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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2019

Science and transareality in Humboldt’s cosmos

Résumé

As an Enlightenment scientist, Alexander von Humboldt was continually observing, measuring, and describing the world. If he made major discoveries, nowadays he is mostly recognized as a father of biodiversity and a figure of interculturality and interdisciplinarity. The Humboldtian vision of the cosmos, characterized by its unity in diversity, is close to our ecological and planetary thought. His philosophy is based on the main currents of thought of his time in the West (the Enlightenment and Naturphilosophy), but is taking also into account those of the American continent. During his journey to the new continent, Humboldt was developing an in-depth knowledge of the whole cultural and natural area. On his other trip to Russia and Central Asia, he became familiar with other regions of the world, although his knowledge was not as deep on the cultural and social levels than on the scientific one. His dream of India could never come true: so he did not rely his approach of this area on fieldwork, but on knowledge spread by his brother and other Sanskrit philologists. The situation would certainly have been very different if had had the opportunity to go there. But as a specialist of several natural and cultural areas that he studies from a comparative perspective, Humboldt may be considered as a representative of ‘transareality’, a notion combining Ottmar Ette’s ‘transarea’ and Spivak’s ‘planetarity’. Humboldt’s approach brings together diverse regions of the world, but also different fields of knowledge that generally do not find themselves unite: science and aesthetics, cosmopolitics, physical description of the world and geopoetics. In addition, actualization of Humboldt’s vision may be crucial for our own society facing the challenges of the planet.
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Dates et versions

hal-02401395 , version 1 (10-12-2019)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02401395 , version 1

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Damien Ehrhardt, Hélène Fleury. Science and transareality in Humboldt’s cosmos. Humboldt-Kolleg International Conference: To Grasp the Whole World. On the 250th Anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt, Soraya Nour, Dec 2019, Lisbonne, Portugal. ⟨hal-02401395⟩
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