Description Captures the complicated attitude towards science during the Enlightenment. A man is suffocating a bird in an air pump, while (most of) his audience looks on in wonder and fear. Shows that scientific demonstrations […]
Tag Archives: disciplines
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) and His Wife (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze, 1758-1836)
Description Reveals the gendered division of labor in many scientific households. Antoine, seated, is at work on a chemistry treatise; his wife, Marie-Anne, takes a break from her drawing board to look over his shoulder. […]
Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings
Description Brings together a collection of Du Châtelet’s writing and shows that she was much more than Voltaire’s mistress; she was a philosophe in her own right. This volume not only provides a good introduction […]
Man a Machine
Description Julien Offray de La Mettrie was one of the earliest French Enlightenment materialists. Exiled from France after publishing a book (A Natural History of the Soul) arguing that psychical phenomena could be explained by […]
The Paradox of the Automaton: From Diderot to Cybernetics
Description A concise and provocative history of the idea of automata from Diderot to the present. She argues that the automaton is the cornerstone of modern knowledge and its powers. Creator Martineau, Julie Publisher Montréal: […]
Machine and Organism
Description Canguilhem inverts the normal scientific question–what is the mechanism underlying this organic process?–and asks how machines are organic. He traces the history of the relationships between organism and machine from the ancient Greek political […]
The Guillotine and the Terror
Description A very original if somewhat disturbing book on the imaginary of the French Revolution. Arasse, a historian of art, discusses the stories that were created about and around the guillotine. He shows how the […]
Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence
Description “A fractured meditation on the incompleteness and inadequacy of each possible response to collective atrocities,” is how the author of this work describes what she has written, and it is an apt description. It […]
“The Past is Evil/Evil is Past: On Retrospective Politics, Philosophy of History, and Temporal Manichaeism,”
Description Bevernage turns to the Enlightenment in order to explain why so much of contemporary politics is focused on rectifying past wrongs. He argues that the 18th century saw the emergence of a modern philosophy […]
Alimut Elohit: Shnei Hiburim al Elohim ve Asson[Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster]
Description Ophir, an Israeli philosopher, examines the connection between God and disasters. From the bible and through much of western history, disasters were seen as caused in some manner by God’s will. Ophir examines this […]