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The naturalist and the nuances: Sentimentalism, moral values, and emotional expression in Darwin and the anatomists
Author(s) -
Dupouy Stéphanie
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1520-6696
pISSN - 0022-5061
DOI - 10.1002/jhbs.20515
Subject(s) - darwin (adl) , expression (computer science) , evolutionism , creationism , epistemology , philosophy , subject (documents) , naturalism , darwinism , library science , computer science , programming language , systems engineering , engineering
Comparing Charles Darwin's account of emotional expression to previous nineteenth‐century scientific studies on the same subject, this article intends to locate the exact nature of Darwin's break in his 1872 book (as well as in his earlier notebooks). In contrast to a standard view that approaches this question in the framework of the creationism/evolutionism dichotomy, I argue that Darwin's account distinguishes itself primarily by its distance toward the sentimentalist values and moral hierarchies that were traditionally linked with the study of expression—an attitude that is not an inevitable ingredient of the theory of evolution. However, Darwin's approach also reintroduces another kind of hierarchy in human expression, but one based on attenuation and self‐restraint in the exhibition of expressive signs. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.