Des singularités de la nature is a book on natural history by the French philosopher and author Voltaire, first published in 1768.[1][2] In it, he defends Preformationism, the idea that organisms develop from tiny versions of themselves.[1] He defends the idea of a supreme being, and the idea that many features of the natural world have been made to benefit people, including noses for smelling and mountains for forming the landscape.[3]
References
edit- ^ a b Roe, Shirley A. (January 1985). "Voltaire Versus Needham: Atheism, Materialism, and the Generation of Life". Journal of the History of Ideas. 46 (1): 65–87. doi:10.2307/2709776. JSTOR 2709776. PMID 11620668.
- ^ Carozzi, Marguerite (1982). Voltaire's Attitude Toward Geology (PhD thesis). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. hdl:2142/71029.
- ^ Gilmour, Peter (1990). Philosophers of the Enlightenment. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 144. ISBN 978-0-389-20910-2.
Further reading
edit- Marguerite Carozzi (1985) "Voltaire's geological observations in Les singularités de la nature" in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, volume 215. Oxford; the Voltaire Foundation
- Porter, Roy (5 January 2009). "Review: Enlightenment Marguerite Carozzi, Voltaire's attitude toward geology. Geneva: Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle, 1983. Pp. 146. SFRp 28". The British Journal for the History of Science. 17 (1): 116. doi:10.1017/S0007087400020732.
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