The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America

306372384

Laura Dassow Walls - The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press | 2009-09-30 | ISBN: 0226871827 | PDF | 424 pages | 2.00 MB


Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. In it, Humboldt espoused the idea that, while the universe of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty and order, the very idea of the whole it composes, are human achievements: cosmos comes into being in the dance of world and mind, subject and object, science and poetry.
Humboldt’s science laid the foundations for ecology and inspired the theories of his most important scientific disciple, Charles Darwin. In the United States, his ideas shaped the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman. They helped spark the American environmental movement through followers like John Muir and George Perkins Marsh. And they even bolstered efforts to free the slaves and honor the rights of Indians.

下载地址：
http://www.filesonic.com/file/40852291/b462-0226871827+.rar