--- Apologies for cross-posting. Please circulate to colleagues---
*** Temporalizing the great chain of being: a reappraisal after 70 years ***
A one-day workshop
in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of
Cambridge
on Tuesday 16 January 2007, 10.00–6.00
Why engage today with Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The great chain of being
(1936)? Not, surely, to revive the history of ideas for which this book
was the manifesto, but, for this workshop, as a starting point,
stimulating as well as obligatory, from which to reconsider the history
of seriality in the sciences. Re-reading is above all an opportunity to
reflect on the influential thesis of Lovejoy’s last chapters, that the
eighteenth century witnessed the profound transformation of a static
scale of beings into a ladder of progress, an inventory into a
developmental programme. Seventy years since Lovejoy’s book, and over
30 since William F. Bynum’s appraisal in the journal History of
science, we invite colleagues to revisit this historical problem in the
light of recent scholarship. How, now that historians of science are
more at home with practices and pictures than unit-ideas, might we best
describe and explain the new kinds of seriality of the decades around
1800?
Attendees will be expected to have studied Lovejoy’s book, especially
the last three chapters, and it would be very helpful also to have read
Bynum’s ‘The great chain of being after 40 years: an appraisal’,
History of science 13 (1975), 1-28.
Organized by Nick Hopwood, Jim Secord and Simon Schaffer
Assistant: Melanie Keene
Funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group
PROGRAMME
Simon Schaffer
Lovejoy’s chain
Discussion of Lovejoy’s book, especially the last three chapters,
introduced with commentaries by Marie-Noëlle Bourguet (University of
Paris 7) and Nicolaas Rupke (University of Göttingen)
Carlos López Beltrán (UNAM, Mexico City)
Hereditary tales: contingency and narrativity versus the chain of being
Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter)
How the great chain of being fell apart
Renato Mazzolini (University of Trento)
Human skin colour and the chain of being
Janina Wellmann (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,
Berlin)
Life as a series: the embryological work of Christian Pander and Karl
Ernst von Baer
Joan Steigerwald (York University, Toronto)
Inversions of the chain of being: Schelling and Ritter
Martin Rudwick (HPS)
Testing the temporalized chain against real (deep) time
A booking form can be downloaded from
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/medicine/greatchain.html. To register, please
complete and send it with your cheque to Melanie Keene, Department of
History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School
Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, by 20 December 2006. Numbers are strictly
limited by room capacity and our wish to encourage informal discussion.
First come, first served. Inquiries to Melanie on [log in to unmask]
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