Charles W. J. Withers : “Historical Geographies of the Prime Meridian: the Case of France and Britain in the Eighteenth Century”

Charles W. J. Withers, de l’Université d’Edimbourg, présentera sa communication “Historical Geographies of the Prime Meridian: the Case of France and Britain in the Eighteenth Century” le jeudi 20 novembre, de 17h30 à 19h30.

Discutant: Daniel Foliard, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense.

Maison de la Recherche de l’université Paris IV-Sorbonne (28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e), salle D421. Le séminaire est ouvert aux étudiants de Master et doctorat, ainsi qu’à toutes les personnes intéressées.

Podcast ci-dessous et sur le site de l’IHR.

Résumé:

The Prime Meridian is the line at which the world’s longitude is set at 0˚. Both longitude on the one hand, and time’s measurement on the other, are based on the Prime Meridian. Since 1884, the Prime Meridian has been fixed at the Royal Observatory, at Greenwich, in the United Kingdom. The fact that Greenwich is the ground zero of planetary measurement is the result of recommendations made at the 1884 International Prime Meridian Conference, held in Washington DC, in 1884. Before 1884, however, there were many different prime meridians at work in the world. This was a source of considerable geographical and astronomical confusion.

In this paper, I examine the relationship between two different prime meridians, those of Paris and of Greenwich in the ‘long’ eighteenth century and do so through the lens of the historical geographies of science. The paper will explore, firstly, the debates between international politics, national mapping, and the local siting of the Paris prime meridian in the period c.1634 to c.1787, and, secondly, the workings of joint Franco-British attempts to ‘fix’ the prime meridians of Paris and of Greenwich by triangulation in the period c.1787 to c.1830. The paper is about rockets, maps, metrology, and trust in instruments, about the politics and authority of science and about the reliance placed upon questions of accuracy and precision and the tolerance of error as nations delimit themselves.

Rob Iliffe: “The rational religion of Isaac Newton”

Rob Iliffe, de l’Université du Sussex, présentera sa communication “The rational religion of Isaac Newton” le 23 octobre, de 17h30 à 19h30.

Maison de la Recherche de l’université Paris IV-Sorbonne (28 rue Serpente, Paris 6e), salle D421. Le séminaire est ouvert aux étudiants de Master et doctorat, ainsi qu’à toutes les personnes intéressées.

Résumé:
For two centuries Isaac Newton has been viewed through a bifurcated lens that divided up his ‘scientific’ from his ‘non-scientific’ work. The inaccessibility of his voluminous religious writings has meant that it has been impossible to give an empirically-grounded account of how the different domains of his work might be related to one another. However, the recent online publication of these works means that historians can now see more clearly the ethical and religious values that Newton believed to underpin all of his intellectual activity.
In this paper I examine the intellectual and religious sources for his exaltation of the intellect, including his engagement with Cartesianism, and his religious conviction that he had been granted a special vocation as a learned Christian. In the second case, it is clear that he believed that the cultivation of the understanding was a fundamental duty for all Christians, a procedure that was to be accompanied by the disciplining of the will and the imagination. I discuss Newton’s remarkable writings on the dangers of the imagination, which led to lust, legendary sacred histories, and hypotheses. Finally, I show that the baneful effects of the imagination in both the care of the godly self and in natural philosophy could be controlled by hard work, experience and reason.