Natural History Of Man Research Articles

On What is Always Before Our Eyes The Uncharted Depths of Francisco Varela's Thought

What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of man; not curiosities, however, but rather observations on facts which no one has doubted & which have only gone unremarked because they are always before our eyes. (Wittgenstein, 1956, §141)

James Cowles Prichard and the Linguistic Foundations of Ethnology.

This article examines the English scholar James Cowles Prichard's attention to language and comparative philology within his wider project on the natural history of man. It reveals that linguistic evidence was among the most important elements for Prichard in his overarching scientific aim of investigating human physical diversity, and served as the evidential foundation for his ethnology. His work on Celtic comparative philology made him not only one of the earliest British adopters of German comparative grammar, but a comparative philologist of European stature in his own right. More generally, linguistic evidence helped Prichard to keep his magnum opus, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, as logically ordered as possible, and therefore to turn ethnology into a discipline with analytical aspirations on a global scale.

The Justification of David Hume's Notion About The Relationship Between Thought and Emotion in Human Nature

As it will be remembered, God, the subject of philosophy in the Middle Ages, has left its place to "nature" since the 17th century. This comprehensive theoretical change, which provides the description of reality, has led to the formation of a worldview independent of metaphysical, theological and political references in many fields such as knowledge, morality, human and society. Especially since the main interest of the Scottish Enlightenment was the natural history of man, Hume focused on human nature and tried to produce his thoughts from here as the category of the subject rather than the object. Hume, with his understanding of philosophy, which has an important place in the history of philosophy with his critical attitude, and which connects science and morality to emotions, has also become one of the most important representatives of Enlightenment thought with this foundation. Hume, unlike the rationalists, placed the science of human nature, which is the initiating power of our actions, at the center of all sciences. According to Hume, if human nature is meticulously researched and the right results are obtained from this research, it becomes possible to predict what a person has done in the past, present and even in the future, based on the results in question. According to Hume, even mathematics, natural philosophy and natural religion depend on human science. Because the way of all of these fields is to get to know the person. Hume's views on human nature and history are based on two basic assumptions: First, there is an unchanging, uniform nature in human beings. Second, if a science of human nature is to be established, its foundations and method must be based on experience and observation. In this direction, Hume stated that the aim of his philosophy is to “abandon the distracting and tedious methods followed until now”, “to march directly to the capital city instead of capturing a castle or village on the border”, that is, as determined “to the center of the sciences, to the very nature of human nature that was once superior to all”. According to Hume, instead of the fruitless discussions of previous philosophies, one should focus on the science of human nature and try to fully grasp the scope and power of human understanding. Because “There is no important question whose answer is not within the scope of human science. Also, without knowing this science, there is not a single question we can answer definitively.” Hume's basing the causality of human knowledge on human nature and experience in terms of its source and limits has deeply affected the philosophical, religious and metaphysical teachings that claimed reality/truth after him. Based on his works A Treatise of Human Nature and An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, this study is based on Hume's understanding of emotion-thought and human nature, which produces ideas in many fields of social sciences. aims to present it within the limits of the human mind.

Антропология в фокусе социального времени. Часть 1. Пионеры и основатели науки

A series of articles is devoted to the analysis of the formation and transformation of anthropology as a fundamental science. The study uses a social time scale, which makes it possible to assess the reasons for the transformations, ups and downs of science in different countries, depending on social events that form the challenges of society. At present, anthropology, like no other science, has a different "content" depending on the country in which it is formed. At the same time, like all sciences, it has a common history, common tasks and methods. Whether this is a consequence of the internal contradiction of anthropology (a single science or a collection of separate human sciences), or the reason for regional characteristics is the result of the influence of the society in which it develops. It is proposed to begin the discussion of issues important for determining the status of modern anthropology by plunging into its history, to which the first part of the work is devoted. The article discusses the achievements of the initial stage of anthropology, when in Paris it became possible to found a professional Society, a journal, a School and Laboratory, as well as an Anthropological Museum. Why did it work for P. Broca in France, and did not become possible for another scientist in another country. Why did the brilliant works of K. von Baer not give rise to the formation of the Russian school of anthropology. How did it happen that A. Hrdlička and D. N. Anuchin, who received the same skills and knowledge in Paris and founded essentially the same schools of anthropology in America and Russia, did not become guarantors of the same development of anthropology in these countries. What can cross out science in a particular country, bringing a negative connotation to the term "anthropology" for many years. What could be the catalyst for the revival of interest in the natural history of man. How fundamental science acquires applied aspects and becomes “attractive” for the economy of a particular country. These and many other questions are presented in a polemical review of the many-sided anthropology.

Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution, by Ian Duncan

Reviewed by: Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution by Ian Duncan Philipp Erchinger (bio) Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution, by Ian Duncan; pp. xiii + 290. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019, $35.00, £30.00. Anthropology, as Ian Duncan's impressive Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution confirms, has returned to literary scholarship. But it has discarded the guise of the universalist science of man that was one of the unfinished projects of Enlightenment thought. Instead, studies of the human now often work from the premise that their subject is not only infinitely diverse, but also deeply involved with a world of nonhuman life and matter that forms an integral part of its existence, sustaining and surpassing that existence at the same time. As Duncan outlines in his introduction, this modern approach to anthropology took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a materialist and evolutionist "natural history of man" began to complicate the older notion that human life is divided between a physical body and an "immortal soul." As a result, the figure of man came to inhabit a confusing borderland crisscrossed by multiple fault lines: between "nature and history, individual and species, human life and biological life, or life as such" (2). As various emergent disciplines laid claim to the exploration of that borderland, Duncan argues, the nature of human being became an urgent problem, unsettling the very sciences that increasingly sought to use it as their secular ground. Duncan's key argument is that the realist novel, which evolved alongside the natural history of man, is itself a form of anthropology: rather than simply staging or exhibiting [End Page 290] the questionable figure of the human, it actively participated in its investigation. Duncan pursues this claim through five chapters that range widely across the "classical era of European realism, circa 1750–1880," covering philosophical, scientific, and fictional prose from Germany, Britain, and France (1). The first two chapters establish an analogy between the loose, open, variable form of the novel and the indeterminate nature of human life, which was perceived as equally capable of assuming "all forms and functions" (9). Thus viewed, the very formlessness of novel writing enabled it to compose the "universal discourse" that the philosophy of human nature was unable to supply (2). Indeed, the study of human life, like its subject, was fractured from its inception, as Duncan explains. One broadly empiricist school, represented by a line that stretches from Johann Gottfried Herder to Charles Darwin, described human history as inseparably caught up in the evolution of organic life. By contrast, a rival tradition ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau through Immanuel Kant to Friedrich Nietzsche argued that humans develop through works and arts that separate them from their natural state. In both cases, the underlying question was how natural philosophers were supposed to conceive of the relation between the organic life that humans involuntarily undergo and the historical life that they consciously lead. In the Romantic Bildungsroman, as we learn in chapter 2, this relation between organic and historical development reoccurs in the form of an unresolved conflict between the growth of a human individual and the life of the species of which it partakes. Concentrating mainly on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–96) and Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy (1807), Duncan shows how these novels try to mediate the "formation of species being" through narratives of personal progress (57). In doing so, Duncan argues, they repeatedly draw attention to the difference, or even open a rift, between individual and human history. In Corinne, the ruinous disintegration of these two dimensions of human life is specifically meant to expose the "exclusion of women" from the universal category of Enlightenment "man" (57). One of the greatest merits of Duncan's study is that it vividly and thoughtfully illustrates how the nature of the human increasingly was overtaken and transformed by the very life in which nineteenth-century science, from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to Charles Lyell and Darwin, found it to be embedded. For example, in Walter Scott's Count...

Race before Darwin: Variation, adaptation and the natural history of man in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh, 1790-1835.

This paper draws on material from the dissertation books of the University of Edinburgh's student societies and surviving lecture notes from the university's professors to shed new light on the debates on human variation, heredity and the origin of races between 1790 and 1835. That Edinburgh was the most important centre of medical education in the English-speaking world in this period makes this a particularly significant context. By around 1800 the fixed natural order of the eighteenth century was giving way to a more fluid conception of species and varieties. The dissolution of the 'Great Chain of Being' made interpretations of races as adaptive responses to local climates plausible. The evidence presented shows that human variation, inheritance and adaptation were being widely discussed in Edinburgh in the student circles around Charles Darwin when he was a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1820s. It is therefore no surprise to find these same themes recurring in similar form in the evolutionary speculations in his notebooks on the transmutation of species written in the late 1830s during the gestation of his theory of evolution.

Race and Risorgimento: An unexplored chapter of Italian history

ABSTRACT In Italian history, race has been traditionally examined in the context of colonialism, Fascism, and the Shoah. In contrast, the role played by ideas of race in the Risorgimento – when the idea of an Italian nation was formulated – has not been sufficiently investigated. This article argues that ideas of race played a pivotal role in the construction of Italian identity and that nationalism sparked the diffusion of new theories concerning the ethnic and racial past of Italy. In this period, older understandings of race such as ‘stock’ and ‘lineage’, and newer concepts borrowed from the natural history of man and linguistics intersected with each other. This process, by further ‘biologizing’ and racializing national traits, made the Italian nation a ‘concrete’ and ‘tangible’ concept. By dissecting these different meanings of race we can unearth the racial subtext that permeates the public discourse on national identity, and gain a broader understanding of Italian and European nationalism in current years.

William Frédéric Edwards and the study of human races in France, from the Restoration to the July Monarchy.

Scholars of the nineteenth-century race sciences have tended to identify the period from c.1820-c.1850 as a phase of transition from philologically to physically focused study. In France, the physiologist William Frédéric Edwards (1776-1842) is normally placed near the center of this transformation. A reconsideration of Edwards' oeuvre in the context of his larger biography shows that it is impossible to see a clear-cut philological to physical "paradigm shift." Although he has been remembered almost solely for his principle of the permanency of physical "types," Edwards was also committed to what he recognized as the new science of "linguistique" and proposed a new branch of comparative philology based on pronunciation. Bearing Edwards' attention to linguistics in mind, this article reconstructs his racial theories in their intellectual contexts and suggests that at a time of emergent disciplinary specialization, Edwards tried to hold discrete fields together and mold them into a new "natural history of man."

Science and Human Animality in Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein

Science and Human Animality in Mary Shelley’s<i>Frankenstein</i>

"We must strip him to his shirt". The "natural history of man" from Linnaeus to Darwin

Si ricostruisce il passaggio dall’antropologia letteraria quella naturalistica, avvenuto quando l’uomo fu classificato tra i Primati (Linne, 1735). Si considera poi il passaggio all’antropologia evoluzionistica, avvenuto quando l’uomo venne per la prima volta assunto come derivato da un’altra specie di Primati (Lamarck, 1802). Si analizza quindi l’epoca in cui il problema della sua origine venne posto invece nei termini del lontano progenitore comune (De Filippi, 1864; Canestrini, 1866; Darwin, 1871) e, dopo aver ricordato i principali dibattiti che vi si aprirono (fra monogenisti e poligenisti; sull’esistenza di razze), si considera infine l’epoca in cui la storia naturale dell’uomo trovo il suo primo assetto istituzionale (istituzione di Societa professionali, pubblicazione di manuali ecc.); soffermandosi sull’opera di Paolo Mantegazza, titolare della prima cattedra europea di Antropologia (Firenze, 1869), e in particolare sulla sua ricerca di un’antropologia a tutto campo.

Stephen Gaukroger. The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841. vii + 402 pp., illus., bibl., index. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. £30 (cloth).

Stephen Gaukroger. <i>The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841</i>. vii + 402 pp., illus., bibl., index. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. £30 (cloth).

The Scottish Enlightenment: race, gender, and the limits of progress

Introduction: The Scottish Enlightenment as Historiographic Problem 1. Hume versus Montesquieu: Race Against Climate 2. The Natural History of Humankind and the Natural History of Man 3. Ignoble Savages: a Blank in the History of the Species 4. Universal Prerogatives of Humankind 5. Measures of Civilization: Women, Races, and Progress Conclusion

Philosophers, Naturalists, and Antipodean Encounters, 1748-1803

This article addresses a complex nexus of discourse and praxis: varying Enlightenment visions of Man; emergent ideas about human differences; and encounters between European scientific voyagers and Indigenous people in New Holland (Australia) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) at the start of the nineteenth century. Discursively, I trace two strands of ‘anthropological’ thinking. One, philosophical and economic, is epitomized in French and Scottish stadial theory. The other is naturalist and culminated in Buffon's natural history of man. Both were appropriated from the late eighteenth century by a nascent science of race. With respect to praxis, I chart the reciprocal impact of metropolitan theory, antipodean experience and local agency by selective comparison of materials produced by the voyages of Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin in Australian waters in 1801–1803.

The End of Prehistory? An Africanist Comment

THE STORY IS ALREADY WELL TOLD that history as a professional discipline developed out of the rise of the nation-state and nationalism, with an emphasis on methodological rigor that is based on institutional archives. 1 This origin came along, however, with an impoverished diet of methodology that has since conditioned the growth of a stunted historiography, especially with the elision of about 99 percent of human temporal experience from the purview of historical inquiry. Thus the period referred to as prehistory, because of its lack of documentary sources, is considered unfit for historians proper but is deemed the appropriate purview of archaeologists and ethnohistorians. This has been good for building disciplinary boundaries, but not without the consequence of truncating historical consciousness. 2 These temporal barriers, created by nationalism and colonialism, have been a subject of criticism by scholars who are committed to the study of the deep past. It is not surprising that this endeavor was pioneered by scholars interested in the long-term history of recently colonized societies. 3 Hence, in the introduction to Three Thousand Years in Africa: Man and His Environment in the Lake Chad Region of Nigeria (1981), Graham Connah defiantly wrote: The study of Man’s past should be indivisible and there can be no such thing as an historical time before history: providing that we define history as the whole natural history of Man and not his written history only. Thus to write about Africa’s past it is essential to step over some of the traditional academic boundaries. 4

«Des hommes noirs et non pas des nègres»: Piel y raza en el siglo XVIII

A growing interest in the nature of the black skin and in the origins of the peoples classified under this trait was accompanied in the eighteenth century by an increasing differentiation of their nature from whites, to the point that they were considered either a degenerated variety of humans, a separate species or inferior animals. Skin and race go together in the natural history of man, which comprises not only anatomical and physiological aspects, but also the history of nations, the Sacred History, and the aesthetic reflection.

The Brain Collections of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, University of Turin: Re-Evaluation and Scientific Investigation

The study of brain collections has played an important role in research on the Natural History of Man. Current knowledge on cerebral morphological evolution and development of the psyche, from non-human primates to Man, is the result of analyses of endocranial casts and brains collected in the nineteenth century from the various primate species dissected. This paper presents the brain collections of non-human and human primates housed in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin put together in the early 1900s by A. Marro, father of Prof. Giovanni Marro, the founder of the Museum. These collections, which have required constant interventions aimed at their preservation and scientific re-evaluation, have undoubted historical interest and are essential to define Man, both biologically and culturally.

The Natural History of Man and the Politics of Medical Portraiture in Manchester

Visual practices play a role in the making of scientific careers and theories that is not always straightforward. Several portraits of the Manchester surgeon Charles White, along with scientific illustrations associated with him, interfered with Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait of John Hunter in ways that reveal the messy diversity of practices, uses, and contexts of images during the Enlightenment The increased mobility of Enlightenment visual culture straddled the fields of art and science, reflected their social economies, and enabled images to maintain a meaningful role simultaneously in systems of knowing, projects of professional empowerment, and forms of political commentary.

Notes on ‘Race’ and the Biologisation of Human Difference

It has come belatedly to my attention that the Journal of Pacific History has printed a rejoinder by Tom Ryan to a footnote in my paper ‘Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man’.1 While...

Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man*

This paper examines intellectual interchanges between European theorists in the science of man and sailors, naturalists and artists on scientific voyages in Oceania during the century after 1750. I argue that travellers' narratives and ethnographic representations were not mere reflexes of dominant metropolitan discourses, but were also personal productions generated in the tensions and ambiguities of cross-cultural encounters. I identify countersigns of indigenous agency embedded in such materials and evaluate their trajectory from the interactions which provoked them, through varied genres and media of voyagers' representations, to their contorted appropriation by European savants. My examples are drawn from British and French accounts of visits to New Holland and Van Diemen's Land between 1770 and 1802. In this paper, Aboriginal Australians, especially Tasmanians, serve as synecdoche for the indigenous inhabitants of Oceania generally, using the regional term in its extended early 19th-century sense which encompassed the present Indonesia and Australia along with Papua New Guinea, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

Despised Source of Whining and Worse

Mosquito A Natural History of Man's Most Persistent and Deadly Foe. Andrew Spielman and Michael D'Antonio. Hyperion, New York, 2001. 267 pp. $22.95, C$32.95. ISBN 0-7868-6781-7. Faber and Faber, London. £10.99. ISBN 0-571-20980-7. Spielman, an authority on mosquito-borne diseases, and D'Antonio, a science journalist, have collaborated to provide a popular account of mosquitoes, their roles as disease vectors, and the efforts of humans to combat them. The book includes numerous stories and anecdotes that Spielman has gathered over the course of his career.