scholarly journals José Celestino Mutis’ appropriation of Newton’s experimental physics in New Granada (1761–1808)

2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-323
Author(s):  
Sergio H. Orozco-Echeverri ◽  
Sebastián Molina-Betancur

This paper characterizes José Celestino Mutis’ (1732–1808) appropriation of Newton in the Viceroyalty of New Granada. First, we examine critically traditional accounts of Mutis’ works highlighting, on the one hand, their inadequacy for directing their claims toward the nineteenth-century independence from Spain and, on the other, for not differentiating between Newtonianism and Enlightenment. Next, we portray Mutis’ complex Newtonianism from his own statements and from printed sources, including a variety of works and translations from British, Dutch, and French authors, in addition to a wide range of Newton’s writings, unusual for an eighteenth-century reader in the Americas. Finally, we analyze a salient claim of Mutis’ Newtonianism in order to depict his appropriation and transformation of Newton’s ideas: the characterization of Newtonian experimental physics as a useful science. In so doing, Mutis further developed metaphysical and methodological positions not present in Newton’s works.

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


2014 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 115-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Ottner

During the nineteenth century, history developed into an independent discipline with important cultural and intellectual functions in both the academic world, as well as in society at large. Specific circumstances contributed to the rise in importance of this discipline: On the one hand, the emergence of an educated bourgeoisie and rising nationalist movements influenced the study of history; whereas on the other hand, public demands for assurances of continuity, as well as conservative efforts for restoration, also played an important role in history's growth in importance. Historicism, which began to establish itself in late-eighteenth-century Germany, had its forerunners in research approaches that grew out of the late Enlightenment. Concepts of cultural science [Kulturwissenschaft] developed by scholars of the late Enlightenment paved the way for the rise of the historical discipline during the first half of the nineteenth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-120
Author(s):  
Dmitry Bulgakovsky ◽  
Nick Mayhew

Abstract Xenia the Servant of God, or Andrey Fyodorovich the Holy Fool is a hagiography written by Russian Orthodox priest and publicist Dmitry Bulgakovsy (1843–ca. 1918). Published in Russia in 1890, it is one of the first full accounts of the life of a saint variably referred to by two names: one feminine, Xenia, and the other masculine, Andrey. The saint ostensibly lived in St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century. Identified female at birth and named Xenia, after the death of their husband Andrey, at the age of twenty-six the saint took on the identity of their deceased husband. The saint is popular in Russia today, and stories about their life are disseminated widely. Although they were canonized in 1988 as St. Xenia and are now venerated as a holy woman, accounts of their life always include the story of their gender transformation. In twenty-first-century narratives, this episode tends to be glossed over briefly as proof of the saint's extraordinary love for their husband, serving to embellish their role as a devoted wife. However, in the original nineteenth-century stories of the saint's life—such as the one translated below—there is greater ambiguity in the depiction of their gender.


Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart

The final chapter summarizes the findings of the preceding chapters and offers an epilogue on how the tension between different approaches to classical literature has parallels in the nineteenth century. It is argued that the debates described in the monograph between the ‘Dutch School’ (philologia) focusing on textual problems and the ‘French School’ (philosophia) focusing on moral issues had no clear winners. Rather they led, on the one hand, to a more technical and professional approach to the study of ancient texts and, on the other hand, to the continued popularity of classical ideas and models of moral virtue in the eighteenth century thanks to more accessible works of ‘popular’ scholarship.


Der Islam ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Reilly

AbstractLate-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources from the Homs and Hama region in Ottoman Syria present contrasting portrayals of Bedouins. Taken together, these sources offer conflicting perspectives with respect to relationships between peoples of the towns and the steppe. On the one hand, literary sources typically portray Bedouins as antitheses of urban life, as savage wanderers who lived outside the norms of propriety and who collectively posed a threat to the wellbeing and property of settled people and of travelers. But on the other hand, legal sources portray Bedouins variously as targets of exploitation or taxation by urban-based governments; or as partners with urban people in contractual undertakings; or as imperial subjects who, like any others, would seek justice in the urban Sharīʿa courts. The article explores these differing characterizations, and seeks to explain the multifarious realities that different sources convey. It concludes by suggesting that relationships between town and steppe were on their way to becoming more institutionalized in the last years of the eighteenth century. This development foreshadowed documented nineteenth-century trends in which urban civil norms and institutions became noticeable in the lives of Bedouins who lived in proximity to towns and urban centers.


Slavic Review ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Raeff

In general histories of Russian social and philosophical thought we usually find a gap between 1790 (publication of Radishchev's Journey) and 1815 (the establishment of the first secret societies by the future Decembrists). This quarter of a century could boast neither a prominent personality nor a cause cèlèbre of government persecution. True enough, there was Karamzin and his Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia); but the tract remained long unknown, and its author is usually dismissed as a lone figure whose impact on the development of the ideologies that were to matter was, at best, peripheral. General histories of literature treat this period primarily in terms of the philological debate between Karamzin and Shishkov and as prologue to Romanticism. Thus, in the one case, the period is described exclusively in terms of Russia's literary history, which is not very satisfactory to the student of social and political ideas; for literature—even as engagé a literature as was Russia's in the nineteenth century—is hardly an adequate source or form of ideology. In the other case, Radishchev must perforce be viewed as an isolated figure, a maverick, without either followers or immediate influence. Furthermore, the obvious implication is that there were no direct links between the Decembrists and eighteenth-century Russian ideas, so that the young rebels of 1825 must have been influenced exclusively by their experiences with the life and thought of Western Europe.On the strength of the testimony of all contemporaries, however, the first decade of the nineteenth century was a period of great intellectual ferment, of exhilarating optimism about Russia's prospects for “modernization” (to use a fashionable term). Compared with the last years of Catherine II and with the reign of Paul, these decades also offered greater freedom, more opportunities for the expression of ideas and hopes. Could indeed the outrage and disillusionment at Alexander's so-called reactionary stance after 1815 be understood if it were not for the fact that his reign had opened on such a strong note of optimism and vitality?


1988 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Yeo

The ArgumentFocusing on the celebrations of Newton and his work, this article investigates the use of the concept of genius and its connection with debates on the methodology of science and the morality of great discoverers. During the period studied, two areas of tension developed. Firstly, eighteenth-century ideas about the relationship between genius and method were challenged by the notion of scientific genius as transcending specifiable rules of method. Secondly, assumptions about the nexus between intellectual and moral virtue were threatened by the emerging conception of genius as marked by an extraordinary personality – on the one hand capable of breaking with established methods to achieve great discoveries, on the other, likely to transgress moral and social conventions. The assesments of Newton by nineteenth-century scientists such as Brewster, Whewell, and De Morgan were informed by these tensions.


1989 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene F. Irschick

Recently, we have come to see that the perceptions which we had of the decay and destruction of India in the eighteenth century were more than anything else a product of British writing which sought consciously or unconsciously to magnify and color the changes which took place in the eighteenth century to enhance the magnitude of their own ‘achievements’ from then onwards. ‘achievements’ from then onwards. Secondly, we have come to see the interaction of British desires for political security on the one hand and a steady income from land and other taxes as producing a situation first of depression in the first half of the nineteenth century and later of gradual underdevelopment at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth. It is therefore possible now to understand the unwillingness of the British administration in India to engage in any large-scale developmental activity which would upset the political balance which the British had established early in their relationship with landed and mercantile groups in the area. In this essay, I should like to address the connection between British support for landed groups in the agrarian area outside of Madras on the one hand and the colonial ‘discovery’ and reinforcement of traditions on the other, to understand both the nature of colonial control strategies and the genesis of Indian revivalism.


Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith

This chapter surveys some of the more important developments in the history of the concept of race in eighteenth-century Germany. It reveals an inconsistency between the desire to make taxonomic distinctions and a hesitance to posit any real ontological divisions within the human species. This inconsistency was well represented in the physical-anthropological work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was, in many respects, the most important eighteenth-century theorist of human difference. Johann Gottfried Herder, a contemporary of Blumenbach's, was intensely interested in human diversity, but saw this diversity as entirely based in culture rather than biology, and saw cultural difference as an entirely neutral matter, rather than as a continuum of higher and lower. Herder constitutes an important link between early modern universalism, on the one hand, and on the other the ideally value-neutral project of cultural anthropology as it would begin to emerge in the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Bernhard Maier

The chapter gives an overview of the ways in which nineteenth-century Christian thinkers approached ‘other’, non-Christian religions. On the one hand, it establishes characteristics that distinguish the period between the flowering of Romanticism and the outbreak of the First World War from the periods immediately preceding and following it. On the other hand, it shows the wide range of approaches during the period under consideration, focusing on the struggle with finding suitable technical terms for hitherto unknown religious phenomena and on the scholarly attempts to arrange and classify new pieces of information, in order to integrate them into a unified picture. Special attention is paid to the ways in which nineteenth-century Christian (and secular) debates shaped and were shaped by the study of non-Christian religions. In conclusion, it is asked to what extent nineteenth-century ideas, presuppositions, and preoccupations are continuing to shape our present views on ‘religion’ and ‘world religions’.


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