AS RUPTURAS EPISTEMOLÓGICAS NAS CIÊNCIAS DA VIDA SEGUNDO A ARQUEOLOGIA DE MICHEL FOUCAULT

Este artigo busca expor a compreensão da ruptura ou descontinuidade epistemológica explanadas pelo filósofo francês Michel Foucault em sua obra As palavras e as coisas. A partir de seu método, denominado Arqueologia do saber, o autor tenta evidenciar que a distinção entre a História Natural dos séculos XVII e XVIII, ciência que visava classificar animais e plantas em espécies, gênero e outras categorias, a partir de características físicas externas dos organismos, e a biologia que surge no final do século XVIII caracterizada como o estudo da vida, tendo em conta as funções dos órgãos internos e a relação entre os organismos e os seus habitats, como eles se alimentam, como respiram etc. Como veremos ao longo do texto, a ruptura epistemológica causada pelo surgimento do microscópio e pelas primeiras dissecações do biólogo Georges Cuvier não apenas deu início à biologia, mas também forneceu a condição de possibilidade de emergir a compreensão evolutiva na segundo metade do século XIX. Ao dissecar organismos, Cuvier não apenas teria quebrado a barreira epistemológica intransponível da epiderme dos seres vivos, mas também pavimentado o caminho para Charles Darwin e Alfred Wallace conceberem a noção da evolução das espécies algum tempo depois.

The illustrations of Brongniart and Cuvier illuminate paleontology in the early nineteenth century

ABSTRACT The concept of biostratigraphy was a significant step in the evolution of geoscience. Alexandre Brongniart (1770–1847) and Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) were key contributors to developing the subdiscipline as they worked to decode the stratigraphy of the Paris Basin in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Their illustrations of fossils, local geologic columns, and a regional geologic map played a decisive role in furthering an understanding of the value of paleontology in the service of illuminating Earth history.

The World Soul in American Transcendentalism

American Transcendentalism, a religious, literary, and social reform movement whose acknowledged leader was Ralph Waldo Emerson, characteristically deployed world soul thinking to harmonize Protestant individualism with Deist rationalism and modern science. Emerson’s “Over-Soul,” whose sources include Platonism, German Idealism, and the transcendental anatomy of Georges Cuvier, enabled the Transcendentalists to distance themselves from orthodox theism by turning God’s magisterial law from outer command into inner creative principle, based on the fundamental concept that all human beings (and, for some, all life) share an inner divine principle that radiates meaning into the world. This chapter draws on William James, who analyzed world soul thinking in terms of the varieties of transcendentalism: this lens suggests that for many Transcendentalists, Emerson’s idealist, absolute monism yielded to a range of pluralist and materialist variants, as seen in Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and the radical pluralism of William James himself.

‘Shattering’ and ‘Violent’ Forces: Gender, Ecology, and Catastrophe in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe with the image of the disastrous female body in order to challenge contemporary geological readings of nature as a balanced, self-regulating domain. Both incorporating and revising the work of Charles Lyell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Georges Cuvier, Eliot emphasises the interconnectedness of human and planetary processes, feminises environmental catastrophe, and blends human and ecological history. She does so in order to write the human presence back into geological histories that tended to evacuate the human, and to invite readers to account for the effects their lifestyles and industries have upon the supposedly balanced and orderly processes of nature.

“The Truth of the Origination of the World and Mankind”

The Judeo-Christian tradition maintains that humankind derives from the first couple in the Garden of Eden. St. Augustine even included the so-called monstrous races in the overall category of humanity. This consensus started to fragment in the sixteenth century with the work of Paracelsus and later Giordano Bruno, when alternative theories were put forward to account for human diversity. Their work was followed by others, including Julius Caesar Vanini, Isaac La Peyrère, John Atkins, Voltaire, François Bernier, Carl Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier, Edward Long, and Lord Kames. For most of them, the black and the Jew were the great obstacles to the unity of mankind.