Discovering the Human? (original) (raw)
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2013
‘Discovering the Human’ investigates the emergence of the modern human sciences and their impact on literature, art and other media in the 18th and 19th centuries. Up until the 1830s, science and culture were part of a joint endeavour to discover and explore the secret of life. The question ‘What is life?’ unites science and the arts during the Ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism, and at the end of the Romantic period, a shift of focus from the human as an organic whole to the specialized disciplines signals the dawning of modernity. The emphasis of the edited collection is threefold: the first part sheds light on the human in art and science in the Age of Enlightenment, the second part is concerned with the transitions taking place at the turn of the 19th century. The chapters forming the third part investigate the impact of different media on the concept of the human in science, literature and film.
Contributions on history and philosophy of science, 2022
As many authors of the time used to say, the Age of Enlightenment, approximately 1700-1789, represents the awakening of long centuries of darkness and ignorance to a new era illuminated by the light of reason and respect for humanity. The study of the conception of man in several representative authors of this time constitutes the objective of this work. After a brief analysis of the Age of Enlightenment, the conclusions obtained on each of the authors studied are presented: Descartes, de La Mettrie, Hervás, Buffon, Voltaire and Diderot. All of them enlightened authors, except Descartes who belongs to the Scientific Revolution of the XVI-XVII centuries. Although all the authors studied dealt with man, not all dealt with the same aspects. Thus, Descartes and de La Mettrie worked more on aspects related to the functioning of the human body, the latter also dealt with certain aspects of human psychology. Hervás, Buffon, Voltaire and Diderot developed a more complete anthropology, taking an interest in aspects such as the human species, races, the constitution and evolution of societies, morality, etc. In the last part of the work, a comparative analysis of the authors studied is presented, which includes their methodology, their vision of the origin and nature of man, their relationship with other species of animals, and the social and moral aspects of anthropology.
The XVII century debate on Homo sapiens
The General Science Journal, 2022
As many authors of the time used to say, the Age of Enlightenment, approximately 1700-1789, represents the awakening of long centuries of darkness and ignorance to a new era illuminated by the light of reason and respect for humanity. The study of the conception of man in several representative authors of this time constitutes the objective of this work. After a brief analysis of the Age of Enlightenment, the conclusions obtained on each of the authors studied are presented: Descartes, de La Mettrie, Hervás, Buffon, Voltaire and Diderot. All of them enlightened authors, except Descartes who belongs to the Scientific Revolution of the XVI-XVII centuries. Although all the authors studied dealt with man, not all dealt with the same aspects. Thus, Descartes and de La Mettrie worked more on aspects related to the functioning of the human body, the latter also dealt with certain aspects of human psychology. Hervás, Buffon, Voltaire and Diderot developed a more complete anthropology, taking an interest in aspects such as the human species, races, the constitution and evolution of societies, morality, etc. In the last part of the work, a comparative analysis of the authors studied is presented, which includes their methodology, their vision of the origin and nature of man, their relationship with other species of animals, and the social and moral aspects of anthropology.
Writing the History of Science of the Human Organism
This essay is a study of theories and perspectives on the human organism in the context of seventeenth and eighteenth century Western Europe. It looks at numerous apparatuses used to interpret the history of science, from the perspective(s) of individuals, and particular groups and sub-groups, with a particular agenda of placing science as a discipline, within the cultural context of the times. Relating the particulars of the data received and gathered from experiments, research and collections, the substrata of methodologies used to explicate the intersecting parameters of knowledge became cornerstone in the ways in which the history of science was to be written and presented.
Biological and human life. French philosophy and the life sciences (1830-1990)
In France, starting from the early 19 th century, the interaction between what we call today the "life sciences" and "philosophy" provoked several important controversies. Academic philosophers, physicians and naturalists frequently competed for the monopoly over common topics, and colleagues across faculties would thus interfere in each other's work. This conflictual interaction, which often involved the use of texts coming from the history of knowledge, resulted in the emergence of new disciplines, in the epistemological reframing of scientific theories and in the readjustment of philosophical concepts, pressured by empirical evidence. This chapter analyzes the five most important sequences of these interactions taking place from the beginning of the process of disciplinarization, at the start of the 19 th century. The first section, which spans 1830 to 1852, focuses on the strategies adopted by the academic philosophers in order to defend their area of competence, namely the "moral" part of man, from the physicians' attempts to naturalize human cognition and behavior. The second section analyzes how, between 1855 and 1864, philosophers were involved in controversies concerning both the difference between human and biological life and between biological life and unanimated matter. The third section shows how Claude Bernard's Introduction to Experimental Medicine (1864) pushed philosophers to adopt a more cautious approach, avoiding expressing claims about the nature of life. The fourth section concerns the limited fortune of the theory of evolution and the rejection of social Darwinism by philosophers and sociologists between 1865 and 1920. Finally, the fifth section exposes two apparently contradictory evolutions: on the one hand a growing attention towards the history of the transformation of biological concepts and theories, and, on the other hand, the return to bolder metaphysical claims about the nature of life and the organisms.