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. […]
Tag Archives: science
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 […]
Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France
Description Vila’s study is now a classic, not only for its revealing interdisciplinary treatment of sensibility but also for its precise methodology and the clarity of its prose. Creator Vila, Anne Publisher Johns Hopkins, 1997 […]
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 […]