Browse Items · Legacies of the Enlightenment

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,…

Tags: colonialism, disciplines, evolutionary biology, materialism, Matter, science

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…

Tags: gender and sexuality studies, In-between, materialism, nature, new materialism, queer studies, science

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…

Tags: experiment, history of science, image-making, materialism, objectivity, philosophy of nature, science, subjectivity

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…

Tags: discourse, experiment, history of science, materialism, philosophy of nature, science

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

Worksheet on the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission II

This is an in-class assignment about the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, a US research institute established after WWII in Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to study effect of radiation on humans. The worksheet is based on a couple of…

Tags: catastrophe, colonialism, cultural studies, disciplines, ethics, in-class assignment, science, women's studies

Worksheet on the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission I

This is an in-class assignment about the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, a US research institute established after WWII in Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to study effect of radiation on humans. The worksheet is based on a couple of…

Tags: catastrophe, colonialism, cultural studies, disciplines, ethics, in-class assignment, science, women's studies

History of Sexuality in Modern Science

This upper-level undergraduate course examines scientists’ changing approaches to sexuality in a range of different societies from the beginning of sexology in the late nineteenth century to the revival of biological studies at the end of the…

Tags: disciplines, gender and sexuality studies, science, syllabus, undergraduate course, women's studies, world history

Comparative History of Sexuality, Health, and Illness

The history graduate course explores histories of sexuality, health, and illness in the contexts of colonialism and post-colonialism between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth-century, with a focus on pertinent issues such as…

Tags: colonialism, disciplines, gender and sexuality studies, graduate course, race, science, syllabus, women's studies, world history

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…

Tags: 17th century, 18th century, climate, colonialism, Indigenous people, resilience, science, United States

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…

Tags: climate, collective identities, Indigenous people, science

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