Scientific Analogy and Literary Taxonomy in Darwin's<i>Loves of the Plants</i>

Porter, Dahlia

doi:10.1080/10509580701297950

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Although one might today assume that the religious commitments of early eighteenth‐century poets and theologians would put them odds with the new scientific worldview, the reality, as Clark Lawlor notes, was that science, religion, and poetry were typically collaborators rather than competitors in this period. James Thomson's The Seasons (1728–44), for example, is, among other things, a work of physico‐theology that depicts nature as God's book while also imagining a cosmos that is best described using scientific language. Of course, it was not always easy to reconcile the metaphysical implications of Newtonian physico‐theology with traditional Christian doctrine.…”

Section: Poetry and Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

Literature and Science in Enlightenment Britain: New Directions

Drury

2017

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite predictions of its impending doom in the late 1970s, the field of literature and science continues to flourish, especially among scholars of eighteenth‐century British literature. This essay identifies four main areas of research in this field: poetry and performance, fiction, new ontologies, and politics and gender. It argues that although scholars continue to study the influence of scientific ideas on literary texts, the most ambitious new work explores the relationship between science and literature through the analysis of shared rhetorical practices and common epistemological and ontological structures.

show abstract

Section: Poetry and Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

Literature and Science in Enlightenment Britain: New Directions

Drury

2017

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…By comparing plant and animal behavior using scientifi c analogies (see Genter (1982) for background on scientifi c analogies vs. metaphors), Darwin was alluding to the materialistic basis of human behavior ( Beer, 1983 ), a tactic earlier used by Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709Mettrie ( -1751 ( La Mettrie, 1994 ) and Darwin ' s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802 ( Browne, 1989 ;Porter, 2007 ). Recently, several others have explored Charles Darwin ' s work on plant movement from historical ( Browne, 2002 ;Ayres, 2008 ;Kutschera and Briggs, 2009 ) or scientifi c ( Balu š ka and Mancuso, 2009 ;Ellison and Gotelli, 2009 ;Holland et al, 2009 ;Isnard and Silk, 2009 ;Moulia and Fournier, 2009 ) standpoints.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731Darwin ( -1802 personifi ed plant reproduction in complex multilayered analogies to discuss human sexual behavior, plant physiology, and the unity of life ( Browne, 1989 ) in ways that prevented scientifi c analogy from slipping into literary metaphors ( Porter, 2007 ). Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731Darwin ( -1802 personifi ed plant reproduction in complex multilayered analogies to discuss human sexual behavior, plant physiology, and the unity of life ( Browne, 1989 ) in ways that prevented scientifi c analogy from slipping into literary metaphors ( Porter, 2007 ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By the late 18th century, plant reproduction and the movements of fl ower parts provided a subject of great interest. Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731Darwin ( -1802 personifi ed plant reproduction in complex multilayered analogies to discuss human sexual behavior, plant physiology, and the unity of life ( Browne, 1989 ) in ways that prevented scientifi c analogy from slipping into literary metaphors ( Porter, 2007 ). Guided by sensationalistic natural philosophy, Dr. Darwin was interested in the physical basis of disease ( Darwin, 1794 ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The “sensational” power of movement in plants: A Darwinian system for studying the evolution of behavior

Whippo

Hangarter

2009

American J of Botany

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Darwin's research on botany and plant physiology was a landmark attempt to integrate plant movements into a biological perspective of behavior. Since antiquity, people have sought to explain plant movements via mechanical or physiological forces, and yet they also constructed analogies between plant and animal behavior. During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, thinkers began to see that physiochemical explanations of plant movements could equally apply to animal behavior and even human thought. Darwin saw his research on plant movements as a strategic front against those who argued that his theory of evolution could not account for the acquisition of new behavioral traits. He believed that his research explained how the different forms of plant movement evolved as modified habits of circumnutation, and he presented evidence that plants might have a brain-like organ, which could have acquired various types of plant sensitivity during evolution. Upon publication of The Power of Movement in Plants, his ideas were overwhelmingly rejected by plant physiologists. Subsequently, plant biologists came to view the work as an important contribution to plant physiology and biology, but its intended contribution to the field of evolution and behavior has been largely overlooked.

show abstract

“…According as it did with the materialist theory of simple percepts, which combine by laws of association into more and more complex ideas, it likewise skirted the philosophical worry about analogy that increasingly haunted the age. As Wasserman (1953) and others (e.g., most recently, and both on Erasmus Darwin's complex and conflicted theory and use of analogy, Packham 2004 andPorter 2007) have argued, analogy was a common philosophical stopgap for the moral and theological unmooring that empirical metaphysics, and especially the doctrine of associationism, threatened to occasion. Coleridge Coleridge (1958Coleridge ( [1817, 1:83) characterized associations as "blind" and "habitual," but they are minimally constructive and purposive in that they seek similitude or, in Hartley's (1971Hartley's ( [1749, 1:293) definition of analogy, the "Resemblance, and in some Cases Sameness, of the Parts, Properties, Functions, Uses, &c. any or all, of A to B."…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Shelley's Theory of Mind: From Radical Empiricism to Cognitive Romanticism

Bruhn¹

2009

Poetics Today

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This essay reconstructs Percy Shelley's theory of mind from his letters and many unfinished essays as well as his Defence of Poetry (1821), emphasizing his radical insistence on the formal and teleological roles of analogy in human cognition, communication, and culture. Adopting the assumptions, method, and terminology he inherited from the vigorous associationist tradition in eighteenth-century British philosophy and psychology, Shelley sought to demonstrate the innate and thus indefeasible foundations of human morality, especially its master principle of social equity. His analysis took him at once to the heart of a range of psychosocial issues that are today studied under the cognitive scientific rubric of "theory of mind," including the developmental interrelations of, and motivations for, social imitation, language acquisition, and mental representation. Taking first a historical and then a theoretical view, I argue that Shelley's elegant solution to one of the major philosophical problems of the empirical age remains surprisingly relevant to central issues in contemporary science of mind. Associationist Moral Psychology as Theory of Mind: Recovering Shelley's Analogy Though he was there only a term and a half, Percy Shelley (1792-1822) received at Oxford an intellectual stimulus to which he responded for the remainder of his precocious and sadly arrested career. The stimulant was

show abstract

Scientific Analogy and Literary Taxonomy in Darwin'sLoves of the Plants

Cited by 17 publications

References 4 publications

Literature and Science in Enlightenment Britain: New Directions

Literature and Science in Enlightenment Britain: New Directions

The “sensational” power of movement in plants: A Darwinian system for studying the evolution of behavior

Shelley's Theory of Mind: From Radical Empiricism to Cognitive Romanticism

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About