Conference Review
In Kind: Species of Exchange in Early Modern Science and Philosophy
18-19 June 2010
The workshop, "In Kind: Species of Exchange in Early Modern Science and Philosophy," held at CRASSH 18-19 June, 2010, was a great success. It was hosted by James Delbourgo, Justin E. H. Smith, and Sachiko Kusukawa, and featured eight speakers coming from six different countries. A particular strength of this event was its interdisciplinary character, bringing together scholars from departments of history and philosophy, all of whom are specialists on issues relating to the problems of the nature, ontology and classification of species in natural science and philosophy in the period around the end of the 17th century in Europe. The different domains in which these problems arose include the study of insects, plants, and minerals, but in another important sense that was highlighted at the workshop, the concept of species was also of central importance in early modern economic matters. Thus the speakers in the workshop together identified points of contact between the natural science of the era, on the hand, and economics on the other, where economics involves both theory and implementation of monetary policy, as well as commerce. One important theme in many of the interventions and in the discussions to follow had to do with the impact of early modern global trade and colonialism on the study of classification, particularly of plant and animal kinds. Among the figures discussed, most attention was given to scientists and philosophers active in Germany and England.
The workshop examined the question of species designation both in philosophical systems and quotidian practices. Its participants sought to determine what methods, resources and exchanges designation projects involved in the early modern period; how practical techniques – especially manual and visual – intersected with the articulation of philosophical accounts of the designation of kinds; and the extent to which reckonings of plant, animal and human variation (understood either physically or culturally) related to concerns in larger programmes of natural history and natural philosophy. Our hypothesis at the outset had been that before more celebrated episodes in global histories of Enlightenment classification, ethnographic encounter and racial reckoning (in particular, Linnaean systematics and the Pacific voyages and comparative anatomy projects of the later eighteenth century), travel, commerce and colonization raised pressing questions about the very possibility of contriving reasoned mechanisms of equivalence, discrimination and taxonomy. We hypothesized, further, that these questions would invite a sustained interdisciplinary assessment they have hitherto lacked, to shed light on the early modern functioning of global information systems, resource networks, and philosophies of natural order. The presentations and discussions at the workshop fully bore out these hypotheses.
Dr Justin Smith
justismi@alcor.concordia.ca
