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‘A General and Distinct View of Nature in Miniature’: Mechanical Explanations of Natural Knowledge c .1760
Author(s) -
GRANT FLORENCE
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12078
Subject(s) - variety (cybernetics) , rhetoric , natural (archaeology) , george (robot) , representation (politics) , poetry , natural philosophy , epistemology , literature , affinities , sociology , aesthetics , cognitive science , art , linguistics , computer science , philosophy , history , psychology , artificial intelligence , art history , archaeology , political science , chemistry , law , politics , stereochemistry
The course of experimental philosophy was an important new genre for the representation of natural knowledge in eighteenth‐century B ritain and E urope. It was a complex, multimedia genre with a variety of possible forms, but we know little about its characteristics and affinities with other kinds of representation. This article uses a collection of instruments, books and manuscripts made for G eorge III in the early 1760s to show how contemporary ideas about geometry, rhetoric, poetry and cognition provided a conceptual framework for re‐making natural knowledge in new social contexts.