In this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature. Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, redeemed, and overcome in human existence. The book progresses gradually from Benjamin's philosophically fundamental writings on language and nature to his Goethean empiricism, from the presentation of ideas to the primal history of the Paris arcades. Friedlander's careful analysis brings out how the idea of natural history inflects Benjamin's conception of the work of art and its critique, his diagnosis of the mythical violence of the legal order, his account of the body and of action, of material culture and technology, as well as his unique vision of historical materialism. Featuring revelatory new readings of Benjamin's major works that differ, sometimes dramatically, from prevailing interpretations, this book reveals the internal coherence and philosophical force of Benjamin's thought.

Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550 addresses fundamental questions about the interplay of visual and verbal communication in medieval medicine, pharmacy, and natural history. Analyzing images in works as diverse as herbals, jewellery, surgery manuals, lay health guides, cinquecento paintings, manuscripts of Pliny's Natural History, and Leonardo's notebooks, the essays ask: What counts as medical illustration in the Middle Ages? What purposes and audiences do these illustrations serve? How do images of natural objects, observed phenomena, and theoretical concepts amplify texts and convey complex cultural attitudes? Why do we regard some of these images as medieval productions while other exactly contemporary images strike us as typically early modern in character?

The Victorian era heralded an age of transformation in which momentous changes in the field of natural history coincided with the rise of new visual technologies. Concurrently, different parts of the British Empire began to more actively claim their right to being acknowledged as indispensable contributors to knowledge and the progress of empire. This book addresses the complex relationship between natural history and photography from the 1850s to the 1880s in Britain and its colonies: Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, India. Coinciding with the rise of the modern museum, photography’s arrival was timely, and it rapidly became an essential technology for recording and publicising rare objects and valuable collections. Also during this period, the medium assumed a more significant role in the professional practices and reputations of naturalists than has been previously recognized, and it figured increasingly within the expanding specialized networks that were central to the production and dissemination of new knowledge. In an interrogation that ranges from the first forays into museum photography and early attempts to document collecting expeditions to the importance of traditional and photographic portraiture for the recognition of scientific discoveries, this book not only recasts the parameters of what we actually identify as natural history photography in the Victorian era but also how we understand the very structure of empire in relation to this genre at that time.

This book explores the work of Thomas Seebohm (1934-2014), a leading phenomenologist and hermeneuticist. It features papers that offer a critical and constructive dialogue about Seebohm’s analyses and their implications for the sciences. The net result is an in-depth study and a helpful overview of Seebohm’s general approach and his specific views on various areas of modern science. The contributors focus especially upon his final text, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences. They view this as the culmination and summary of his historical and phenomenological investigations into the foundations, nature, and limits of modern sciences. This includes not just history but the Geisteswissenschaften more generally, along with the social and natural sciences as well. The essays in this volume reflect that range. This volume presents insightful discussions about the nature and legitimacy of the human sciences as sciences and the unique character of the social sciences. It will be of interest not just as a matter of historical scholarship, but also and above all as an important contribution to phenomenology and to the philosophy of science and the sciences as such. It deserves attention by scholars from any philosophical tradition interested in thinking about the foundations of their disciplines and a philosophy of science that includes, but is not limited to, the natural sciences.