*** A reminder that registration closes on 20 December. ***
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**. Inquiries to
Melanie on [log in to unmask]
|