The episode of God’s punishment of the human being through the flood mentioned in Genesis (6-7) sets a chronology of the world and a "before" and "after" in history. All over Buffon's work we see the difficulty of breaking this framework established by the Bible and of overcoming the traditional notion of universal history as a finite history with a specific purpose and a necessary end. Buffon's investigations on the waters of the flood and the question of the location of fossils led him to formulate a conception of time as a historical and rational category and to sketch out a new relationship between nature and man. This paper aims to show how it was difficult at the threshold of the French Revolution to abandon a historiography built over a finite timespan and to interrupt shared habits and mental schemes that were deeply rooted in eighteenth-century science.
Le acque e la storia. Fossili e diluvio in Buffon
Giuseppina Totaro
2022
Abstract
The episode of God’s punishment of the human being through the flood mentioned in Genesis (6-7) sets a chronology of the world and a "before" and "after" in history. All over Buffon's work we see the difficulty of breaking this framework established by the Bible and of overcoming the traditional notion of universal history as a finite history with a specific purpose and a necessary end. Buffon's investigations on the waters of the flood and the question of the location of fossils led him to formulate a conception of time as a historical and rational category and to sketch out a new relationship between nature and man. This paper aims to show how it was difficult at the threshold of the French Revolution to abandon a historiography built over a finite timespan and to interrupt shared habits and mental schemes that were deeply rooted in eighteenth-century science.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
