Browse Items (123 total)
- Collection: Curated Research
Sort by:
Nature: Course Notes from the College de France
Merleau-Ponty, one of the greatest 20th Century thinkers of perception, the body, and its operation in the natural world, gives a course on the history of nature and its relationship with human freedom and thinking. These are notes on the course…
Tags: disciplines, ethics, freedom, materialisms, mechanism, organism, perception, philosophy, physics, physiology, science
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
Linnaeus, Natural History, and the Circulation of Knowledge
Contributors examine the various techniques, materials and methods that originated within the ‘Linnaean workshop’: paper technologies, publication strategies, and markets for specimens. Fresh analyses of the reception of Linnaeus’s work in Paris,…
The Starship Philosophy: Its Heritage and Competitors
Examines the distinctive features of the astronautical philosophy characteristic of the current surge of interest in interstellar spaceflight. Contrasts them with the conflicting features of more Earthbound philosophies in order to elucidate the…
Tags: colonialism, diaspora, history, Matter, philosophy, political philosophy, science
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
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 Enlightenment legacy is under siege. Defend it.
Linker defines Enlightenment legacies as "individualism, international commerce and trade, moral cosmopolitanism, freedom of the press and a culture of publicity, technological modernity, the valorization of expertise" and defends them against…
Tags: economics, enlightenment, globalization, modernity, politics, upheavals
Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century
Remains, even after half a century, the most comprehensive serious general survey available of the development of intellectual and scientific attitudes toward nature in the history of western civilization from antiquity up to the end of the…
Nature's Queer Performativity
Through a range of vivid examples drawn from scientific research (from social amoebas to lightening), Barad lays out how nature itself is queer, how it models queer communication through a performative rather than represnetative mode. Barad expands…
Cinema and Experience: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno
Hansen explores the promise of cinema as it defined and changed the notion of experience in modernity and modernist thinkers. Here Hansen proposes a materialst theory of the cinema to help work understand the radical potential that the cinema and…
Tags: critical theory, experience, film, In-between, materialism, media history
Critical Theory: Essays
Collection of Horkhiemer's early essays that define the program of critical theory. Includes seminal essays such as "Traditional and Critical Theory" and "The Latests Attacks on Metaphysics," providing background and context for many of the wartime…
The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays
A collection of essays published during the Weimar Republic that reflect on the contemporary state of reason and society as expressed in the material products of modern mass capitalism, most notebly in dance revues, photography, and the literary…
Tags: critical theory, materialism, media, modernity
Critique of Instrumental Reason
A series critical essays that connect the rise of Enlightenment thinking with the emergence of state bureaucratic apparatuses that oppress human societies through a distinctive form of ‘instrumental rationality’.
Tags: critical theory, history, In-between, modernity
The Lettered City
Rama's classic interdisciplinary study of the convergence of European architecture and literacy in Latin America. He argues the development of Latin American cities functions to reproduce and deploy power associated with European literacy and…
Tags: architecture, colonialism, Latin America, literacy, power
The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization
Written over the scope of 20 years of research, Mignolo argues that European colonizers used writing technologies (like the alphabet) as a weapon of war in Mesoamerica, with subsequent political and cultural projects in the Enlightenment serving to…
Tags: colonialism, In-between, Latin America, literacy, modernity
The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future.
Written by Paul Tillich’s student, Rubenstein argues the holocaust is the rational expression of historical tendencies made possible by the European Enlightenment, it’s focus on rational order and technical mastery of nature.
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
A landmark text critiquing the universalizing project of the European enlightenment. It argues the so-called promises of the intellectual movement remain unfulfilled, as does the forward-moving, developmental picture of history as a progressive…
Tags: critical theory, disciplines, modernity
Objectivity
Daston and Galison write the history of the emergence of scientific objectivity, beginning in the eighteenth century and proceeding into the present day. This magisterial study reveals practices of scientific image-making as constitutive of both…
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…
Featured Item
No featured items are available.