Browse Items (123 total)
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A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America
European encountered climates in northern North America that were harsher and more variable than their notions about weather and geography led them to expect. In A Temperate Empire, Anya Zilberstein reveals how colonial conditions generated…
Tags: 18th century, 19th century, Atlantic, climate, colonialism, science
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
Captures the complicated attitude towards science during the Enlightenment. A man is suffocating a bird in an air pump, while (most of) his audience looks on in wonder and fear. Shows that scientific demonstrations could attract a considerable…
Tags: 18th century, disciplines, savage/civilized, science, violence
Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World
A global history of the 1815 Tambora eruption, the climate changes it brought, and their impact on societies, culture, and science. Includes chapters on the experiences of famines in Bengal, Yunnan, and Ireland, and reactions by writers in America…
Tags: 19th century, climate, disaster, famine
Natural Disasters and the Debate on the Unity or Plurality of Enlightenments,
Discusses eighteenth-century views of natural portents and disasters, mainly in the thought of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith, and claims, vis-à-vis Jonathan Israel's thesis regarding the Radical Enlightenment, that in fact the Moderate Enlightenment…
Natural Disasters and the Debate on the Unity or Plurality of Enlightenments,
Discusses eighteenth-century views of natural portents and disasters, mainly in the thought of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith, and claims, vis-à-vis Jonathan Israel's thesis regarding the Radical Enlightenment, that in fact the Moderate Enlightenment…
The Civilizing Process, Nature, and Stadial Theory
Discusses the influence of Enlightenment stadial theory on the ideas of Norbert Elias, particularly as these relate to the utilization of natural resources.
History and Nature in the Enlightenment: Praise of the Mastery of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Historical Literature
Outlines how eighteenth-century historians emphasized the use of nature as a precondition for cultural progress. Discusses such things as climatic theories, and stadial theories.
Nature in the History of Economic Thought: How Natural Resources Became an Economic Concept
Outlines how natural resources came to be considered as economic resources in European intellectual history, with an emphasis on developments in the long eighteenth century.
Christian Wolff’s Prolegomena to Empirical and Rational Psychology: Translation and Commentary
In this translation of a short selection of Wolff’s extremely influential Psychologia empirica (published in 1732, with a second edition released in 1738), he sets out some of his key assumptions regarding how to examine the human mind. The…
The Right to be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet
Watt-Cloutier gives a biographical account of her work on climate justice in the Arctic region. She discusses her perspective on climate change coming from an Indigenous community perspective. Her notion "the right to be cold" clarifies a different…
Sade: From Materialism to Pornography
Examines influences of materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment on Sade's thinking and writing and how Sade adapts these various philosophies to create his own transgressive approach to materialism. In so doing, Warman shows how violence,…
Tags: disciplines, In-between, materialism, pornography, upheavals
Candide
Tags: 18th century, disaster, enlightenment, philosophy, upheavals
The Letter from Dublin: Climate Change, Colonialism, and the Royal Society in the Seventeenth Century
This article discusses an anonymous letter published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1676 that reports the theories of American colonists about the cause of their warming climate (cultivation and deforestation), and offers Ireland’s colonial…
Tags: 17th century, climate, climate change, Ireland, science, Virginia
Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France
Vila's study is now a classic, not only for its revealing interdisciplinary treatment of sensibility but also for its precise methodology and the clarity of its prose.
Tags: 18th century, biology, disciplines, France, In-between, materialism, medecine, philosophy, physiology, science, sexuality
La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine
Vartanian establishes the authoritative French text of La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine, and several essays on its background, claims, its materialism, and its place in 18th Century science.
Tags: disciplines, ethics, materialisms, mechanism, medicine, philosophy, physics, physiology, science
Mémorial Cap 110
Commemorates the victims of the 1830 shipwreck of a slave ship along the coast of Martinique, as well as other victims of the slave trade. Fifteen human figures stand in a triangular formation facing the sea, orientated at the exact latitude of the…
Tags: art, colonialism, race, upheavals
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Tsing traces the rhythms of disturbance-based ecologies through the biological and economic lives of matsutake mushrooms. Attending to the fortuitous multispecies assemblages of lifeforms and lifeways that arise within the ruins of capitalist…
Tags: capitalism, climate, ecocritique, ecology, environment, In-between
Catching Nature in the Act: Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century
Terrall's investigation of the eighteenth-century French scientist Réaumur and his circle represents both a fascinating account of the techniques and practices of eighteenth-century naturalists and a stimulating analysis of the production of…
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