Browse Items (27 total)
- Tags: 18th century
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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
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…
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.
Candide
Tags: 18th century, disaster, enlightenment, philosophy, upheavals
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
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Deserves as much credit as any source for bringing the political implications of Kant’s Critique of Judgment into contemporary discourse. Despondent over the perceived failure of the French Revolution, Schiller asks, “Why are we still barbarians?” He…
Tags: 18th century, aesthetic, citizenship, disciplines, Kant, philosophy, Schiller
“Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: The Regime of the Sister in Graffigny's Lettres
d'une Péruvienne.”
Discusses 18th-century author Françoise de Graffigny's important novel (Lettres d'une Péruvienne), focusing on the form of the letters in the novel, which are constructed first in quipos (a peruvian form of communication involving knotted cords), and…
Emile, or on Education
Outlines a program for educating children according to the precepts of Nature. Heavily influenced by Locke's philosophy of human understanding, this 1762 treatise argues that parents should pursue a "negative education": avoid formal schooling and…
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…
Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783
This text surveys the British Caribbean from 1624 through the calamitous hurricane season of 1780. Mulcahy examines the various natural hazards that the region was prone to, including food shortages and disease, but focuses his attention on…
L’invention de la catastrophe au xviiie siècle: du châtiment au désastre naturel
In the spirit of Starobinski's L'invention de la liberté, 1700-1789, essays in this edited volume consider the invention of "catastrophe" in the eighteenth century, i.e. the idea of catastrophe as a natural event and an aesthetic object was born in…
Tags: 18th century, catastrophe, disciplines, enlightenment, Europe, risk, upheavals
“The Morality of Plagiarism: Voltaire, Diderot and the Legacy of Graffigny’s Cénie.”
Explains how Graffigny’s play, which was a great success from its first performance until the end of the author’s life, later falls into oblivion due to evolving attitudes toward plagiarism. Kelley argues that accusations of plagiarism in reviews…
Tags: 18th century, climate, Diderot, disciplines, female authors, Graffigny, In-between, theater, Voltaire
Critique of the Faculty of Judgment [Urteilskraft]
Received most often as Kant’s aesthetic treatise, but also understood as his mature political treatise (cf., Hannah Arendt’s “ectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy). Unlike most aesthetic treatises before and since, this one privileges natural over…
Tags: 18th century, aesthetic, citizenship, disciplines, Kant, philosophy
Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment
Edited collection of six articles that explore eighteenth-century catastrophes around the globe. Studies consider questions of risk, vulnerability, resilience, colonialism, and the human role in creating "disasters."
The Republic of Letters
A ground-breaking consideration of the social history of gender in the Enlightenment. As well as an invaluable source on the social history of the Enlightenment overll, this study gave rise to a meaningful and revaling debate about the lack of…
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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