“'Cosmos' & the Work of Alexander von Humboldt" at the Rock Island Public Library's Downtown Branch -- November 3.
Thursday, November 3, 2 p.m.
Rock Island Public Library Downtown Branch, 401 19th Street, Rock Island IL
A thoughtful and fascinating Frieze Lecture Series presentation on the man whom many regard as the first environmentalist, the Rock Island Public Library's “Cosmos” & the Work of Alexander von Humboldt will, on November 3, find Augustana College's professor of biology Dr Stephen Hager exploring Humboldt’s holistic observation of all of nature, with special emphasis on the German scientist's 19th-century book Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe.
Born in 1769, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science whose quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. Humboldt's advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement, meanwhile, laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring. Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing them for the first time from a modern Western scientific point of view, with his eventual description of the journey written up and published in several volumes over 21 years. Additionally, Humboldt was one of the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined – South America and Africa, in particular.
Humboldt resurrected the use of the word "cosmos" from the ancient Greek and assigned it to his multivolume treatise Kosmos, in which he sought to unify diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture. This important work also motivated a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity, which introduced concepts of ecology leading to ideas of environmentalism. In 1800, and again in 1831, he described scientifically, on the basis of observations generated during his travels, local impacts of development causing human-induced climate change.
An influential treatise on science and nature, Humboldt's Cosmos began as a lecture series delivered by Humboldt at the University of Berlin, and was published in five volumes between 1845 and 1862, with the posthumous fifth completed based on Humboldt's notes. In the first volume of Cosmos, Humboldt paints a general "portrait of nature," describing the physical nature of outer space and the Earth, and in the second, he describes the history of science. Widely read by both academics and laymen, Cosmos applies the ancient Greek view of the orderliness of the cosmos to the Earth, suggesting that universal laws apply as well to the apparent chaos of the terrestrial world and that contemplation of nature can yield an awareness of its wholeness and coherence. Humboldt embraced the subjectivity of the observer and, as described by L.D. Walls' in his book Minding Nature, “thus ran exactly counter to the developing ideology of science, the objectivity which sought to purify science by removing subjectivity altogether.”
“Cosmos” & the Work of Alexander von Humboldt will be presented at the Rock Island Public Library's downtown branch on November 3, participation in the 2 p.m. program is free, and more information is available by calling (309)732-7323 and visiting RockIslandLibrary.org.
