19th century
A01=Laura Dassow Walls
academic
america
american
Author_Laura Dassow Walls
Category=PDX
Category=RGR
cosmology
darwin
ecologist
ecology
emerson
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
era
explorer
historical
history
human
humanist
humanities
humanity
humans
influential
intellectual
interdisciplinary
napoleon
natural world
nature
poetry
research
scholarly
science
scientist
social sciences
thoreau
time period
transdisciplinary
united states
whitman
writer
Product details
- ISBN 9780226871820
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Aug 2009
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With "Cosmos", the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. In it, Humboldt espoused the idea that, while the universe of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty and order, the very idea of the whole it composes, are human achievements: cosmos comes into being in the dance of world and mind, subject and object, science and poetry. Laura Dassow Walls here traces Humboldt's ideas for "Cosmos" to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world's people - and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt's transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities.
Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and the author of several books, including, most recently, Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth.
