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

系统自然史的历史传统上优先考虑进化历史学家所使用的经典文本所暗示的世界等级图景。这个项目提供了一个新的视角，使这些来源所描绘的画面变得复杂。特别是，我挑战的概念，后期启蒙运动的自然主义者通过一套固定的类别，公开连接到像“链的存在”或“物种”的概念来看待世界。更具体地说，我专注于秩序的前奏，也就是说，在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的排序，提取和插入。这些无处不在的实践是可塑的，而且至关重要的是，它们在教室、图书馆、演讲厅、研究和博物馆以及自然环境中日复一日地得到加强。从这个角度来看，我用笔记本电脑认为，“心”，“身体”和“世界”的概念是灵活的方式，赋予新的意义和相关性的动态性质的知识形成在启蒙运动后期。

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.