Organizers:
Dr James Hanrahan (Trinity College Dublin)
Professor Jean-Luc Guichet (Université de Picardie Jules Verne)
In the seventeenth century, biblical criticism called into question the historical status of the Christian origins of humanity – both Creation and the Deluge – thereby destroying the old certainties of the theological world view and causing antiquarians, linguists, philosophers and other thinkers to ask the question of the origins of humans in different ways. From the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century this questioning of origins developed, from approaches dominated by an analysis of the historical value of the fables of antiquity (accompanied by intense speculation on biblical chronologies applied to the secular world) to hypothetical-deductive methods, drawing regularly on certain themes such as comparisons with the non-European world, empirical philosophy of knowledge, and the emerging area in natural history. Many thinkers of the time sought to locate the origins of civil society in a hypothetical state of nature (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant); others hypothesized about the origins of our planet and human life in direct contradiction with the biblical account of Genesis (Du Maillet, Buffon, Diderot); some debated the origins of language (Condillac, Rousseau, abbé de L’Epée). These accounts of origins addressed the origins of humanity and also the origin of what it meant to be human. The search for origins was therefore a predominant feature of early modern thought across a range of diverse areas, yet, at the core of the Enlightenment’s so-called ‘science de l’homme’ lay speculative representations that relied on the imagination of the most innovative thinkers of the period. The aim of this conference is to investigate in an open and interdisciplinary manner the question of how origins were imagined, invented, and instrumentalized in Enlightenment thought. While, as organizers, our main area of interest is French thinkers of this period, we are keen to welcome papers relating to the representation of origins in works from other cultures and languages during the same period. Approaches that investigate dialogue between cultures and the translation of such concepts between cultures will also be particularly welcome. Far from being exhaustive, the approaches outlined below indicate potential avenues of exploration.
· Philosophical/scientific/historical/comparative methods used to access representations of origins
· Thought experiments as representations of origins
· Exchange and borrowing of images and representations of origins between different intellectual areas (for example, natural history and political thought)
· Debates within intellectual networks interrogating origins
· Evolution of the questioning of origins throughout the long eighteenth century
· Gendered images of origins in the Enlightenment canon
· Instrumentalization of the ‘native’ or the ‘savage’ within comparative approaches to the origins of society/politics
· Origins in early modern proto-ecological thought
· Origins in stadial histories
· Origins and temporality
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