Browse Items (26 total)
- Collection: Curated Research
- Tags: Science
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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
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…
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…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Botany: The Salutary Science
Cook's magisterial study explores Jean-Jacques Rousseau's abiding interest in botany and botanical science and the significance of his botanical writings in the context of the history of plant science. She gives a wide-ranging yet exquisitely nuanced…
Tags: botany, ecology, ethics, In-between, philosophy of nature, Rousseau, science
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
Re-Thinking Colonialism to Prepare for the Impacts of Rapid Environmental Change
Reo and Parker discuss how landscape change similar to what people are concerned about with climate change today has a long history in certain regions. In what is now called the Eastern U.S., colonialism enacted environmental changes such as massive…
The Melting Ice Cellar: What Native Traditional Knowledge is Teaching Us about Global Warming and Environmental Change
The knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples have historically been rejected by many scientific fields. Climate science is just beginning to catch on to the value of Indigenous knowledge systems. Cochran and Geller discuss the overlaps and differences…
How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts
Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about…
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…
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
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
The Guillotine and the Terror
A very original if somewhat disturbing book on the imaginary of the French Revolution. Arasse, a historian of art, discusses the stories that were created about and around the guillotine. He shows how the machine was invested with the values and…
Tags: art, destruction, disciplines, revolution, science
Machine and Organism
Canguilhem inverts the normal scientific question--what is the mechanism underlying this organic process?--and asks how machines are organic. He traces the history of the relationships between organism and machine from the ancient Greek political…
Tags: biology, disciplines, history, materialism, mechanism, philosophy, politics, science
The Paradox of the Automaton: From Diderot to Cybernetics
A concise and provocative history of the idea of automata from Diderot to the present. She argues that the automaton is the cornerstone of modern knowledge and its powers.
Tags: disciplines, materialism, mechanism, philosophy, physics, science
Man a Machine
Julien Offray de La Mettrie was one of the earliest French Enlightenment materialists. Exiled from France after publishing a book (A Natural History of the Soul) arguing that psychical phenomena could be explained by examining bodily processes, he…
Tags: disciplines, ethics, materialism, medicine, philosophy, physics, physiology, science
Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings
Brings together a collection of Du Châtelet's writing and shows that she was much more than Voltaire's mistress; she was a philosophe in her own right. This volume not only provides a good introduction to Du Châtelet but shows how ambitious…
Tags: 18th century, disciplines, education, female author, gender, science
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