Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species PDF Download

Author: Mary Gregory
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135915822
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
In this study Dr. Gregory examines how Diderot borrowed from Lucretius, Buffon, Maupertuis, and probability theory, and combined ideas from these sources in an innovative fashion to hypothesize that species are mutable and that all life arose randomly from a single prototype.

Author: Mary Efrosini Gregory
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415955513
Category : Evolution in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author: Mary Efrosini Gregory
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433103735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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This book examines how eight eighteenth-century French theorists - Maillet, Montesquieu, La Mettrie, Buffon, Maupertuis, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire - addressed evolutionism. Each thinker laid down a building block that would eventually open the door to the mutability of species and a departure from the long-held belief that the chain of beings is fixed. This book describes how the philosophes established a triune relationship among contemporary scientific discoveries, random creationism propelled by the motive and conscious properties of matter, and the notion of the chain of being, along with its corollaries, plenitude and continuity. Also addressed is the contemporary debate over whether apes could ever be taught to speak as well as the issue of race and the family of man.

Author: David Gallagher
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042027088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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The origins of selected instances of metamorphosis in Germanic literature are traced from their roots in Ovid's Metamorphoses, grouped roughly on an 'ascending evolutionary scale' (invertebrates, birds, animals, and mermaids). Whilst a broad range of mythological, legendary, fairytale and folktale traditions have played an appreciable part, Ovid's Metamorphoses is still an important comparative analysis and reference point for nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language narratives of transformations. Metamorphosis is most often used as an index of crisis: an existential crisis of the subject or a crisis in a society's moral, social or cultural values. Specifically selected texts for analysis include Jeremias Gotthelf's Die schwarze Spinne (1842) with the terrifying metamorphoses of Christine into a black spider, the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Die Verwandlung (1915), ambiguous metamorphoses in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der goldne Topf (1814), Hermann Hesse's Piktors Verwandlungen (1925), Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (1988). Other mythical metamorphoses are examined in texts by Bachmann, Fouqué, Fontane, Goethe, Nietzsche, Nelly Sachs, Thomas Mann and Wagner, and these and many others confirm that metamorphosis is used historically, scientifically, for religious purposes; to highlight identity, sexuality, a dream state, or for metaphoric, metonymic or allegorical reasons.

Author: Rebecca Stott
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679604138
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK “[An] extraordinarily wide-ranging and engaging book [about] the men who shaped the work of Charles Darwin . . . a book that enriches our understanding of how the struggle to think new thoughts is shared across time and space and people.”—The Sunday Telegraph (London) Christmas, 1859. Just one month after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received an unsettling letter. He had expected criticism; in fact, letters were arriving daily, most expressing outrage and accusations of heresy. But this letter was different. It accused him of failing to acknowledge his predecessors, of taking credit for a theory that had already been discovered by others. Darwin realized that he had made an error in omitting from Origin of Species any mention of his intellectual forebears. Yet when he tried to trace all of the natural philosophers who had laid the groundwork for his theory, he found that history had already forgotten many of them. Darwin’s Ghosts tells the story of the collective discovery of evolution, from Aristotle, walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils, to Al-Jahiz, an Arab writer in the first century, from Leonardo da Vinci, searching for fossils in the mine shafts of the Tuscan hills, to Denis Diderot in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin de Plantes, finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. Evolution was not discovered single-handedly, Rebecca Stott argues, contrary to what has become standard lore, but is an idea that emerged over many centuries, advanced by daring individuals across the globe who had the imagination to speculate on nature’s extraordinary ways, and who had the courage to articulate such speculations at a time when to do so was often considered heresy. With each chapter focusing on an early evolutionary thinker, Darwin’s Ghosts is a fascinating account of a diverse group of individuals who, despite the very real dangers of challenging a system in which everything was presumed to have been created perfectly by God, felt compelled to understand where we came from. Ultimately, Stott demonstrates, ideas—including evolution itself—evolve just as animals and plants do, by intermingling, toppling weaker notions, and developing over stretches of time. Darwin’s Ghosts presents a groundbreaking new theory of an idea that has changed our very understanding of who we are. Praise for Darwin’s Ghosts “Absorbing . . . Stott captures the breathless excitement of an investigation on the cusp of the unknown. . . . A lively, original book.”—The New York Times Book Review “Stott’s research is broad and unerring; her book is wonderful. . . . An exhilarating romp through 2,000 years of fascinating scientific history.”—Nature “Stott brings Darwin himself to life. . . . [She] writes with a novelist’s flair. . . . Darwin and the ‘ghosts’ so richly described in Ms. Stott’s enjoyable book are the descendants of Aristotle and Bacon and the ancestors of today’s scientists.”—The Wall Street Journal “Riveting . . . Stott has done a wonderful job in showing just how many extraordinary people had speculated on where we came from before the great theorist dispelled all doubts.”—The Guardian (U.K.)

Author: Stefanie Buchenau
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350142948
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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What makes us human beings? Is it merely some corporeal aspect, or rather some specific mental capacity, language, or some form of moral agency or social life? Is there a gendered bias within the concept of humanity? How do human beings become more human, and can we somehow cease to be human? This volume provides some answers to these fundamental questions and more by charting the increased preoccupation of the European Enlightenment with the concepts of humankind and humanity. Chapters investigate the philosophical concerns of major figures across Western Europe, including Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Ferguson, Kant, Herder, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the Comte de Buffon. As these philosophers develop important descriptive and comparative approaches to the human species and moral and social ideals of humanity, they present a view of the Enlightenment project as a particular kind of humanism that is different from its Ancient and Renaissance predecessors. With contributions from a team of internationally recognized scholars, including Stephen Gaukroger, Michael Forster, Céline Spector, Jacqueline Taylor, and Günter Zöller, this book offers a novel interpretation of the Enlightenment that is both clear in focus and impressive in scope.

Author: Georges-Louis Leclerc
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022639557X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Georges-Louis Leclerc, le comte de Buffon's The Epochs of Nature, originally published as Les Époques de la Nature in 1778, is one of the first great popular science books, a work of style and insight that was devoured by Catherine the Great of Russia and influenced Humboldt, Darwin, Lyell, Vernadsky, and many other renowned scientists. It is the first geological history of the world, stretching from the Earth’s origins to its foreseen end, and though Buffon was limited by the scientific knowledge of his era—the substance of the Earth was not, as he asserts, dragged out of the sun by a giant comet, nor is the sun’s heat generated by tidal forces—many of his deductions appear today as startling insights. And yet, The Epochs of Nature has never before been available in its entirety in English—until now. In seven epochs, Buffon reveals the main features of an evolving Earth, from its hard rock substrate to the sedimentary layers on top, from the minerals and fossils found within these layers to volcanoes, earthquakes, and rises and falls in sea level—and he even touches on age-old mysteries like why the sun shines. In one of many moments of striking scientific prescience, Buffon details evidence for species extinction a generation before Cuvier’s more famous assertion of the phenomenon. His seventh and final epoch does nothing less than offer the first geological glimpse of the idea that humans are altering the very foundations of the Earth—an idea of remarkable resonance as we debate the designation of another epoch: the Anthropocene. Also featuring Buffon’s extensive “Notes Justificatives,” in which he offers further evidence to support his assertions (and discusses vanished monstrous North American beasts—what we know as mastodons—as well as the potential existence of human giants), plus an enlightening introduction by editor and translator Jan Zalasiewicz and historians of science Sverker Sörlin, Libby Robin, and Jacques Grinevald, this extraordinary new translation revives Buffon’s quite literally groundbreaking work for a new age.

Author: Gregory Bringman
Publisher: Les OntOeuvres
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Artifacts for Diderot's Elements of Physiology is a translation of Denis Diderot's rare 18th Century work, Éléments de physiologie, situating it in light of New Materialism and other current debates in continental philosophy. It takes one of many possible theoretical tours through this oeuvre of Diderot, as well as incorporates other supplementary artifacts, including translations of sections of the Latin of Albrecht von Haller on which Diderot's text is partially based.With its critical footnotes and supplementary material, Artifacts addresses old and new materialism in Diderot as a work of theory. Its introductory discussion of animal organs, technical evolution and Diderot's relation to Ernst Kapp, Georges Canguilhem, and Gilbert Simondon is a new, contemporary critical framing for Éléments. While the focus of the critical French editions has been on an inescapable determinism of Diderot (Mayer), a lay anthropology rooted in Diderot's atheist conclusion to Éléments (Quintili), and an extensive presentation of Diderot's sources (Terada), Artifacts emphasizes the importance of Part I of the work. In Beings, Diderot most convincingly stakes out a radical transformist philosophical position appropriate to many issues currently at the forefront of philosophical discourse, demonstrating once more the inexhaustible ways Diderot's work can be fruitfully applied after the age of Lumières.

Author: Miriam Claude Meijer
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042004344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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After the discovery of the anthropoid ape in Asia and in Africa, eighteenth-century Holland became the crossroads of Enlightenment debates about the human species. Material evidence about human diversity reached Petrus Camper, comparative anatomist in the Netherlands, who engaged, among many other interests, in "menschkunde." Could only religious doctrine support the belief of human demarcation from animals? Camper resolved the challenges raised by overseas discoveries with his thesis of the "facial angle," a theory which succeeding generations distorted and misused in order to justify slavery, racism, antisemitism, and genocide. Thanks to his abundant papers in Dutch archives, Camper's ideas are restored to their original state. Eighteenth-century issues differed from those of other centuries: Did orang-utans talk like humans, walk like humans; even rape humans? What was the skin pigmentation of Adam and Eve? Did the spectrum of human physiognomies around the globe reflect the Fall of Man, the Creator's bounty, or merely bizarre beauty practices? Why did the ideal beauty of the Greeks appear to be the reverse of the Hottentots? The book contains some 50 illustrations, including apes with hiking sticks or tea cups, metamorphoses of living forms, and Apollo or Venus icons which titillated the "science of man."

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.