Sarah Jeong
The first description of the natural world in the West can be traced to Aristotle, who placed man at the pinnacle of God’s creation, and later was revitalized in medieval Christian Europe as the concept of natural theology, which justified the application of religion to the discovery and description of new flora and fauna during voyages to the New World.[1] The medieval philosophy of the Great Chain of Being of the continuous, hierarchical gradation of species from simpler forms to more complex human beings influenced many Enlightenment thinkers, including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) and Denis Diderot (1713–1784).[2]
Before Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) published his taxonomic botanical nomenclature system, Buffon, who was based in Paris, was the prominent Enlightenment botanist. Linnaeus’s classification of species as being of equal rank (including Homo sapiens) was a paradigm shift from the hierarchical existential order of the traditional, commonly held concept of the Great Chain of Being. When Linnaeus shared his work with Dutch naturalists, among those who accepted his work was Jan Frederik Gronovius (1690–1762), who facilitated the publication of Linnaeus’s Fundamenta Botanica (Foundations of Botany) in Holland in 1735, which based plant nomenclature on the number, form, and order of the stamens and pistils. As an author of a series of books, Linnaeus created a framework for the first objective system to catalog every plant and animal by genera and species, establishing a binomial nomenclature of flora and fauna. Linnaeus published the first edition of Systema Naturae (System of Nature) in 1735 after completing his doctoral thesis. In this work, Linnaeus proposed a new system of classification order of kingdoms, which included plants, animals, and minerals.[3] Specifically, Linnaeus organized new nested categories of equal status, and every species known at the time was placed within a genus, order, class, and kingdom.
Another concurrent historical development in France was the writing, editing, and publication of Diderot’s Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopaedia, or Classified Dictionary of Sciences, Arts, and Trades). Published over a period from 1751 to 1772, it is a landmark work of secular, polemical Enlightenment thought that criticized Linnaeus’s classification system with articles written by naturalist Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716–1800), who was a collaborator for Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (Natural History, 1749), and who argued that the natural diversity of life comprises individuals with granular characteristics such that no classification was the best system.[4] Initially, the publisher Le Breton hired their first editor, Jean-Paul de Gua de Malves (1713–1785), a mathematician, to improve upon Ephraim Chambers’s (1680–1740) Cyclopaedia (1728) as a model, which was accepted by the traditional regime. Jean-Paul de Gua de Ma