Description Collection of Horkhiemer’s early essays that define the program of critical theory. Includes seminal essays such as “Traditional and Critical Theory” and “The Latests Attacks on Metaphysics,” providing background and context for many of […]
Category Archives: Curated Research
Linnaeus, Natural History, and the Circulation of Knowledge
Description Contributors examine the various techniques, materials and methods that originated within the ‘Linnaean workshop’: paper technologies, publication strategies, and markets for specimens. Fresh analyses of the reception of Linnaeus’s work in Paris, Königsberg, Edinburgh […]
La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine
Description 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. Creator Vartanian, Aram Publisher Princeton: Princeton University […]
Nature: Course Notes from the College de France
Description 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 […]
“The Morality of Plagiarism: Voltaire, Diderot and the Legacy of Graffigny’s Cénie.”
Description Explains how Graffigny’s play, which was a great success from its first performance until the end of the author’s life, later falls into oblivion due to evolving attitudes toward plagiarism. Kelley argues that accusations […]
Medicine in the Boudoir: Sade and Moral Hygiene in Post-Thermidorean France
Description Situates Sade’s work into the cultural and intellectual context during the Age of Enlightenment by focusing on Sade’s engaged approach to scientific culture, epistemology and social reforms and analyzes his medical appropriation of these […]
“The Evolution of Climate Ideas and Knowledge”
Description Begins by examining the “new science of the seveneteenth century” in enlightenment Europe. Heymann shows that the new science of observation, especially scientific weather observation, led to the evolution of climate ideas and knowledge […]
History and Nature in the Enlightenment: Praise of the Mastery of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Historical Literature
Description Outlines how eighteenth-century historians emphasized the use of nature as a precondition for cultural progress. Discusses such things as climatic theories, and stadial theories. Creator Wolloch, Nathaniel Publisher Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Contributor […]
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Description Explores the representational challenges posed by environmental catastrophes that unfold incrementally, in a less spectacular, less visible way than dramatic events. Nixon presents examples of writers doing the conceptual work of making “slow violence” […]
Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture
Description Discusses early modern attitudes toward animals with an emphasis on anthropocentrism, and on interdisciplinary sources, including intellectual history, the history of science, literature and art. Creator Nathaniel Wolloch Publisher (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books / […]