scholarly journals Os saberes úteis de José Pinto de Azerero na rede de informações do Império Ultramarino português * Useful knowledge from José Pinto de Azeredo in the information network inside portuguese's oversea empire

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Fernanda Ribeiro Rocha Fagundes

Neste artigo pretende-se evidenciar a produção de saberes em língua portuguesa, elaborados pelo físico-mor José Pinto de Azeredo, ao final do século XVIII e princípios do XIX, sob a ótica da História das Ciências Global e Transcontinental. Destaca-se na análise as ideias reelaboradas e circulantes desse ator histórico em regiões como a América portuguesa, Europa e África. Tal circulação se dava em uma conjuntura ilustrada, em que se admitia uma espécie de ciência pragmática. Nesse contexto, o Império Ultramarino mantinha uma rede de conhecimentos úteis, que era constantemente alimentada por várias instituições portuguesas e diversos personagens históricos a ela conectados, que agiam nas mais variadas possessões do além-mar português. As informações circulantes envolviam diversos setores, incluindo os saberes médicos.*In this essay, we want to show the Portuguese knowledge made by the physician José Pinto de Azeredo in the end of eighteenth century and first part of nineteenth century. We are using the New Global and Transcontinental History of science theory. This paper has underlined José Pinto de Azeredo’s ideas, which had been recreated and traveled around Portuguese America, Europe and Africa. This process of ideas circulation happened in a historic moment of the Enlightenment, when a pragmatic science was possible. In that moment, the Portuguese overseas empire kept a useful knowledge network, which was fed by several Portuguese institutions and a lot of history characters who belong to Portugal. These characters could be overseas employees, travelers, physicians, traders who sent a lot of information about several subject including cure’s knowledge to Portugal’s network.

Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

This chapter examines how the middle of the eighteenth century was a major turning point in the history of the Jews in Europe. Under the influence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, many rulers now began to initiate attempts, carried still further by their constitutional successors in the nineteenth century, to transform the Jews from members of a religious and cultural community into ‘useful’ subjects, or, where a civil society had been established, into citizens. This attempt to change the legal, social, and economic status of the Jews was part of a wider process affecting the whole of society which can be described as ‘the Great Transformation’. There were two aspects to this transformation: economic and political. One now sees the industrial revolution as the culmination of a much longer process that should probably be dated back to the effects of European overseas expansion from the fifteenth century. The end result of this revolution was urbanization, the development of industry, the increasing importance of the bourgeoisie, and the displacement of the landed aristocracy as the dominant economic and political stratum.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.


Author(s):  
Michael D. Gordin

Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834–1907) is a name we recognize, but perhaps only as the creator of the periodic table of elements. Generally, little else has been known about him. This book is an authoritative biography of Mendeleev that draws a multifaceted portrait of his life for the first time. As the book reveals, Mendeleev was not only a luminary in the history of science, he was also an astonishingly wide-ranging political and cultural figure. From his attack on Spiritualism to his failed voyage to the Arctic and his near-mythical hot-air balloon trip, this is the story of an extraordinary maverick. The ideals that shaped his work outside science also led Mendeleev to order the elements and, eventually, to engineer one of the most fascinating scientific developments of the nineteenth century. This book is a classic work that tells the story of one of the world's most important minds.


Author(s):  
Anik Waldow

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.


Author(s):  
Mark Migotti

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.


2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 474-487
Author(s):  
Marie-Pauline Martin

Abstract Today there is a consensus on the definition of the term ‘rococo’: it designates a style both particular and homogeneous, artistically related to the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. But we must not forget that in its primitive formulations, the rococo has no objective existence. As a witty, sneering, and impertinent word, it can adapt itself to the most varied discourses and needs, far beyond references to the eighteenth century. Its malleability guarantees its sparkling success in different languages, but also its highly contradictory uses. By tracing the genealogy of the word ‘rococo’, this article will show that the association of the term with the century of Louis XV is a form of historical discrimination that still prevails widely in the history of the art of the Enlightenment.


BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.


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