The Smokin' Hot Enlightenment: In Reply to the Ask a Natural Philosophy Blogger Query of the Week

Having been asked as a Science Blogger the following:

If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?...

I say: Mid-Eighteenth Century France or Thereabouts (with Scottish and Swedish and American colleagues, sure)

Diderot, D'Alembert, Condillac, Condorcet, Rousseau, Voltaire, Lavoisier, David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Linnaeus, let's put him in there too. Just think about D & D's L'Encyclopedie alone: The tree of knowledge, great plates about everything (heads, mineralogy, artisan workshops), and it just goes on.

That smokin' hot High Enlightenment. Such optimism! Political, economic, moral, scientific revolutions. Condorcet--who, such the intellectual and thus elite, was later taken in by the French Revolution--actually believed and wrote about the infinite perfectibility of humankind. From his (1791) Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind:

"The aim of the work that I have undertaken, and its results, will be to show by appeal to reason and fact that nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is truly indefinite; and that the progress of this perfectibility...has no...limits."

There was no end; everything was gonna be better. And he was nicely (and maybe surprisingly?) on to the women's rights thing too, about the same time as Mary Wollstonecraft contributed to the issue. (The irony being, that he didn't really live much longer, and so sort of counteracted his own theory with his untimely demise.)

I wouldn't want to be a scientist at that time who was aware of the drawbacks and misconceptions of the philosophies of the time, but I would want to be in on the mix, with the spirit of L'Encyclopedie (The! Encyclopedia!), the salon culture (and coffee house culture in England), those badass Scots, and all the physics, chemistry, and anatomy and mineralogy and botany and mathematics going around. Different names then, most of them, but made the conditions for what we call physics and chemistry and biology and "modern" science. (Sort of - don't call me on my pseudo-Whiggish historiography, it's just a blog post).

Now I'm just going on and on, lumping instead of splitting. But I'd want to be a scientist at that time because a scientist was a natural philosopher (the word "scientist" was defined in 1833) and that sounds nice and because the optimism was infectious.