The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin
Author: Martin Priestman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2016-02-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317020987

While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwin’s scientific ideas and milieu, relatively little attention has been paid to Darwin as a literary writer. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times, Martin Priestman situates Darwin’s three major poems - The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) - and Darwin himself within a large, polymathic late-Enlightenment network of other scientists, writers, thinkers and social movers and shakers. Interpreting Darwin’s poetry in terms of Darwin’s broader sense of the poetic text as a material space, he posits a significant shift from the Enlightenment’s emphases on conceptual spaces to the Romantic period’s emphases on historical time. He shows how Darwin’s poetry illuminates his stance toward all the major physical sciences and his well-formulated theories of evolution and materially based psychology. Priestman’s study also offers the first substantial accounts of Darwin’s mythological theories and their links to Enlightenment Rosicrucianism and Freemansonry, and of the reading of history that emerges from the fragment-poem The Progress of Society, a first-ever printed edition of which is included in an appendix. Ultimately, Priestman’s book offers readers a sustained account of Darwin’s polymathic Enlightenment worldview and cognate poetics in a period when texts are too often judged by their adherence to a retrospectively constructed ’Romanticism’.

Kant and the Transformation of Natural History

Kant and the Transformation of Natural History
Author: Andrew Cooper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2023-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192869787

Andrew Cooper presents the first systematic study of Kant's account of natural history. Cooper contends that Kant made a decisive contribution to one of the most explosive and understudied revolutions in the history of science: the addition of time to the frame in which explanations are required, sought, and justified in natural science. Through addressing a wide range of Kant's works, Cooper challenges the claim that Kant's theory of science denies a developmental conception of nature and argues instead that it establishes a method by which natural historians can genuinely dispute historical claims and potentially come to consensus. This method, Cooper argues, can be used to expose serious flaws in Kant's own historical reasoning, including the formation and defence of his racist views. The book will be valuable to philosophers seeking to discern both the power and limitations of Kant's theory of science, and to historians of science working on the fractured landscape of eighteenth-century Newtonianism.

The Puzzle of the Western Zodiac: Its Wisdom and Evolutionary Leaps

The Puzzle of the Western Zodiac: Its Wisdom and Evolutionary Leaps
Author: Alex A. Gurshtein
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2017-12-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1546219005

Though familiar to all, the twelve-strong Western Zodiac remains an enigmatic artifice of the archaic past. To date, no scholar has been able to determine who conjured up its constellations and when this might have happened. Nor do we know what the grand design behind this innovative endeavor might have been. This book, however, goes a long way towards answering those questions by combining together a variety of clues from multiple disciplines, including astronomy, archaeology, and linguistics. It provides a comprehensive framework that greatly expands our understanding of the genesis and purposes of this remarkable intellectual relic of our cultural heritage. The books overarching outcome that the zodiacal necklace in the sky appeared gradually over time in three different stages, with each reflecting the immanent social and spiritual concerns of its time provides a fundamental impact to reconsider our understanding of prehistory. No special knowledge is necessary to understand this captivating writing.

God in the Enlightenment

God in the Enlightenment
Author: William J. Bulman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-04-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190602104

We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.

From Natural History to the History of Nature

From Natural History to the History of Nature
Author:
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 672
Release: 1981-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0268159750

This collection of readings, published for the first time in any language, presents a selection of critical responses to the original publication of the Natural History by George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1697–1788). Comments by Albrecht von Haller, Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Héault de Séchelles, and anonymous reviews from leading periodicals of the period are included. Substantial selections from the first volumes of the Natural History and important documents from Buffon’s earlier works are also included. As much as possible, the authors have used entire selections, rather than brief excerpts.

Eleusis and Enlightenment

Eleusis and Enlightenment
Author: Ferdinand Saumarez Smith
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2024-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004692304

The age of Enlightenment – the so-called age of reason – was also, paradoxically, the age of the Eleusinian mysteries. By attempting to reveal Demeter's secret cult, British, French, and German thinkers and freemasons of the eighteenth century revealed more than they bargained for: the pagan origins of Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the afterlife, and through the mythical gift of law and agriculture to Eleusis an alternative narrative of the origins of civilisation to that found in the Bible.

The Days of Creation

The Days of Creation
Author: Andrew J. Brown
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2019-05-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004397531

The Days of Creation examines the history of Christian interpretation of the seven-day framework of Genesis 1:1–2:3 in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament from the post-apostolic era to the debates surrounding Essays and Reviews (1860). Included in the survey are patristic, medieval, Renaissance/Reformation, eighteenth-century Enlightenment and finally early to mid-nineteenth-century interpretations of the days of creation. This study enables an insight into the mighty career of a biblical text of seminal importance, and fills a significant niche in reception-historical research.