeau ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Physical Environments ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Point Of Departure

Like other spaces of the Enlightenment, the sublime was what Michel de Certeau might have called “a practiced place.” Its rhetorical commonplaces, philosophical terrains, and associated physical environments were cultivated, shaped, and framed by human action and habit. But can the sublime—epiphanic, quasi-spiritual, unmasterable, extraordinary—ever really become a habit? Is it possible, even natural, to become habituated to sublimity? Taking as its point of departure the Aristotelian claim that “habit is a second nature,” this article explores the counterintuitive relationship between habit and the sublime. It focuses not on that eighteenth-century “cultivar,” the natural sublime, but on sonic sublimity, exploring on one hand overwhelming sounds, and on the other a conceptualization of sound itself as a sublime phenomenon stretching beyond audibility to fill all space. As this exploration shows, both the sublime and habit were seen as capable of creating a second nature, and prominent writers connected habit, practice, or repetition to the sublime. Equally, however, there are points of friction between the aesthetic of the sublime and philosophies of habit, especially in the idea that habit dulls or removes sensation. This is a prominent idea in Félix Ravaisson's landmark De l'habitude (1838), a text currently enjoying renewed attention, and one that apparently stems from Enlightenment attempts to explain sensation, consciousness, and freedom. Similar concerns inform the eighteenth-century sublime, yet the logic behind the sublime is at odds with the dulling of sensation. The article closes by touching on the reemergence of “second nature” in contemporary art oriented toward the sublime, and on the revisions of Enlightenment nature this involves.

2. America and the transatlantic Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
pp. 22-36
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
New World ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Living Things ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
And Gender

‘America and the transatlantic Enlightenment’ explores how America played an important role in the making of the Enlightenment. The New World offered a startling new picture of the natural world and all the living things in it. America catalyzed new ideas about science, natural history, and human nature, which both shaped and were shaped by Enlightenment thought. British Americans drew on classical republican thought and contemporary ideas about natural law and this coalesced into a revolutionary republicanism—the nexus of ideas that animated the Revolutionary War. Though many of the ideas to emerge out of eighteenth-century America promised a radical new world of freedom and human possibility, they were also blinkered by long-standing racial and gender prejudices.

Apocalypse Narrative, Chaotic System: Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne and Modern Ecology

2011 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Heidi Scott
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
New Findings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Vision ◽  
Century Science ◽  
Ecological Methodology

The catastrophic worldview, which has been formalized into various scientific theories (punctuated equilibrium, chaos, tipping points), covets disaster as its aesthetic, with entropy and negentropy as vying principles. At the close of the eighteenth century, science centered around the new findings of Geology, and scientists like Cuvier, Lamarck, and Buffon debated the predominance of gradual change through time versus sudden, widespread calamities or ‘punctuations.’ This essay investigates Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789), a non-fiction, late eighteenth century natural history chronicle of a single parish through decades of close environmental observation. Its epistolary form conveys an aesthetic of discrete, close readings of nature through time, and the chronicle breaks off with the catastrophic effects of the Laki volcanic eruption of 1783. I suggest ways in which White’s famous work is unusually precocious in ecological methodology, a particularly fruitful angle because my reading goes against the perennial critical reception of Selborne as a tome of Enlightenment balance and economy. Instead, I argue that White’s work is a distinctly modern vision of catastrophic change in nature that foregrounds the contemporary science of Chaos Ecology.

A naturalist of the Northern Enlightenment: Peter Forsskål after 250 years

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. Baack
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Marine Biology ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Plant Geography ◽  
Scientific Exploration ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Attention To Detail

Peter Forsskål (1732–1763) was the naturalist on the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia (1761–1767), a particularly rich example of the eighteenth century era of scientific exploration and a quintessential project of the Enlightenment. Forsskål is noteworthy for his early writings in philosophy and politics and for his outstanding contributions to the botanical and zoological knowledge of the Middle East, specifically Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, principally Yemen. His biological work stands out for the large number of species identified, its attention to detail, the expansiveness of his descriptions, his knowledge and use of Arabic and his early ideas on plant geography. Forsskål's research in the marine biology of the Red Sea was also pioneering. His publications and collections represent the single greatest contribution to the knowledge of the natural history of the Middle East in the eighteenth century and are still valued by scholars today. His skill in retaining local terminology in Arabic and his respect for the contributions of local inhabitants to this work are also worth noting. When he died of malaria in 1763 in Yemen, the eighteenth-century world of natural science lost a promising and adventurous scientist.

The Inorganic Plant in the Romantic Garden

2019 ◽  
pp. 86-113
Author(s):  
Natania Meeker ◽  
Antónia Szabari
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Logical Conclusion ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The Way

This chapter approaches Romantic aesthetics through the “plant horror” of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), who had an ambivalent relationship to Romantic vitalism, and studies the way in which his arabesque vegetality travels into the work of later writers, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). Poe’s foregrounding of the eighteenth-century notion of “the sentience of all vegetable things” in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) both responds to and undermines Romantic ideas about human affinities with plants. In “Usher,” Poe follows the Enlightenment analogy of human to plant to its logical conclusion in order to expose its aporias; for him, vegetal sentience cannot be contained within any hierarchy of being. At the same time, Poe destroys the Romantic fusional model—in which humans and plants commune within a shared physical world—by focusing on the destructive and rapacious qualities of the vegetal. The transcendental ideas of beauty and the sublime give way in Poe to a vegetality that invades the human consciousness. He suggests that humans might be horrified, rather than delighted, by the calamity that a vegetal modernity represents, even though (and perhaps because) they have no alternative to it.

scholarly journals „Rasa czyli plemię”. Problemy z nomenklaturą u początku polskiej antropologii

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Nowak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Classification Systems ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Organic World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Human Kind ◽  
Cultural Features

“Race or Tribe”: Problems with Nomenclature in the Early Days of Polish Anthropology This article presents the early stage of shaping Polish terminology connected with the human science, the origins of man and differentiation of humankind in the period when anthropology only began to separate from natural history, and its representatives attempted to make the scope of their research clear and distinct. This process of organising the organic world within the classification systems created for this purpose, including divisions of the mankind on the basis of physical and cultural features of people, was accompanied by an effort to unify scholarly nomenclature and establish a “systematic language”. This was a slow and often chaotic phase because scholars did not object to inconsistent nomenclature at all. In works popularising knowledge and in journalism even more disinformation appeared.The notion of race was accepted as a superior category that was to show a complexity of terms reflecting the divisions of the human kind. This term, from the second half of the eighteenth century used in Western literature to denote individual physical types of man, in the Polish writings was little known and as a rule other notions were in common use instead. Plenty of meanings, diverse and arbitrary application of notions made it necessary to organise this chaos and explain the most typical categories that the Polish authors of the Enlightenment and Romantic periods started to apply in order to describe the diversity of the human world. „Rasa czyli plemię”. Problemy z nomenklaturą u początku polskiej antropologiiW artykule zaprezentowano początki kształtowania się polskiej terminologii związanej z nauką o człowieku, jego pochodzeniu i zróżnicowaniu, w okresie, kiedy antropologia dopiero zaczynała wyodrębniać się z historii naturalnej, a jej przedstawiciele próbowali doprecyzować zakres badanego przedmiotu. Procesowi uporządkowania świata organicznego w ramach powstałych systemów klasyfikacyjnych, w tym podziałów rodzaju ludzkiego ze względu na cechy fizyczne i kulturowe, towarzyszyło ujednolicenie nazewnictwa naukowego, tworzenie „języka systematycznego”. Jego powstawanie dokonywało się powoli, często chaotycznie za sprawą samych badaczy, którym nie przeszkadzała nomenklaturowa niekonsekwencja. Jeszcze większa dezinformacja panowała w pracach popularyzujących wiedzę i publicystyce.Za kategorię nadrzędną, która posłużyła do ukazania złożoności formowania się terminów związanych z podziałami ludzkości, przyjęto pojęcie rasy. Termin ten, używany w literaturze zachodniej do opisów odrębnych typów fizycznych człowieka od drugiej połowy XVIII wieku w piśmiennictwie polskim był słabo upowszechniony i konsekwentnie zastępowany innymi określeniami. Bogactwo znaczeń, różnorodność i dowolność ich stosowania zrodziły potrzebę uporządkowania tego pojęciowego zamieszania i wyjaśnienia najbardziej typowych kategorii, które służyły polskim autorom formacji oświeceniowej i romantycznej do opisów zróżnicowania świata ludzkiego.

Natural history books in the library of Dr Richard Richardson

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Edgington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
History Books

During the first decades of the eighteenth century the wealthy Yorkshire naturalist Richard Richardson acquired a large library, particularly strong in natural history, medicine and antiquarianism. Virtually all the natural history component was dispersed before the library was catalogued, so its contents have been unknown. Richardson's unpublished correspondence with Sir Hans Sloane and William Sherard contains many references to his books and shows that they and other leading naturalists were the source of most of them, by donation and purchase. Of about 700 books in natural history that he possessed, 425 have been identified; an Appendix lists 300 of the more significant titles. Comparison is made with other natural history libraries, and the eventual fate of Richardson's is discussed.

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