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Andrew Cooper, Kant and the Transformation of Natural History, Oxford University Press, 2023, 268pp., $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192869784.
Reviewed by Steve Naragon, Manchester University
Natural history (naturalis historia, Naturgeschichte, histoire naturelle) in the western world began in earnest with Aristotle as an exercise in the description and cataloguing of the natural world which, by the middle of the 18th century, had been formally divided by Karl Linnaeus (1707–78) into three kingdoms: animals, plants, and minerals. Groupings were done according to appearances and were empirical, non-experimental, and decidedly atemporal—a studied observation of a formally static world of unchanging kinds of things, whose kinds had existed either for eternity or since God created them. Individual objects change with time (most obviously with plants and animals; less so with rocks), but the kinds of objects being described and grouped—these were seen as unchanging.
This intellectual project of natural history met with various…
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