Reordering the World: Note-Taking and Natural History during the Late Scottish Enlightenment

系统自然历史的历史传统上优先于进化历史学家所使用的经典文本所揭示的世界的等级图景。这个项目提供了一个新的视角，使这些来源描绘的图景变得复杂。特别是，我对启蒙运动晚期自然学家通过一系列固定的类别来看待世界的观点提出了质疑，这些类别公开地与“存在链”或“物种”等概念联系在一起。更具体地说，我专注于秩序的前奏，即对手稿笔记和教育环境(特别是学校和大学)中显示的单词和定义进行分类、提取和插入。这些无处不在的做法是可延展的，至关重要的是，它们在教室、图书馆、演讲厅、书房和博物馆以及自然环境中得到了日常加强。从这个角度来看，我用笔记本来论证‘思想’、‘身体’和‘世界’的概念是灵活的，这种方式赋予了启蒙运动后期知识形成的动态本质新的含义和相关性。

The history of systematic natural history has traditionally given priority to the hierarchical picture of the world intimated by the canon of texts used by evolutionary historians. This project offers a fresh view that complicates the picture painted by such sources. In particular, I challenge the notion that late Enlightenment naturalists viewed the world through a set of fixed categories overtly linked to concepts like the 'chain of being' or 'species'. More specifically, I concentrate on the prelude to order, that is, the sorting, extracting, and insertion of words and definitions evinced in manuscript notes and educational settings (especially schools and universities). These ubiquitous practices were malleable and, crucially, they were reinforced on a day-to-day basis in classrooms, libraries, lecture theatres, studies, and museums, as well as in natural settings. Viewed from this perspective, I use notebooks to argue that conceptions of 'mind', 'body' and 'world' were flexible in a manner that gives new meaning and relevance to the dynamic nature of knowledge formation during the late Enlightenment.