Encyclopedia of Early Modern History Online

1. Nation and stateA key concept of political modernity, the “nation” aims to bring together a multiplicity of people in a permanent community of shared values and support with the help of an integrative ideology (Nation, nationalism). Modern studies of nationalism have shown that, despite purportedly existing since time immemorial as a quasi-natural element of the political order, nations only come about where a practical reference to a particular territorial area coincides with at least the begin…

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1. IntroductionA natural catastrophe is generally defined as an extreme event of natural origin that has a direct and destructive impact on people and areas of human settlement. Three basic types are distinguished by cause:(1) Geotectonic natural events. These include, primarily, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and consequent  mass-wasting events (landslides, rock falls, mudslides, avalanches, etc.) triggered by tremors in the earth’s crust.(2) Extreme natural events caused by short, medium, and long-term weather phenomena. Sudden or persistent he…

1. “Economy” of nature as a cultural conceptJust as human beings frequently imagined their gods anthropomorphically, so too have they used terminology from human culture in their observations and descriptions of nature. An apparently extra-human nature, observed by this culture, could be conceptualized in familiar terms. An example is the application of the term “household” or “household economy” as an orderly whole, methodically uniting the most diverse functions, to nature, which then appears as a co…

1. Concept and prior historyWith astronomy, natural history is one of the oldest sciences in the written record. Mesopotamian cuneiform texts listing plant and animal names survive from as far back as the early 2nd millennium BCE. This text type, known as “list science,” probably originated as practice material in the training of scribes, but in all early written cultures (including India and China) it very quickly took on lexical and encyclopedic forms [29. 32–47]. In terms of systematic and argumentative structure, these ancient traditions reached an early zenith i…

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1. Concept The Natural History School (German: Naturhistorische Schule) was a tendency of the first half of the 19th century in clinical medicine, distinguished by its strictly empirical procedures and rejecting on principle the use of general theories of illness (e.g. humoralism, vitalism, Broussaiism, Brunonianism, homeopathy, etc.; cf. Therapeutic concepts). It was therefore in conscious opposition to schools of medical thought based on natural philosophy (e.g. that of Schelling). Instead, it advocat…

1. Terminological historyA general understanding of naturalism as the representation of nature in art was closely associated in the early modern period with theories of the imitation of nature (Latin  imitatio naturae; cf. Mimesis). Yet the fact that nature was studied is not evidence in itself of naturalism (cf. Nature study [art]). Study in nature (as opposed to working in the studio) was a possible positive connotation of naturalism, but the term could equally be negative in tone, indicating a breach of the norms of imitatio, which aimed at a representation of nature that wa…

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1. Introduction 1.1. TerminologyPhilosophy of law (Latin  philosophia iuris; French  philosophie du droit; German  Rechtsphilosophie) is understood to be a subdiscipline of jurisprudence and philosophy that is dedicated to fundamental philosophical questions about law and the state and the investigation of certain legal problems from a philosophical perspective. The term natural law (Latin  ius naturae or  naturale; French  droit de la nature; German  Naturrecht) designates a complex of legal norms that are presumed to be valid independent of positive…

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1. Concept and research positionsThe term “natural philosophy” lacks a unanimous definition. In the first centuries of the early modern period, it was still largely synonymous with a general science of nature that was a central component of philosophy. As empirical knowledge came to be regarded as the prototype of reliable (philosophical) knowledge (Empiricism; see below, 3.), so the term natural philosophy even began to be used as a synonym for experimental physics – it was still so used at Scottis…

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1. ConceptNatural science today denotes the fields of science that strive for understanding of natural processes and conditions, as distinct from the social, economic, technical, and human sciences that deal with human culture and technology (Humanities). There is recurrent debate over whether medicine should be counted among the natural sciences or treated as a separate field in its own right. Natural science denotes not only a specific subject of study, but also a professional field and a group…

1. Introduction Natural science and the Christian religion generally coexisted productively in the European early modern period, until the advent of mechanism and materialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, which brought them in some respects into opposition.The notion that early modern natural history had emerged from a secularization of nature and an emancipation of nature study from Christianity, and indeed that it represented an act of human self-assertion against the authority of an omnipotent God and his church [5. 22 f., 135, 229–233], requires some revision.…

1. BackgroundThe term natural theology goes back to pre-Christian Greek philosophy, where – distinguished critically from mythical theology and political theology – it denoted philosophical knowledge of God appropriate to the divine nature. Early Christian theology adopted this tradition but also went beyond it by referring to the knowledge of God acquired through revelation. But while Augustine, for example, still assumed that the Christian doctrine of God coincides with the true form of natural th…

1. Definition and etymologyThe natural philosopher Robert Boyle, concerned that the idea of nature as an active agent was infringing on that of the omnipotence of God, complained in his Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686) that “the generality of men, though they will acknowledge that nature is inferior and subordinate to God, do yet appear to regard her more than him” [32. 347, 350]. Paraphrasing Boyle, the chemist Johann von Löwenstern-Kunckel around 1700 derided the uncertainty of the word “nature” in use, while making a statement…