The Elephant's Footprint: An Ancient Indian Logic Diagram

A seminal article by Margaret Baron, published in 1969, explored the history of set diagrams (Venn diagrams). However, Baron did not look beyond the evidence of European sources. This article presents evidence of a literary simile from ancient India that exemplifies the idea of a larger circle including within it many smaller circles, each circle standing for an ethical concept. The simile – an elephant's footprint enclosing the footprints of smaller animals – first appears in the Buddhist Canon, and it was used occasionally in South Asian literature through the following millennia until the eighteenth century. I argue that the Elephant's Foot simile can be added to Baron’s catalogue of historical cases where ancient authors were using language that implied a simple concept of logical sets.

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Biography and Homoeopathy in Bengal: Colonial lives of a European heterodoxy

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x14000572 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 49 (6) ◽

pp. 1732-1771 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

SHINJINI DAS

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Cultural History ◽

South Asian ◽

Medical Science ◽

British India ◽

Principal Mode ◽

Writing Practices ◽

History Of ◽

Contemporary Status ◽

State Archives

AbstractDespite being recognized as a significant literary mode in understanding the advent of the modern self, biographies as agenrehave received relatively little attention from South Asian historians. Likewise, histories of science and healing in British India have largely ignored the colonial trajectories of those sectarian, dissenting, supposedly pseudo-sciences and medical heterodoxies that have flourished in Europe since the late eighteenth century. This article addresses these gaps in the historiography to identify biographies as a principal mode through which an incipient, ‘heterodox’ Western science like homoeopathy could consolidate and sustain itself in Bengal. In recovering the cultural history of a category that the state archives render largely invisible, this article argues that biographies are more than a mere repository of individual lives, and in fact are a veritable site of power. In bringing histories of print and publishing, histories of medicine, and histories of life writing practices together, it pursues two broad themes: first, it analyses the sociocultural strategies and networks by which scientific doctrines and concepts are translated across cultural borders. It explores the relation between medical commerce, print capital, and therapeutic knowledge to illustrate that acculturation of medical science necessarily drew upon and reinforced local constellations of class, kinship, and religion. Second, it simultaneously reflects upon the expanding genre of homoeopathic biographies published since the mid-nineteenth century: on their features, relevance, and functions, examining in particular the contemporary status of biography vis-à-vis ‘history’ in writing objective pasts.

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A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature (1660-1780)

10.1017/cbo9781139061537 ◽

2009 ◽

Author(s):

Edmund Gosse

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century Literature ◽

History Of ◽

Century Literature

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Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century

10.1017/cbo9781139895705 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

John Nichols

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Literary History ◽

History Of

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The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought

10.1017/chol9780521374224 ◽

2006 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Mark Goldie ◽

Robert Wokler

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Political Thought ◽

History Of

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The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

10.1017/chol9780521867429 ◽

2006 ◽

Cited By ~ 32

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

History Of

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History of English thought in the eighteenth century, Vol 1.

10.1037/14133-000 ◽

1876 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Leslie Stephen

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

History Of

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A history of botanical collections in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia

Archives of Natural History ◽

10.3366/anh.1998.25.2.283 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 25 (2) ◽

pp. 283-291

Author(s):

P.S.M. PHIRI ◽

D.M. MOORE

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Environmental Impact ◽

Impact Assessment ◽

Vascular Plants ◽

Central Africa ◽

Peak Activity ◽

Historical Account ◽

History Of ◽

The 1960S ◽

Made In

Central Africa remained botanically unknown to the outside world up to the end of the eighteenth century. This paper provides a historical account of plant explorations in the Luangwa Valley. The first plant specimens were collected in 1897 and the last serious botanical explorations were made in 1993. During this period there have been 58 plant collectors in the Luangwa Valley with peak activity recorded in the 1960s. In 1989 1,348 species of vascular plants were described in the Luangwa Valley. More botanical collecting is needed with a view to finding new plant taxa, and also to provide a satisfactory basis for applied disciplines such as ecology, phytogeography, conservation and environmental impact assessment.

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Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences ◽

10.1525/hsns.2020.50.1-2.58 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 50 (1-2) ◽

pp. 58-66

Author(s):

Giuliano Pancaldi

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

History Of Science ◽

Science Policy ◽

Special Issue ◽

Half Century ◽

The Past ◽

Past Half Century ◽

History Of ◽

Long Eighteenth Century ◽

Past Half

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.

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