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

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

Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics

A by-now classic and deeply influential critique of the foundational assumptions of ecocriticism (and strands of Romantic literature), Morton’s book issues a challenge to the idea of Nature as a transcendental term—and to the fantasy of a…

Tags: aesthetic, ecocritique, ecology, environment, ethics, In-between, Romanticism

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

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism

A book that responds to many of the different flavors of contemporary materialist theory by offering a model of the ethical commitments many find lacking from some of the more radical new materialisms. The book assembles an incredibly useful,…

Tags: Anthropocene, ethics, history of philosophy, new materialism

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…

Tags: climate, collective identities, colonialism, ethics, human rights, Indigenous people, migration, resilience, 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

An Experiment with an Air Pump

Inspired by Joseph Wright's 1768 painting, Stephenson's play juxtaposes scientific exploration in 1799 with scientific exploration in 1999. The play raises questions about scientific ethics with regard to dissection of human bodies and to genetic…

Tags: disciplines, drama, ethics, science, theater

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