In 1766 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in exile from France and Switzerland, came to England, where he made the acquaintance of Margaret Cavendish Harley Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. The two began to botanise together and to exchange letters about botany. These letters contain salient statements about Rousseau's views on natural theology, gardens, botanical texts and exotic botany. This exchange entailed not only discussions about plant identifications and other botanical matters, but most important, reciprocal gifts of books and specimens in the manner of (...) gentlemanly scientific correspondence of the period. Rousseau volunteered his services as the Duchess's ‘herborist’ or plant collector, and collected specimens and seeds in her behalf; these were destined for her own extensive herbaria and other natural history collections. Rousseau, who elsewhere denied female talent for science, admired the Duchess's knowledge of natural history, acknowledging his own as inferior. Their correspondence ended when the Duchess sent him the Herbarium amboinense of Georg Rumpf (Rumphius), an important work of exotic botany. Rousseau considered exotic botany to be the antithesis of the domination-free nature from which he derived solace and inspiration. (shrink)

It has been alleged that Carolus Linnaeus practised Eurocentrism, sexism and racism in naming plant genera after famous botanists, and excluding ‘barbarous names’. He has therefore been said to practise ‘linguistic imperialism’. This paper examines whether Linnaeus applied ‘linguistic imperialism’ to the naming of Chinese plants. On the basis of examples such as Thea (¼Camellia), Urena, Basella, Annona, Sapindus (¼Koelreuteria), and Panax, I conclude that Linnaeus used generic names of diverse origins. However, he misidentified Chinese plants’ habitats, and acted on (...) these misapprehensions. (shrink)

Steven Pinker’s recent Enlightenment Now aside, Enlightenment values have been in for a rough ride of late. Following Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment as the source of fascism, recent studies, amplified by Black Lives Matter, have laid bare the ugly economic underbelly of Enlightenment. The prosperity that enabled intellectuals to scrutinize speculative truths in eighteenth-century Paris salons relied on the slave trade and surplus value extracted from slave labor on sugar plantations and in other areas Europeans controlled. (...) Indeed, deprived of its ugly economic underbelly, Enlightenment was barely conceivable; furthermore, its reliance on surplus value extraction from oppressed labor was accompanied by a racism that, with the exception of the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a few other thinkers, was arguably inherent to Enlightenment. However, I am not proposing yet another revelation of Enlightenment’s complicity in exploitation of, or disregard for, the Other. Rather, I want to highlight the damage being done today by an insidious strategy of labelling as “pseudo-science” entire domains of non-Western knowledge such as Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, thereby rendering them no-go zones for serious minds. Even though the term pseudo-science had yet to be coined, the beginnings of this tendency are already evident in Enlightenment-era works such as Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description … de la Chine. The perpetuation of this dismissive treatment of non-Western natural knowledge creates a significant obstacle to superseding a “scientific revolution” whose confines have long been burst: it is increasingly recognized that traditional/indigenous knowledge affords a vast reservoir of materials, skills and insights of which the world has desperate need, no more urgently than in response to the covid-19 pandemic. (shrink)

IN an article on Rousseau’s annotations of a popular botany text, Henry Cheyron describes the Genevan philosopher as ‘ce botaniste me´juge´’. 3 The misapprehension of Rousseau’s botanical practice identified by Cheyron has its roots, I believe, in Rousseau’s own depiction of his botanising in the Reˆveries; in the ‘Septie`me promenade’ Rousseau selfconsciously portrays this study as socially isolated, lazy and lacking in direction: ‘La botanique est l’e´tude d’un oisif et paresseux solitaire... Il se prome`ne, il erre librement d’un objet a` (...) l’autre, il fait la revue de chaque fleur avec inte´reˆt et curiosite´.’4 Neither does Rousseau disguise botany’s role for him as a ‘the´rapeutique improvise´e’; the therapeutic purpose has tended to obscure the rigour, application, time and knowledge that Rousseau put into his botanical studies so that no less a scholar than Jean Starobinski asserts: ‘Jean-Jacques herborise en collectionneur, et non pas en naturaliste. C’est pour lui une occupation, un amusement, plutoˆt qu’une ve´ritable action.’5 Finally, Rousseau fuels this misunderstanding.. (shrink)

The present study investigates the association between diabetes-related distress and work outcomes among employed people with type 1 diabetes. Employed adults with type 1 diabetes completed an online survey. Measures assessed emotional, social, food- and treatment-related DD, burnout, and job satisfaction, as well as the type of insulin treatment. We conducted multiple regression analyses to test our hypotheses. Emotional DD was significantly and positively associated with burnout. Social DD was significantly and negatively associated with job satisfaction. The type of treatment (...) had no significant effect on the outcomes. This study sets the stage for research on the interactions between working conditions, work outcomes and illness symptoms, and problems of people with type 1 diabetes, and, generally, employees with chronic illnesses. The findings have implications for individual health and illness management, burnout prevention, and occupational health measures. (shrink)