Protogaea, an ambitious account of terrestrial history, was central to the development of the earth sciences in the eighteenth century and provides key philosophical insights into the unity of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s thought and writings. In the book, Leibniz offers observations about the formation of the earth, the actions of fire and water, the genesis of rocks and minerals, the origins of salts and springs, the formation of fossils, and their identification as the remains of living organisms. Protogaea also includes a series of engraved plates depicting the remains of animals—in particular the famous reconstruction of a “fossil unicorn”—together with a cross section of the cave in which some fossil objects were discovered.
Though the works of Leibniz have been widely translated, Protogaea has languished in its original Latin for centuries. Now Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield offer the first English translation of this central text in natural philosophy and natural history. Written between 1691 and 1693, and first published after Leibniz’s death in 1749, Protogaea reemerges in this bilingual edition with an introduction that carefully situates the work within its historical context.
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Claudine Cohen is professor of the history of science at the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris, and the author of The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Andre Wakefield is associate professor of history at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and the author of The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice.
“The Protogaea reveals to us a very different Leibniz than we usually confront, and in this learned and readable edition, Claudine Cohen and André Wakefield reveal to us the Protogaea. This work shows us a hitherto unappreciated aspect of Leibniz's insatiable curiosity about the world. It is, furthermore, a window into one of the earliest and most influential attempts to come to grips with the deep history of the earth in a rigorous way.”
(Daniel Garber, Princeton University)“The first English translation, with parallel Latin text, of Leibniz’s often cited but rather rarely read Protogaea, with an excellent scholarly introduction. The work reveals the author’s extensive knowledge of ‘mundane’ matters and expounds his interesting speculations about the earth’s origin and history. With its reproductions of the original illustrations, this will be the standard edition, invaluable to both Leibniz specialists and historians of geoscience.”
(David Oldroyd, Honorary Visiting Professor, University of New South Wales)“The Protogaea is a wonderful exemplar of post-Cartesian science, attempting to explain such phenomena as the Flood and fossils in physical terms, subject to the laws of nature, occurring in a historical time frame that stretches well beyond the account of Genesis. We are indebted to Cohen and Wakefield for producing a superior version of it, with an introduction and annotations setting the historical context, a new Latin edition, and the very first English translation.”
(Roger Ariew, University of South Florida)"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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