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Hume's Lucretian Mission: Is It Self-Refuting?

Paul Russell

in The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion

Whatever the merits of the irreligious interpretation of the Treatise, it may be argued that there remain significant puzzles and problems relating to the coherence of Hume's aim to discredit and ... More

Whatever the merits of the irreligious interpretation of the Treatise, it may be argued that there remain significant puzzles and problems relating to the coherence of Hume's aim to discredit and dislodge the role of religion in human life (i.e. his “Lucretian mission”) when we try to accommodate developments and additions that appear in his later writings. More specifically, it may be argued that Hume's own observations about the origins and roots of religion in human nature, primarily as presented in his Natural History of Religion, show that his Lucretian mission is neither wise nor achievable. If this general line of criticism is correct, then Hume's Lucretian mission is both theoretically self‐refuting and practically self‐defeating. Moreover, considered in this light, Hume's project in the Treatise is fundamentally flawed as judged by his own claims and hypotheses concerning religion. This chapter argues that in respect of all these charges Hume is not guilty of any internal inconsistency.Less

Fatal Latitudes: The Poetics of West Indian “Improvement” in Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands

Christopher P. Iannini

in Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature

This chapter focuses on Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, arguing that his book modifies the basic emblematic techniques at the heart of Hans Sloane's Voyage to... Jamaica. The Natural ... More

This chapter focuses on Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, arguing that his book modifies the basic emblematic techniques at the heart of Hans Sloane's Voyage to... Jamaica. The Natural History of Carolina charts the rapid expansion of the West Indian plantation into southern North America and shows a new and shifting geography of plantation slavery and tropical agriculture in the Americas. The book is also designed to prompt reflection on the implications of the natural and human history of the colony for the future intellectual advancement and refinement of manners.Less

“A Vision of the Future”:: The New Museum Idea and Display Reform, 1890–1915

Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain

in Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century

Between the 1890s and the 1910s, a young generation of reformers inspired by a transnational movement known as “the New Museum Idea” agreed that natural history museums had a social responsibility to ... More

Between the 1890s and the 1910s, a young generation of reformers inspired by a transnational movement known as “the New Museum Idea” agreed that natural history museums had a social responsibility to reach and teach all citizens about nature and biology. Convinced that museum displays could and should become powerful pedagogical tools, reformers persuaded their colleagues to build collections and displays that would appeal to both scientists and the lay public. A small but influential group of reformers, known as “museum men,” led effort to realize exhibits’ educational potential and to establish museums as major forces in American science education. Though many argued over the shape and extent of museum reform, by the mid-1910s, reformers had persuaded most staff members to rally behind their tripartite vision of the museum as a place for the preservation of specimens, the production of scientific knowledge, and an institution of popular education.Less

The Drama of the Diorama, 1910–1935

Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain

in Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century

Habitat dioramas proliferated in American natural history museums in the 1910s, 1920s, and early 1930s, transforming the social and political dynamics of museum halls. Initially, curators, ... More

Habitat dioramas proliferated in American natural history museums in the 1910s, 1920s, and early 1930s, transforming the social and political dynamics of museum halls. Initially, curators, administrators, trustees and the public enthusiastically supported investment in the expensive displays, which promised to further educational, scientific and institutional goals. As museums built more dioramas, however, these displays awakened new animosity between staff members, altering staff dynamics and making clear how difficult it would be to accomplish popular science education, protect and collect specimens, and produce scientific knowledge simultaneously. As the exhibits grew in number and status, and the Great Depression placed new financial strains on museums, these clashes intensified. United only a few years earlier by an ambitious vision of the New Museum Idea, museum professionals now bickered amongst themselves about what museums should be and do.Less

The Culmination of his Art: Tu rostro mañana

Gareth Wood

in Javier Marías's Debt to Translation: Sterne, Browne, Nabokov

This chapter is in two sections and offers a synthesis of the conclusions of the book and relates them to Marías's penultimate and longest novel, Tu rostro mañana. Hence, the first section of the ... More

This chapter is in two sections and offers a synthesis of the conclusions of the book and relates them to Marías's penultimate and longest novel, Tu rostro mañana. Hence, the first section of the chapter offers a close reading of the novel and suggests ways in which Marías develops and adds layers of complexity to what had been the preoccupations of the previous novels discussed in this study, preoccupations that include betrayal, the unknowability of others, the Spanish Civil War, intervention of the state in the life of the private individual. The first section traces the development of these preoccupations in both the novel and in Marías's journalism in the period of the novel's gestation. The chapter's second section shows how Marías has continued to use translation, intertextuality, and palimpsest as a means of developing the characterization in TRM. Close analysis is given of the quotations and paraphrasing of Shakespeare's King Henry V, W. G Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, Milton's sonnets, Sefton Delmer's autobiography, and Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry.Less

The Count's Degenerate America

in Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America

Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon argued that all animals in the New World were degenerate—smaller, and less robust—than those found in the Old World. But it was hardly the fault of these New World ... More

Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon argued that all animals in the New World were degenerate—smaller, and less robust—than those found in the Old World. But it was hardly the fault of these New World creatures that they existed in degenerate form. In Buffon's mind, the fault lay with the American Indians who had long ruled the land. They had failed to conquer nature, and so the land remained wet and cold. And for Buffon, wet and cold environments led to degenerate life forms, leaving him free to make sweeping claims about the superior life forms to be found in the Old World—which, of course, included his own beloved France. The birthplace of these arguments about New World degeneracy—Buffon's massive, thirty-six-volume Natural History: General and Particular (Histoire Naturelle)—is a massive encyclopedia that was published over the course of nearly four decades (1749–1788). It was in this all-encompassing work on nature that Buffon set out his theory about degenerate animals and humans in America.Less

Strauss on Locke and the Law of Nature

Michael P. Zuckert and Catherine H. Zuckert

in Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy

The Lockean form of modernity was generally more attractive than the Machiavellian and far more successful. Locke appealed to what seemed a version of traditional natural law and cast his argument in ... More

The Lockean form of modernity was generally more attractive than the Machiavellian and far more successful. Locke appealed to what seemed a version of traditional natural law and cast his argument in many places in theistic terms. In Natural Right and History Strauss argued that this appearance was mostly a clever subterfuge. The chapter in Natural Right and History had been written prior to the 1954 appearance of a text, the Essays on the Law of Nature, that had been found in Locke’s papers. The new text was sometimes seen as a definitive rebuttal to Strauss’s version of Locke. In an essay on this new text Strauss vindicates his original reading and, building on Locke’s presentation, goes on to offer his own serious refutation of natural law philosophy, in particular the version of that doctrine associated with Thomas Aquinas.Less

Beyond Comparison: M. Sergius, Fortunae Victor

Mary Beagon

in Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffin

The only extant written account of the remarkable exploits of M. Sergius Silus, is to be found halfway through book 7 of Pliny's Natural History. If we think of book 7 as falling into three main ... More

The only extant written account of the remarkable exploits of M. Sergius Silus, is to be found halfway through book 7 of Pliny's Natural History. If we think of book 7 as falling into three main sections, Sergius appears in the middle one, among the statistics and achievements of human maturity. This chapter argues that the elevation of Sergius to the status of pre-eminent exemplum virtutis in the Natural History owes a great deal to the cultural and philosophical atmosphere in which Pliny was writing; more, perhaps, than it does to the actual historical significance of the hero himself. The key lies in Pliny's final words: ‘Others certainly have conquered men but Sergius conquered fortune also’; a statement that reflects a popular philosophical paradox by which virtue in effect turns failure into success. Its significance is, however, enhanced by consideration of the final chapter of Sergius' story in Pliny.Less

Materials and Methods

Taisoo Park

in Taxonomy and Distribution of the Calanoid Copepod Family Heterorhabdidae

This chapter examines specimens picked from the Isaacs–Kidd midwater trawl (IKMT) samples selected from the collections available at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). It notes that ... More

This chapter examines specimens picked from the Isaacs–Kidd midwater trawl (IKMT) samples selected from the collections available at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). It notes that additional specimens were obtained from the IKMT, plankton net, and the MOCNESS (Multiple Opening/Closing Net and Environmental Sensing System) samples available at the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution (USNM), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and the University of Rhode Island (URI). It examines a total of 148 samples (one plankton net, 126 IKMT and 21 MOCNESS samples) collected throughout the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. It accounts the sources, the areas they represent, the number of examples examined and the extent of geographic coverage for each ocean. It notes that citation of type material includes the number of specimens, collecting gear, sampling depth, source, expedition, cruise number, station number, latitude and longitude, area, and date of collection.Less

Establishing the American Paleolithic, 1872–1881

David J. Meltzer

in The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of America's Ice Age Past

In 1872, Charles Abbott started finding artifacts in Delaware River gravels at Trenton, NJ, similar to European paleoliths. That discovery caught the eye of Harvard's Frederic Putnam, who provided ... More

In 1872, Charles Abbott started finding artifacts in Delaware River gravels at Trenton, NJ, similar to European paleoliths. That discovery caught the eye of Harvard's Frederic Putnam, who provided financial aid, moral support and scientific respectability to the cause. Geologist George F. Wright seized the challenge of ascertaining the age of Abbott's finds. It was no easy task. Trenton was south of the limit of glacial advance by 60 miles, and had multiple gravel layers. Which were the same age as the glacier, and which were more recent? How did paleoliths fit that sequence, and the broader history of North American glaciation, then becoming more complicated with the realization there had been more than one glacial episode? The age of Abbott's paleoliths landed in a tug of war between competing camps. Nonetheless, he was certain the specimens were glacial in age, and in January of 1881 they took center stage at a Boston Society of Natural History meeting, where the city's scientific elite rose to bear witness to his discoveries. In scarcely a decade Abbott had shown that the future of American archaeology might be deep in its geological past.Less

Building Mr. Bell’s Museum

Sue Leaf

in A Love Affair with Birds: The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts

This chapter examines the birth of the Minnesota Natural History Museum. The museum at the zoology building was full due to the large dioramas. Unfortunately for Thomas Sandler Roberts, the state ... More

This chapter examines the birth of the Minnesota Natural History Museum. The museum at the zoology building was full due to the large dioramas. Unfortunately for Thomas Sandler Roberts, the state legislature passed up on the $125,000 offer of James Ford Bell to build a new building. Bell and Roberts then urged the University of Minnesota to apply to The Public Works Administration for funds, who accepted the offer to help with the building of a museum. Construction began on May 1939. The chapter then describes Roberts’ second marriage to Agnes Williams Harley, the sister of Carroll Williams who had been his friend back at medical school. Roberts defined it as a marriage of “companionship”. In addition to loneliness, chronic bronchitis plagued him. The seventy-five year old Roberts had battled the illness since before Jennie’s death, and had never completely cleared up.Less

Brussels: Fieldwork in a Metropolitan Museum

Raf de Bont

in Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930

This chapter challenges the assumption that the natural history museums of around 1900 were dusty, old-fashioned centers of accumulation and cataloguing. The chapter argues that, by setting up ... More

This chapter challenges the assumption that the natural history museums of around 1900 were dusty, old-fashioned centers of accumulation and cataloguing. The chapter argues that, by setting up annexes of field stations, museums could actually play an important role in rejuvenating the life sciences. For substantiating this claim the chapter focuses on the Natural History Museum of Brussels. In the first decades of the twentieth century this museum set up a cluster of biological stations, which were mostly ill-equipped and often of a temporary nature, but which proved decisive in the transformation of the institution from a place of classification and exhibition into a self-declared “exploration museum”. As such, the Brussels Natural History Museum played an important role in putting the study of nature in nature on the agenda of the local scientific community.Less

Emerson’s Memory Loss

Christopher Hanlon

in Emerson's Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style

This chapter examines Emerson’s 1870–71 lecture series Natural History of Intellect, which formed as Emerson’s experience of memory loss became profound, and registers its author’s shifting protocols ... More

This chapter examines Emerson’s 1870–71 lecture series Natural History of Intellect, which formed as Emerson’s experience of memory loss became profound, and registers its author’s shifting protocols for producing texts as he contended with changing patterns of cognition. Natural History of Intellect reflects upon Emerson’s increasing reliance upon his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson, who assisted Emerson as he lectured and who eventually reshaped Emerson’s manuscript materials. Entering into conversation with other literary historians who challenge an account of Emerson’s thought that enshrines Emersonian individualism to the exclusion of more communal dimensions of transcendentalism, this chapter contends that the lecture series theorizes the terms of his collaboration with Ellen in ways that break with Emerson’s earlier tendency to lionize insular consciousness and to isolate the body from the mind, offering instead an account of first-person thought as if always interpenetrated with the thinking of other people.Less

The Cardinal Hour

Sue Leaf

in A Love Affair with Birds: The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts

This chapter examines the final years of Thomas Sadler Roberts, who held the post of director of the Minnesota Natural History Museum until his death. At nearly eighty-two, Roberts no longer moved ... More

This chapter examines the final years of Thomas Sadler Roberts, who held the post of director of the Minnesota Natural History Museum until his death. At nearly eighty-two, Roberts no longer moved briskly, but the light in his eyes was still keen and reflective. The museum staff were in the thick of things, coping with the move into the new building. However, they had just barely settled into the routine in the new museum in 1940 when war broke out. World War II affected the operations of the museum as staff members were drafted to serve. By 1942, there were only three main staff members left: Roberts, and his longtime associates William Kilgore, and Walter Breckenridge. The chapter concludes by describing the last moments of Roberts. On April 17, Roberts was rushed to the Eitel Hospital after a heart attack. He passed away two days later.Less

Chris Humphries, Cladistics, and Connections

David M. Williams, Kåre Bremer, and Sandra Knapp

in Beyond Cladistics: The Branching of a Paradigm

By way of introduction, this short piece describes a few subjects that attracted Chris Humphries's attention during his thirty-plus years as botanist and systematist. These include botanical ... More

By way of introduction, this short piece describes a few subjects that attracted Chris Humphries's attention during his thirty-plus years as botanist and systematist. These include botanical cladistics, cladistics and daisies, and biogeographic cladistics. Humphries joined the Department of Botany of the Natural History Museum in 1972 replacing Alexsandr Melderis, then head of the European Herbarium. His first task was to finish his thesis and obtain his PhD degree, which he did in 1973. His study was on species of Argyranthemum, a genus of daisy in the family Asteraceae, and is a fine example of a morphological investigation (with a little phytochemistry) and anatomical interpretation, with comments on their relationships and geographic distribution. Humphries's studies on Asteraceae to one side, the next period in his career focused almost exclusively on biogeography, and in 1979 he published his first considered paper on the subject, “Endemism and Evolution in Macaronesia.” Humphries blazed a trail for botany at the Natural History Museum and beyond — and his influence extended to other museum departments.Less

Greece, Rome, and the Modern British Nation

Kate Nichols

in Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854-1936

Chapter 6 examines what the presentation and responses to classical civilizations at the Crystal Palace might reveal about Britain’s perceived national and international status. It discusses how ... More

Chapter 6 examines what the presentation and responses to classical civilizations at the Crystal Palace might reveal about Britain’s perceived national and international status. It discusses how Greece and Rome figured in the national roles played by the Palace from 1854 to 1921: host to the Festival of Empire (1911), and the first incarnation of the Imperial War Museum. The Palace boasted a unique Natural History Department, curated by ethnologist Robert Gordon Latham, which exhibited tableaux of models of extra-European peoples engaged in ‘characteristic’ activities. The second section examines these models in the context of what were increasingly coming to be seen as representations of the ur-Europeans; the sculpture in the Greek Court, showing how the historiography of Greek sculpture intersected with Victorian racial thought. The final section considers the presentation of the Roman empire—and in particular, Roman Britain— in changing Victorian and Edwardian imperial culture.Less