Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-Century Liberal Political Writing PDF Download
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Author: Andrew Billing
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003812481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers.
Author: Andrew Billing
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003812481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
Our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers.
Author: Jeff Loveland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
This book examines the rhetorical dimension of eighteenth-century natural history. It focuses on the French naturalist and literary stylist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, author of the bestselling multi-volume Histoire naturelle (1749-1789). Natural history as Buffon and his contemporaries knew it remains a fascinating object of study for its breadth, its cultural openness, and its disorderly energy. Rhetoric here is understood as a set of techniques for attracting and persuading an audience. As a contribution both to literary studies and to the history of science, Rhetoric and natural history adds to our understanding of the intellectual culture of the French Enlightenment.
Author: Joanna Stalnaker
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462347
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
In The Unfinished Enlightenment, Joanna Stalnaker offers a fresh look at the French Enlightenment by focusing on the era's vast, collective attempt to compile an ongoing and provisional description of the world. Through a series of readings of natural histories, encyclopedias, scientific poetry, and urban topographies, the book uncovers the deep epistemological and literary tensions that made description a central preoccupation for authors such as Buffon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, Delille, and Mercier. Stalnaker argues that Enlightenment description was the site of competing truth claims that would eventually resolve themselves in the modern polarity between literature and science. By the mid-nineteenth century, the now habitual association between description and the novel was already firmly anchored in French culture, but just a century earlier, in the diverse network of articles on description in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and in the works derived from it, there was not a single mention of the novel. Instead, we find articles on description in natural history, geometry, belles-lettres, and poetry. Stalnaker builds on the premise that the tendency to view description as the inevitable (and subservient) partner of narration—rather than as a universal tool for making sense of knowledge in all fields—has obscured the central place of description in Enlightenment discourse. As a result, we have neglected some of the most original and experimental works of the eighteenth century.
Author: Karine Chemla
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319164449
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 435
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Book Description
The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The book relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory.
Author: Louise E. Robbins
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 080187677X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 525
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Book Description
This lively history “adds a new dimension to our understanding of 18th-century France” by exploring the Parisian fashion of importing exotic animals (American Historical Review). In 1775, a visitor to Laurent Spinacuta’s Grande Ménagerie at the annual winter fair in Paris would have seen two tigers, several kinds of monkeys, an armadillo, an ocelot, and a condor—in all, forty-two live animals. In the streets of the city, one could observe performing elephants and a fighting polar bear. Those looking for unusual pets could purchase parrots, flying squirrels, and capuchin monkeys. The royal menagerie at Versailles displayed lions, cranes, an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a zebra, which in 1760 became a major court attraction. For Enlightenment-era Parisians, exotic animals piqued scientific curiosity and conveyed social status. Their variety and accessibility were a boon for naturalists like Buffon, author of Histoire naturelle. Louis XVI use his menagerie to demonstrate his power, while critics saw his caged animals as metaphors of slavery and oppression. In her engaging account, Robbins considers nearly every aspect of France’s obsession with exotic fauna, from the animals’ transportation and care to the inner workings of the oiseleurs’ (birdsellers’) guild. Based on wide-ranging research, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots offers a major contribution to the history of human-animal relations, eighteenth-century culture, and French colonialism.
Author: Mordechai Feingold
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004416870
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
This volume aims to furnish a broader framework for analyzing the scientific and institutional context that gave rise to scientific academies in Europe—including the Accademia del Cimento in Florence; the Royal Society in London; the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris; and the Academia naturae curiosorum in Schweinfurt. The essays detail the multiple backgrounds that prompted seventeenth-century savants—from Italy to England, and from Poland to Portugal—to establish new forms of scientific organizations, in which to institutionalize collaborative research as well as modes of communication with like-minded individuals and associations.
Author: William Max Nelson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148753678X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. The Time of Enlightenment argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.
Author: Bruce Dain
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674030141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism. From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously "black" African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist "natural history" into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences. In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion "race" caused for thinkers black and white, A Hideous Monster of the Mind offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.
Author: Peter Cryle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022648405X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447
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Book Description
Most of us think we know what is meant when we hear the term "normal," but Cryle and Stephens upend taken-for-granted attitudes about the term. They offer a history of the intellectual and cultural issues that have been at stake in the use of the term since it appeared around 1820. What is taken at one time or any one culture to be "aberrant" or "deviant" clearly depends on assumed meanings for norm and normality. The authors of this book explore this history--peppered with a fascinating series of case studies--to make sense of variations on the theme of identity (disability, gender, race, sexuality) in fields organized around identity. They locate the concept in the scientific spheres where it originated in its modern sense and they chart its transformations and developments from the 1820s in France (medicine) to the mid-20th century (Alfred Kinsey). They start with comparative anatomy and other branches of medicine before moving on to consider developments in fields as remote as craniometry, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. It is not enough to say, with David Halperin, that "queer" is "whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant." Cryle and Stephens move beyond a simple binary opposition between "normal" and "abnormality" to give us the whole picture, from the Continent to the U.S., and in all the contexts that distinguish the normal from other available terms (such as typical, average, respectable, conventional, white and heterosexual, and uniform). "Normality" has had a long struggle to secure its cultural dominance and authority, a story which is told here for the first time.
Author: Siegfried Bodenmann
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319698605
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
This book begins with an observation: At the time when empiricism arose and slowly established itself, the word itself had not yet been coined. Hence the central question of this volume: What does it mean to conduct empirical science in early modern Europe? How can we catch the elusive figure of the empiricist? Our answer focuses on the practices established by representative scholars. This approach allows us to demonstrate two things. First, that empiricism is not a monolith but exists in a plurality of forms. Today’s understanding of the empirical sciences was gradually shaped by the exchanges among scholars combining different traditions, world views and experimental settings. Second, the long proclaimed antagonism between empiricism and rationalism is not the whole story. Our case studies show that a very fruitful exchange between both systems of thought occurred. It is a story of integration, appropriation and transformation more than one of mere opposition. We asked twelve authors to explore these fascinating new facets of empiricisms. The plurality of their voices mirrors the multiple faces of the concept itself. Every contribution can be understood as a piece of a much larger puzzle. Together, they help us better understand the emergence of empiricism and the inventiveness of the scientific enterprise.
