‘My purpose was humbler, but also higher’: Thomas De Quincey's ‘System of the Heavens’, Popular Science, and the Sublime

Romanticism ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Duffy Cian
Keyword(s):  
Popular Science ◽  
The Sublime

The Scientific Sublime

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan G. Gross
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Rachel Carson ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Crucial Difference ◽  
Stephen Jay Gould ◽  
Stephen Hawking

The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life?

Darwin, Concepción, and the Geological Sublime

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul White
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Earth History ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Popular Audience

ArgumentDarwin's narrative of the earthquake at Concepción, set within the frameworks of Lyellian uniformitarianism, romantic aesthetics, and the emergence of geology as a popular science, is suggestive of the role of the sublime in geological enquiry and theory in the early nineteenth century. Darwin's Beagle diary and later notebooks and publications show that the aesthetic of the sublime was both a form of representing geology to a popular audience, and a crucial structure for the observation and recording of the event from the beginning. The awesome spectacle of the earthquake proved in turn the magnitude of the forces at stake in earth history, and helped to make geology an epic conjoining the history of civilization with the history of the earth.

Lucan and the Sublime

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry J. M. Day
Keyword(s):  
The Sublime

Interpassivity and Misdemeanours: The Art of Thinking in Examples and the Žižekian Toolbox

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Pfaller
Keyword(s):  
Specific Role ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
The Sublime

Starting from a passage from Slavoj Žižek`s brilliant book The Sublime Object of Ideology, the very passage on canned laughter that gave such precious support for the development of the theory of interpassivity, this chapter examines a question that has proved indispensable for the study of interpassivity: namely, what does it mean for a theory to proceed by examples? What is the specific role of the example in certain example-friendly theories, for example in Žižek’s philosophy?

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