In Kind: Species of exchange in early modern science

摘要

The article examines the relations among European philosophies and practices of species assessment during the decades around the turn of the eighteenth century. They aim to show that before more celebrated episodes in later enlightenment sciences of classification, global commerce and colonization raised pressing questions about the very possibility of contriving reasoned mechanisms of equivalence and discrimination. Species now comes to denote what it is that every individual of a given kind has in common, notwithstanding evident diversity at the individual level. Although the metaphysics that inform the distinction are now completely different than they had been for Platonists and Aristotelians alike, there remains a distinction between individual, superficial diversity, on the one hand, and the deeper identity in which diverse individuals are grounded and in virtue of which these individuals may in some sense be said to be intersubstitutable or exchangeable the one for the other.