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- Tags: 18th century
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“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
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."
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
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…
“De la percepción popular a la reflexión erudite: La transmisión de la ‘cultura de la catástrofe’ en la España del siglo XVIII”
In this article, Alberola argues that while the first formal reflections on the physical nature of disasters appeared in the philosophical and scientific works of the Classical era, it was in the eighteenth century that these environmental ideas took…
Candide
Tags: 18th century, disaster, enlightenment, philosophy, upheavals
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.
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
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
"Aesthetics and Civil Society: Theories of Art and Society, 1640–1790"
Shows how Kant wrote his Critique of Judgment as a synthesis of English theories of “taste” and civil society and German theories of “aesthetic.” Writers since Hobbes have used theories of art to advance theories of society. Kant sought a middle way…
Tags: 18th century, aesthetic, citizenship, disciplines, Kant, philosophy, Schiller
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…
The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
Explores Enlightenment optimism about the perfectibility of mankind by looking at efforts to educate and "civilize" children. Chapters consider reactions to so-called "wild children"; utopian pedagogical schemes (including efforts to apply…
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
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) and His Wife (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze, 1758-1836)
Reveals the gendered division of labor in many scientific households. Antoine, seated, is at work on a chemistry treatise; his wife, Marie-Anne, takes a break from her drawing board to look over his shoulder. Whereas Antoine is famous for his…
Tags: 18th century, disciplines, gender, 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
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
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…
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