Matthew Daniel Eddy

Durham University | DU · Department of Philosophy

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John Locke's comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa , was one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment. Though scholars embrace its impact on the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, they seldom consider why the metaphor was so successful. Concentrating on the notebooks made and...

In recent years the historical relationship between scientific experts and the state has received increasing scrutiny. Such experts played important roles in the creation and regulation of environmental organizations and functioned as agents dispatched by politicians or bureaucrats to assess health-related problems and concerns raised by the public...

The story of Enlightenment literacy is often reconstructed from textbooks and manuals, with the implicit focus being what children were reading. But far less attention has been devoted to how they mastered the scribal techniques that allowed them to manage knowledge on paper. Focusing on Scotland, handwritten manuscripts are used to reveal that chi...

Concentrating on the rich tradition of graphic culture that permeated Scotland’s universities during the long eighteenth century, this essay argues that student lecture notebooks were a sophisticated form of scribal media. I reveal that they were inscribed, assembled, bound, bought, sold, disassembled, edited, annotated, pirated, plagiarized, and c...

In 1766, Thomas Cochrane entered the Edinburgh classroom of Joseph Black (1728-99) to learn chemistry for the first time. Cochrane was studying medicine, and, like so many of Black's students, he dutifully recorded several diagrams in his notebooks. These visualizations were not complex. They were, in fact, simple. One of them, reproduced in this e...

The Argument In 1787 an anonymous student of the Perth Academy spent countless hours transforming his rough classroom notes into a beautifully inscribed notebook. Though this was an everyday practice for many Enlightenment students, extant notebooks of this nature are extremely rare and we know very little about how middle class children learned to...

On 8 July 2010 the front page of The Guardian newspaper featured an attractive colour drawing by the artist John Sibbick. It was entitled ‘Meet the Norfolk relatives’ and it depicted a pastoral scene of farmers and hunters going about their daily routines ([figure 1][1]). However, the image

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, words were seen as artefacts that afforded insights into the mental capacities of the early humans. In this article I address the late Enlightenment foundations of this model by focusing on Professor Hugh Blair, a leading voice on the relationship between language, progressivism and culture. Whereas the writin...

While much has been written on the cultural and intellectual antecedents that gave rise to Carolus Linnaeus’s herbarium and his Systema Naturae, the tools that he used to transform his raw observations into nomenclatural terms and categories have been neglected. Focusing on the Philosophia Botanica, the popular classification handbook that he publi...

ABSTRACT This essay examines the kinds of textbooks that were used to teach natural knowledge to children in eighteenth-century Scotland. Following Roger Chartier's belief that the forms and uses of print can be employed to categorise the content of texts, I focus on three groups of books that were used in specific settings: (1) homes, academies an...

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KleinUrsula and LefèvreWolfgang, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007. Pp. x+345. ISBN 978-0-262-11306-6. £24.95 (hardback). - Volume 41 Issue 4 - Matthew D. Eddy

This essay addresses mineral water as a medical, experimental and economic material. It focuses on the career of the Reverend Dr William Laing (1742-1812), a physician and cleric who wrote two pamphlets about the water of provincial spa located in Peterhead, a town on the north-east coast of Scotland. I begin by outlining his education and I then r...

Late eighteenth-century industrialists, farmers and physicians who actively employed chemistry are historically hazy figures. This is not only the case for scientific histories, but also for studies that address the socio-economic factors of the Enlightenment. Up until the late twentieth century, historians of chemistry tended to focus on ideas and...

KATHARINE ANDERSON, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. x+331. ISBN 0-226-019680-3. £31.50, $45.00 (hardback). - - Volume 40 Issue 2 - MATTHEW D. EDDY

R. D. CONNOR and A. D. SIMPSON, with A. D. MORRISON-LOW (ed.), Weights and Measures in Scotland: A European Perspective. Edinburgh: NMS Publishing, 2004. Pp. xvi+842. ISBN 1-901663-88-4. £50.00 (hardback). - - Volume 39 Issue 4 - MATTHEW D. EDDY

In 1792 Dugald Stewart published Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. In its section on abstraction he declared himself to be a nominalist. Although a few scholars have made brief reference to this position, no sustained attention has been given to the central role that it played within Stewart's early philosophy of mind. It is therefore t...

Natural history in Augustan England was a pervasive enterprise for the landed and professional classes. From the sprawling collections of aristocrats and the Royal Society to the humble pantry cabinets of parson‐naturalists, the desire to collect, label, and measure reached into just about every nook and cranny of polite publications and conversati...

During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the scene of several lively debates concerning the structure of the Earth. Though the ideas of groups like the ‘Wernerians’ and the ‘Huttonians’ have received due attention, little has been done to explicate the practice of mineralogy as it existed in the decades before the debates. T...

In the 18th century, the concept of ‘affinity’, ‘principle’ and ‘element’ dominated chemical discourse, both inside and outside the laboratory. Although much work has been done on these terms and the methodological commitments which guided their usage, most studies over the past two centuries have concentrated on their application as relevant to La...

When Jan Golinski's Making Natural Knowledge was published in 1998 it was generally applauded for its ecumenical stance between the empirical ‘art’ of historians and the theoretical focus of the social sciences. Indeed, such a middling position was a unique approach to be taken in wake of the ‘science wars’ and this, in combination with the book's...

Yet even man's intelligence must lead us to infer the existence of a mind in the universe. Cicero, De Natura Deorum1 In this essay I suggest that William Paley's Natural Theology was rhetorical work written to appeal to an eighteenth-century British empiricist mindset. I begin by addressing the book's argument and audience. In particular, I pay clo...

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In 1779 Revd Dr John Walker was appointed to be the University of Edinburgh’s Professor of Natural History. Because of the institutional structure of the university, he took care to keep detailed class lists from 1782 to 1800. These are extant in the University of Edinburgh’s Special Collections Department. As many of the students on the lists woul...

The Rev. Dr John Walker was the Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh from 1779 to 1803. Although his time in this position has been addressed by several studies,1 the previous thirty years that he spent 'mineralizing' have been virtually ignored. The situation is similar for many of the well-known mineralogists of the eightee...

Cet article presente une recherche sur la conception du temps et de son role dans le monde naturel de John Walker professeur d'histoire naturelle de l'Universite d'Edimbourg. La premiere partie developpe des elements biographiques demontrant son importance dans le cercle de l'histoire naturelle a son epoque et la deuxieme partie montre les sources...

In the 18th century, the concept of ‘affinity’, ‘principle’ and ‘element’ dominated chemical discourse, both inside and outside the laboratory. Although much work has been done on these terms and the methodological commitments which guided their usage, most studies over the past two centuries have concentrated on their application as relevant to La...

Paley's work of 1802 was hugely influential and still controversial, as we see a resurgence of interest in the theory of intelligent design and creationism. Richard Dawkins's book The Blind Watchmaker famously takes on Paley to argue that the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design: natural selection is blind. This is the only edit...