The Language of Natural Power: The “Eloges” of Georges Cuvier and the Public Language of Nineteenth Century Science

Outram, Dorinda

doi:10.1177/007327537801600301

Cited by 61 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…For example, Kepler accepted Galileo's arguments in the Sidereal Messenger on the grounds of his character 27 . A general conception formed of the scientist as a morally superior person (Dubos 1961, 152–53; Outram 1978). Adam Smith endorsed this myth in his Theory of Moral Sentiments , which had a wide circulation (Smith 1976 [1759], 20, 125).…”

Section: Reworking Dastonmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Aperspectival Objectivity to Strong Objectivity: The Quest for Moral Objectivity

Tannoch-Bland¹

1997

Hypatia

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Sandra Harding is working on the reconstruction of scientific objectivity. Lorraine Daston argues that objectivity is a concept that has historically evolved. Her account of the development of “aperspectival objectivity” provides an opportunity to see Harding's “strong objectivity” project as a stage in this evolution, to locate it in the history of migration of ideals from moral philosophy to natural science, and to support Harding's desire to retain something of the ontological significance of objectivity.

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Section: Reworking Dastonmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Aperspectival Objectivity to Strong Objectivity: The Quest for Moral Objectivity

Tannoch-Bland¹

1997

Hypatia

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“…Cuvier, who also diligently collected data, restricted his research to comparative anatomy, especially of living and fossil mammals, and he did not develop any theory about the cause of catastrophes (Adams 1969:138–164, Ruse 1979:12–15, 37–38, Mayr 1982:363–371, Bowler 1989:112–118, Packer 2000). Like Humboldt, and unlike Lamarck, Cuvier was also very successful in science and in society (Outram 1976, 1978, 1986, Gillispie 2004, Taquet 2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 34: A Changing Economy of Nature

Egerton

2010

Bulletin Ecologic Soc America

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“…This ample construal of the term is important to avoid anachronism -the narrowing of the English "science" (and the cognate French science) occurred only in the nineteenth century -but also to keep our historical quarry firmly in sight: when, where, and why did distinctive scientific personae (e.g., the "scientist" as opposed to the "natural philosopher," the scientifique as opposed to the savant, the Wissenschaftler as opposed to the Gelehrter) appear? Although the attempt to apply Mauss' anthropological notion of the persona to the history of science is new, there already exists a literature, scattered but significant, which has attempted to carve out a middle course between scientific biography and the history of scientific institutions, attentive to how cultural categories intersect with individual lifelines (Outram 1978, Olesko 1991, Shapin 1991, Clark 1992, Biagioli 1993, Shortland and Yeo 1996, Lawrence and Shapin 1998, Fara 2000, Jordanova 2000. Beyond the history of science, there is a burgeoning literature on the history of the self, much of it inspired by the works of Norbert Elias (Elias [1969(Elias [ ] 1977, Michel Foucault (Foucault 1984), and Charles Taylor (Taylor 1989).…”

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Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories

2003

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The ten essays in this special issue of Science in Context address the formation of scientific personae from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries in Europe and North America. The departure point for the collection was a year-long (1998-99) research project (including a final conference) on "The Scientific Persona" organized at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. This project was in turn inspired by a seminal essay by the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss on the historical and cultural development of the category of personhood, from the tribal personnage to the modern moi (Mauss 1938). Because the application of Mauss' term "persona" to the history of science is somewhat novel, and also unforeseen by Mauss himself, we must first explain what is meant by the term in these essays, and why we believe Mauss' historicization of personhood, somewhat modified, to be illuminating for the history of science. Mauss' essay, "Une catégorie de l'esprit humain: La notion de personne, celle de 'moi'. Un plan de travail," originally delivered in 1938 as the Huxley Memorial Lecture in London, reveals its program already in its title: it was meant to present British colleagues with an example of the "French School of Sociology," more particularly "the social history of the categories of the human mind" (Mauss 1938, 263). Mauss wished to display the possibilities of this historicized neo-Kantianism by means of a prototypical Kantian example, the self, das Ich (Trendelenberg 1908), assumed by modern philosophers to be an innate mental category. To this end, he traced a long developmental arc from the rites of personnage in ancient Greece, Rome, and India (which he believed to be to some degree paralleled by extant practices among the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia), through the institutions of Roman law and medieval Christian theology that forged the persona, to the eighteenth-century emergence in a few European cultures of the moi or self. Mauss' three phases might roughly (the word is used advisedly-he insisted upon the crudeness of his first approximations) be characterized as follows. In societies organized around the personnage, or "role," identities and the names that designate them are recycled from generation to generation, so that ancestors are endlessly reincarnated and the social structure of the clan appears static. These reincarnations are often reinforced by inherited names, ranks, rights, and functions, and symbolized by ceremonies involving masks to map the individual face into the ancestral role. The Latin word persona in fact means "mask," and Mauss located the critical transitional phase between personnage and moi in Greek and Latin moral philosophy and law, later

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The Language of Natural Power: The “Eloges” of Georges Cuvier and the Public Language of Nineteenth Century Science

Cited by 61 publications

References 7 publications

From Aperspectival Objectivity to Strong Objectivity: The Quest for Moral Objectivity

From Aperspectival Objectivity to Strong Objectivity: The Quest for Moral Objectivity

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 34: A Changing Economy of Nature

Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories

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