scholarly journals Evolutionary Theism of Henryk Levittoux in Polish and International Context

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Michał Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
International Context ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Polish Philosophy ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Religious Dogma ◽  
Law Of Attraction ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Nicolaus Copernicus

Henryk Levittoux (1822-1879) is currently best known as the model of Jan Matejko who posed for him as Nicolaus Copernicus. Less known, however, is his concept of evolution, which he presented as a part of his philosophical system and which caused a heated debates among Polish intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century. Levittoux's theory, which was trying to combine religious dogma with the achievements of contemporary science, breaks out of the popular historical narrative, in which it is assumed that the discussions about the evolutionism were dominated by creationists and pro-Darwinian positivists. The aim of this article will be to present Levittoux's theory of evolution and to show how he combined the ideas of evolution with the concept of Divine creation. Secondary focus of the article will be to place his theory in the broader context of scientific and philosophical changes, that took place in the nineteenth century. Attention will be paid to the way in which the professionalization of science affected natural philosophers, such as Levittoux, who were refusing to accept the rigorous positivist methodology. It will also be shown how Levittoux’s evolutionism became part of the so-called "developmental evolutionism" which promoted a completely different vision of evolution than Darwinism. The non-Darwinian nature of Levittoux's evolutionism was inspired by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s theory. Levittoux adopted his idea that species evolve thanks to the environmental stimulus which affects their ontogenesis. However, this idea will be extrapolated in Levittoux’s writings to the whole Earth. So, he will conclude that the Earth is the equivalent of the womb in which, like the fetus, all Life develops. All changes of species, in his opinion, are additionally controlled by a universal principle which he called the law of attraction-repulsion. This law was also the tool by which God created the world. The Levittoux’s concept is one of the first attempts to create a synthesis of evolutionism and religious thought in the Polish post-Darwinian philosophy of nature. Levittoux, as a continuator of Saint-Hilaire's thought, is also an interesting example of an attempt to instill in Polish philosophy French evolutionist thought.

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

OOK DE VIS MOET DUUR BETALEN

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 226-247
Author(s):  
Lucie Sedláčková
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Speaking Out ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Sentient Beings ◽  
Animal Agency

THE FISH HAVE TO PAY DEARLY AS WELL The representations of animals and vegetarianism in the works of Herman Heijermans and other socially engaged writers of the fin de siècle At the end of the nineteenth century, the perception of animals changed significantly due to the theory of evolution and other new ideas, which also affected a number of Dutch socialist-leaning writers. Utilizing the framework of literary animal studies, this article investigates how animals were represented in their works. Most of the examined writers present animals as sentient beings, which is also ref lected by their speaking out in favour of vegetarianism. Herman Heijermans takes a more ambivalent position: some of his writings show the possibility of animal agency, whereas in others, animals are subordinate to people’s needs and are objectified.

Gendered Ecologies

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Natural Domain ◽  
Diachronic Study ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Michael Faraday

Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century is comprised of a diverse collection of essays featuring analyses of literary women writers, ecofeminism, feminist ecocriticism, and the value of the interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman, and nonliving entities as part of the environs. The book presents a case for the often-disregarded literary women writers of the long nineteenth century, who were active contributors to the discourse of natural history—the diachronic study of participants as part of a vibrant community interconnected by matter. While they were not natural philosophers as in the cases of Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Michael Faraday among others, these women writers did engage in acute observations of materiality in space (e.g., subjects, objects, and abjects), reasoned about their findings, and encoded their discoveries of nature in their literary and artistic productions. The collection includes discussions of the works of influential literary women from the long nineteenth century—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child—whose multi-directional observations of animate and inanimate objects in the natural domain are based on self-made discoveries while interacting with the environs.

A Victorian Wrenaissance: Historical Narrative at St. Paul's Cathedral

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-422
Author(s):  
Dory Agazarian
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Christopher Wren ◽  
Liberal Individualism

The condition of St. Paul's Cathedral was central to concerns about the perception of London over the course of the nineteenth century. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, it faced public criticism from the start. Unlike gothic Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's was an eclectic amalgam of gothic and neoclassical architecture; its interior was never finished. Efforts to decorate were boxed in by the strictures of Victorian architectural revivalism. This is the story of how academic historiography resolved a problem that aesthetic and architectural theory could not. Throughout the century, cathedral administrators sought to improve the cathedral by borrowing tools from historians with varying success. In the 1870s, a solution emerged when historians reinvented the Italian Renaissance as a symbol of liberal individualism. Their revisionist Renaissance provided an alternative to pure gothic or neoclassical revivalism, able to accommodate Wren's stylistic eclecticism. Scholars have traditionally plotted disputes about St. Paul's within broader architectural debates. Yet I argue that these discussions were framed as much by historical discourse as aesthetics. Turns in Victorian historiography eventually allowed architects to push past the aesthetic limits of the Battle of the Styles. New methods in Victorian historical research were crucial to nineteenth-century experiences of urban space.

Let Us Grow Strong by Organization and Earnest Cooperation

2018 ◽  
pp. 135-157
Author(s):  
Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
National Leaders

This chapter focuses on the formation of national civil rights organizations in Boston and how they confronted the rising tide of Jim Crow in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Through these organizations, black men and women merged local political concerns with a broader movement for racial equality. This chapter pays particular attention to the Boston black community’s response to the rise in southern lynching. In doing so, it expands the historical narrative that has focused on anti-lynching during the 1890s as a product of the actions of central national leaders.

Revisionist Theologies of Salvation

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-118
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Liberal Theology ◽  
Existential Interpretation ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Human Liberation

What unites revisionist theologies of the cross is the rejection (sometimes with qualification) of the idea of vicarious substitution and the Anselmian analysis of its rationale. They all reject or reinterpret the doctrine of “original sin.” They propose an “existential” interpretation of the cross, and relate it to the imperative for human liberation. These ideas are in continuity with liberal theology of the nineteenth century. What is more specifically novel is their reliance on critical biblical studies and above all their acceptance of contemporary science, especially its account of human evolution.

scholarly journals Natural Philosophy and the Sciences: Challenging Science’s Tunnel Vision

Philosophies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arran Gare
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Dialectical Thinking ◽  
Tunnel Vision ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Philosophers

Prior to the nineteenth century, those who are now regarded as scientists were referred to as natural philosophers. With empiricism, science was claimed to be a superior form of knowledge to philosophy, and natural philosophy was marginalized. This claim for science was challenged by defenders of natural philosophy, and this debate has continued up to the present. The vast majority of mainstream scientists are comfortable in the belief that through applying the scientific method, knowledge will continue to accumulate, and that claims to knowledge outside science apart from practical affairs should not be taken seriously. This is referred to as scientism. It is incumbent on those who defend natural philosophy against scientism not only to expose the illusions and incoherence of scientism, but to show that natural philosophers can make justifiable claims to advancing knowledge. By focusing on a recent characterization and defense of natural philosophy along with a reconstruction of the history of natural philosophy, showing the nature and role of Schelling’s conception of dialectical thinking, I will attempt to identify natural philosophy as a coherent tradition of thought and defend it as something different from science and as essential to it, and essential to the broader culture and to civilization.

scholarly journals The Interplay of Demographic, Economic, and Social History

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 495-515
Author(s):  
E. Anthony Wrigley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Urban Growth ◽  
Positive Feedback ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Controlled Experiments ◽  
Occupational Change ◽  
Demographic Behavior

Historical narrative commonly involves both description and explanation. The nature of the information available to historians gives rise to problems that seldom appear in other disciplines. For example, it is not possible, given the nature of historical data, to conduct controlled experiments to resolve uncertainties concerning the cause of a given event. It is normally the case that the concept of negative and positive feedback is a more appropriate framework for this purpose than causation. Such a framework can be used in discussing the interplay of demographic behavior, urban growth, and occupational change in facilitating England’s escape from the constraints suffered by all organic economies. Comparison of the contrast in this regard between England and continental Europe helps to clarify the nature of the divergence between the island and the continent over a period of 300 years, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Dialogical elements in Harris, Dewey, Cutter, Otlet, Kaiser, and Ranganathan: Theoretical convergences in the history of Knowledge Organization

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-362
Author(s):  
Rodrigo de SALES ◽  
Daniel MARTÍNEZ-ÁVILA ◽  
José Augusto GUIMARÃES
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Knowledge Organization ◽  
Methodological Development ◽  
History Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Descriptive Approach

Abstract In this paper, we study the theoretical intersections and dialogues between some foundational authors on classification and indexing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that helped developing the theoretical-methodological framework of knowledge organization. More specifically, we highlight and analyze the theoretical convergences of Harris, Dewey, Cutter, Otlet, Kaiser, and Ranganathan as they can provide a clearer picture of the historical and theoretical contributions to the epistemological foundations of knowledge organization. Our methodology follows a critical-descriptive approach to the analysis of the main contributions of the authors and the critical reflections of some specialists and biographers. We continue with a discussion of the links between bibliographic classifications and knowledge organization drawing on the ideas of Bliss; then, we divide our historical narrative between the theoretical contributions during the nineteenth-century (Harris, Dewey, and Cutter) and the twentieth century (Otlet, Kaiser, and Ranganathan); and finally, we present a discussion of the history of knowledge organization from the point of view of the theoretical and methodological development of classification and indexing at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. We conclude with some remarks on their main contributions to the development of the knowledge organization field.

Ali Sedad Bey’s (d. 1900), ()

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nazif Muhtaroglu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Working Mechanism ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
First Time ◽  
Late Ottoman

This chapter presents and evaluates Ali Sedāt’s (d. 1900) Principles of Transformation in the Motion of Particles. In this work, Ali Sedad gives a detailed description of the working mechanism of the whole universe, including topics that range from the interaction of atoms to the emergence of animate bodies and the motion of heavenly bodies. In doing this, he introduces thermodynamics and Darwin’s theory of evolution for the first time to the Turkish-speaking community in a detailed way and discusses the laws behind natural phenomena in a philosophical way. Ali Sedāt’s Principles of Transformation is a unique work introducing the basic principles of the natural sciences in nineteenth-century European circles to the Ottoman world and interpreting them from an Ashʿarite perspective. It shows how an Ashʿarite scholar from the late Ottoman era followed modern science thoroughly but interpreted it critically from its own philosophical point of view.

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