The Genius of Erasmus DarwinChristopher Upham Murray Smith, Robert Arnott Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2005 - 416 páginas The Genius of Erasmus Darwin provides insight into the full extent of Erasmus Darwin's exceptional intellect. He is shown to be a major creative thinker and innovator, one of the minds behind the late eighteenth-century industrial revolution, and one of the first, if not the first, to perceive the living world (including humans) as part of a unified evolutionary scenario. The contributions here provide contextual understandings of Erasmus Darwin's thought, as well as studies of particular works and accounts of the later reception of his writings. In this way it is possible to see why the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge was moved to describe Darwin as 'the first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded man'.Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, was one of the leading intellectuals of eighteenth-century England. He was a man with an extraordinary range of interests and activities: he was a doctor, biologist, inventor, poet, linguist and botanist. He was also a founding member of the Lunar Society, an intellectual community that included such eminent men as James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood. |
Contenido
Introduction | 1 |
Catching Up with Erasmus Darwin in the New Century | 13 |
Introduction | 33 |
Englands Greatest | 47 |
Erasmus Darwin and William | 83 |
Introduction | 101 |
Erasmus Darwins Evolutionary Psychobiology | 133 |
Introduction | 161 |
Erasmus Darwin Tom Wedgwood | 237 |
Introduction | 257 |
The Air Man | 273 |
Erasmus Darwin Work and Health | 289 |
Introduction | 305 |
Myth and Medicine in Erasmus | 321 |
Nature and Human Beings in Erasmus | 337 |
One great Slaughterhouse the warring world | 357 |
The Persistence of Erasmus | 179 |
Introduction | 195 |
The Ancestors of Modernday Speech Science | 217 |
The Creation of the Erasmus Darwin Foundation | 373 |
405 | |
Términos y frases comunes
after-image became Birmingham Botanic Garden Boulton Breadsall Priory Cambridge Canto carriage Charles Darwin chemistry Coleridge Commonplace Book consonants Darwinia Derby Derbyshire Desmond King-Hele disease doctor Dr Darwin early Economy of Vegetation Edgeworth Edinburgh eighteenth century English Enlightenment Erasmus Darwin Erasmus's Essay evolution evolutionary example experiments eyes Figure fricative front beam Galvani geological History human Ibid ideas images imagination included interest inventions James Watt John John Whitehurst Josiah Wedgwood later Laws of Organic Letters of Erasmus Lichfield Lichfield Cathedral lines living London Loves Luigi Galvani Lunar Society mechanical medicine motion Observations Parkinson Philosophical Transactions physician Plants poem poet poetry progress published reprinted Richard Richard Lovell Edgeworth rotation Royal Society scientific sexual speaking machine speech Spencer Staffordshire Temple of Nature theory Thomas Uglow Unequalled Achievement University vertigo vowels Whitehurst Wilkes William William Withering writings wrote Zoonomia