Abstract

GUTIERREZ, Felipe  and  HERNANDEZ, Adolfo. Earth: Transit through the Ideas in Western Culture (17^th to 19^th Centuries). Hist. Soc. [online]. 2023, n.44, pp.154-178.  Epub Feb 21, 2024. ISSN 0121-8417.  https://doi.org/10.15446/hys.n44.98667.

The aim of the article was to study the transformations of the concept "Earth" as an object of modern science in the West culture. Methodologically, the text resorted to the history of ideas in order to identify the transit of their singular representations between the 17th and 19th centuries. For this purpose, the analyzes developed by some philosophers and historians of science such as Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, François Dagognet, Arthur Lovejoy and Stephen Jay Gould, among others, were selected and compared as sources. Based on this bibliographical review, the article described knowledge processes involved in these historical drifts of the idea of science in modernity, for example, that the botanist deduced the tree from a leaf or a fruit; the paleontologist from a tooth or a bone, deduced the animal; the nosologist of a sign, derived a pathology; the geologist of a rock, observed the Earth; the geographer of a temporary staggering obtained the spatial distribution; the philologist of the structure of words found the origin and composition of culture. In this way, it was concluded that the knowledge produced in these sciences of deciphering, interested in the "logic of the living", emerged in tension with a Christianizing theology, dominant in the West, where Genesis posed a complete nature created from the beginning of the world and immutable, with its mechanisms to regulate the transformation. However, the consideration of the time variable made space visible and this new scenario led to the emergence of alternative theories such as preformism and epigenesis and to controversies such as those that were woven from scientific thought around the calculation of the age of the Earth.

Keywords : Earth (Planet); history of science; scientific culture; epistemology; conceptual history; religious doctrines; science and society.

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