The Alpine Enlightenment: Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Nature’s Sensorium (The Life of Ideas) - Softcover

Kete, Kathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226835480 ISBN 13: 9780226835488

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2024

Synopsis

A study of the experience of nature in the eighteenth century based on the life of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99).
 
In The Alpine Enlightenment, historian Kathleen Kete takes us into the world of the Genevan geologist, physicist, inventor, and mountaineer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. During his prodigious climbs into the upper ranges of the Alps, Saussure focused intensely on the natural phenomena he encountered―glaciers, crevasses, changes in the weather, and shifts in the color of the sky―and he described with great precision what he saw, heard, and touched. Kete uses Saussure’s evocative writings, which emphasized above all physical engagement with the earth, to uncover not just how people during the Enlightenment thought about nature, but how they experienced it. As Kete shows, Saussure thought with and through his body: he harnessed his senses to understand the forces that shaped the world around him. In so doing, he offered a vision of nature as worthy of respect independent of human needs, anticipating present-day concerns about the environment and our shared place within it.

About this title

About the Author

Kathleen Kete is the Borden W. Painter, Jr., ’58/H’95 Professor of European History at Trinity College in Connecticut.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226835480
• ISBN 13: 9780226835488
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272