Naming as Natural Process and Historical Narrative in Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, 1749–55

Abstract

This essay examines the philosophical and methodological implications of naming natural objects during the Enlightenment, in particular, the effect that different methods of nomenclature had upon scientific language. To frame this issue, I begin with the analysis of works by two famous philosophers of Enlightenment thought, Michel Foucault and Ernst Cassirer, as well as the work of the eighteenth-century botanist, Carolus Linnaeus. The questions about how to identify and order nature raised by these writers provide a structure for the central topic of this paper, the comte de Buffon’s use of nomenclature in his definition of species in the Histoire naturelle. Here, a species is not determined by the visible characteristics that differentiate it from others, but by how the naturalist perceives its relationship to the past and its activity through time. The resulting names embody the historical process through which they were designated, both by natural time and by the natural historian, Buffon.