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Introducing the Orphanage

Kelly Joan Whitmer

in The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment

The Introduction offers a virtual tour of the Halle Orphanage using an account of King Friedrich I’s visit to the ensemble on October 4th, 1720. It provides readers with an accessible way into to the ... More

The Introduction offers a virtual tour of the Halle Orphanage using an account of King Friedrich I’s visit to the ensemble on October 4th, 1720. It provides readers with an accessible way into to the historiographies of Pietism and Enlightenment, including a discussion of Halle Pietists’ interest in philanthropîa and a brief account of the banishment of Christian Wolff from the city in 1723. This event became a major public controversy that led to a widespread tendency to view Pietist theologians as “anti-reason” or “anti-Enlightenment” by the 1730s and 40s. Over the years, it has tended to draw attention away from what was actually going on inside of the Orphanage, including administrators’ early efforts to collaborate with the period’s leading public intellectuals in the interest of constructing a scientific community. The introduction concludes with a discussion of the book’s central contribution to the history of science, including an emerging “history of scientific observation.”Less

Pressed into Service: Specimens, Space, and Seeing in Botanical Practice

Anne Secord (ed.)

in Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science

This chapter examines the transference of botanical knowledge between the field and the cabinet in ways that centered upon texts as guides. It explains the production of scientific observation in the ... More

This chapter examines the transference of botanical knowledge between the field and the cabinet in ways that centered upon texts as guides. It explains the production of scientific observation in the botanical world demanded that books should discipline visual habits and that the spaces of the book illustrate not just the products of observation, but also its processes. This chapter highlights the role of textual space in the honing of visual skills and clarifies some of the key mechanisms in the circulation of scientific expertise.Less

“That Something Living is Abroad”: Missing the Point in ‘Beachy Head’

Lily Gurton-Wachter

in Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention

This chapter finds in Charlotte Smith’s final prospect poem, Beachy Head, a preoccupation with figures of keeping watch, including a geological watchfulness that undermines the wartime logic of ... More

This chapter finds in Charlotte Smith’s final prospect poem, Beachy Head, a preoccupation with figures of keeping watch, including a geological watchfulness that undermines the wartime logic of natural enmity by suggesting that England and France were once one indistinguishable land mass. Smith’s poem borrows from scientific observation to cultivate an attention to the slight sounds that “just tell that something living is abroad.” Juxtaposing poetic, military, and scientific practices of observation, Beachy Head presents a landscape teeming with both sounds and listeners overlapping and intertwining, emptying alarms to create an archive of outdated modes of attention. Moving from horizon to the ground, from the prospect view to a more and more minute observation, Smith depicts a heightened and yet divided attention that she also demands of her reader, who must likewise move between the poetic text and its unfolding footnotes.Less

Scientific Observing

in Scientific Perspectivism

No one questions that the claims of contemporary scientists are in some sense based on the observation of nature. The problem is how to understand the scientific process of observing nature. The ... More

No one questions that the claims of contemporary scientists are in some sense based on the observation of nature. The problem is how to understand the scientific process of observing nature. The first step is to realize that virtually all scientific observation now involves instrumentation. This chapter argues that observation using instruments is perspectival in roughly the same ways that normal human color vision is perspectival. It considers instruments in two different sciences: one, astronomy, concerned with the very large; and the second, neuroscience, concerned with something relatively small, the human brain. In both cases, the chapter indicates those respects in which the relevant instruments are perspectival. Something similar holds for scientific instruments generally.Less

Science’s Disappearing Observer: Baroque Optics and the Enlightenment of Vision

Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris

in Baroque Science

This chapter examines the history of the development of baroque optics, the enlightenment of human vision, and the disappearance of the scientific observer. It explains that the naturalization of ... More

This chapter examines the history of the development of baroque optics, the enlightenment of human vision, and the disappearance of the scientific observer. It explains that the naturalization of vision led to the estrangement of nature, and the confidence in images observed from the very far away cast fundamental doubt on our sense of the immediate. It also discusses the optical paradox which was created by Johannes Kepler’s “enlightenment” of optics and which was articulated by Rene Descartes as the fundamental epistemological conundrum of the baroque.Less

The Power of the Family

Deborah Weinstein

in The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy

This introductory chapter explains the rationale for examining how families became a site of disease and an appropriate point of intervention during mid-century America. It operates across three ... More

This introductory chapter explains the rationale for examining how families became a site of disease and an appropriate point of intervention during mid-century America. It operates across three interconnected areas: the history of family therapy's formation, the history of postwar American cultural and intellectual life, and the history of scientific observation. Pessimistic concerns about the state of the American family are combined with optimistic confidence in the potential for expert assistance, including the capacity of family therapists to use therapeutic means to address severe pathologies. The fact that the family is seen as a vessel of hopes and problems—from schizophrenia and delinquency to the state of national democracy and military strength—underlines the stakes of approaching the family as a site for therapeutic intervention.Less

From Satyr to Pongo: Discovering the Red Ape

Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffin

in Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan

This chapter examines Dutch anatomist Nicolaes Tulp's work, Observationes Medicæ, which provides a detailed description of a great ape. Tulp described the state of the creature's muscles, the texture ... More

This chapter examines Dutch anatomist Nicolaes Tulp's work, Observationes Medicæ, which provides a detailed description of a great ape. Tulp described the state of the creature's muscles, the texture of its skin, the color of its hair, and the shape of its thumb. He had seen the creature when it was still alive, and he told of the way in which it drank liquid and how it pulled a blanket over itself to go to bed. The description, though stretching over little more than a page, was a model of direct scientific observation of a kind that had nothing in common with the wild stories of fantastical beasts in distant places that was still the stuff of travelers' tales in the early seventeenth century.Less

The Emergence of Obsession

in Obsession: A History

This chapter shows how monomania paved the way for obsessive diseases, obsessive practices, and a general culture of attention, focus, specialization—all of these linked to the rise of professions ... More

This chapter shows how monomania paved the way for obsessive diseases, obsessive practices, and a general culture of attention, focus, specialization—all of these linked to the rise of professions and science. There was no necessity that these features would coalesce into a culture of obsession, but there seems to be a trend, a river made up converging streams, a zeitgeist within a culture, that leads to both the concept of scientific observation and its dark side, the diseases of hyperattention and obsessive focus.Less

Theology of Finality

Raymond Ruyer and Alyosha Edlebi

in Neofinalism

This closing chapter moves from exploring finality in the world (the focus of previous chapters) to exploring finality of the world. Ruyer defines the task of metaphysics as twofold: (1) the ... More

This closing chapter moves from exploring finality in the world (the focus of previous chapters) to exploring finality of the world. Ruyer defines the task of metaphysics as twofold: (1) the transformation of scientific observations into a knowledge of relations and of sense; and (2) the study of the relationship between the Agent and the Ideal. In this chapter, Ruyer presents metaphysics as a form of fiction; he affirms that every metaphysics is mythical. This is because reason is not self-sufficient, but draws on a ground of the irrational. This mythical character is not a condemnation of metaphysics, but a necessity in the relation between knowledge and the frontiers of ignorance that encircle it. The book closes by invoking the possibility of a new concept of an immanent divinity as the sense of finality.Less

The Making of a Eureka Moment

Alistair Sponsel

in Darwin's Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation

This chapter explains how Darwin came to have a moment of insight about coral reef formation while at Tahiti in November 1835. Sponsel argues that this eureka moment depended on Darwin’s ability to ... More

This chapter explains how Darwin came to have a moment of insight about coral reef formation while at Tahiti in November 1835. Sponsel argues that this eureka moment depended on Darwin’s ability to envision the underwater realm like a hydrographer, a skill gained working alongside the Beagle’s maritime surveyors. Darwin’s Tahitian insight was also stimulated by his earlier conjecture that the floor of the Pacific Ocean was sinking, an idea derived too from Darwin’s experience with hydrography. Meanwhile, his physical surroundings as he climbed inland at Tahiti and gazed at the reef-encircled island of Eimeo [Moorea] also helped spark his new explanation of reef structures. Darwin’s resulting theory (in which corals grew upward on subsiding foundations to form ring-shaped reefs) echoed Humboldt’s description of the vertical zonation of vegetation on mountainsides, a phenomenon Darwin independently noted while climbing in Tahiti. The eureka moment shifted Darwin’s attention toward puzzles he had not previously addressed (such as atolls’ annular shape) and made a set of previous experiences seem as though they had always been intrinsically relevant to explaining reef formation. He began to pursue his new research not only in the field but by studying printed maps and books aboard the ship.Less