This chapter examines the impact of experimental philosophy in France from the mid-1730s through to the period in which the philosophes were at the forefront of French intellectual life, the period normally called the French Enlightenment. The chapter opens with a discussion of the reception of Bacon’s views about natural history and the acceptance of experimental philosophy more generally in the early Parisian Academy. It then turns to the heyday of experimental philosophy in France which began in the mid-1730s with its promotion by the likes of Voltaire and Comte de Buffon, and the courses in experimental philosophy taught by Abbé Nollet. It is argued that the anti-speculative sentiment so prevalent in Britain manifests itself in the anti-system debate in France. And the chapter goes on to examine the alignment between Buffon’s conception of natural history and that of Bacon, the Baconianism of Denis Diderot, and the influence of experimental philosophy on Jean Le Rond d’Alembert as manifest in his ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to the Encyclopédie. The chapter concludes with an appraisal of the rehabilitation of Descartes, who up to that point had come to be regarded by many as the archetypal speculative philosopher.

In “Natural History,” Ashton Nichols traces the development of natural history in literature and scientific writing from the ancient works of Pliny the Elder and Aristotle to the later ideas of Buffon, Humboldt, and Darwin. Nichols examines how eighteenth-century colonial expansion influenced the spread of ideas about nature as well as how new ideas of nature were represented by Romantic authors like Mary Shelley. Culminating in analysis of the works of Erasmus Darwin and his grandson Charles Darwin, the chapter explores the paradigm shift away from a static and unchanging nature and toward a more modern understanding of nature as dynamic, interconnected, and indifferent to human needs and desires.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

As a result of developments in the meteorological and geological sciences, the Romantic period saw the gradual emergence of attempts to understand the climate as a dynamic global system that could potentially be affected by human activity. This chapter examines textual responses to climate disruption cause by the Laki eruption of 1783 and the Tambora eruption of 1815. During the Laki haze, writers such as Horace Walpole, Gilbert White, and William Cowper found in Milton a powerful way of understanding the entanglements of culture and climate at a time of national and global crisis. Apocalyptic discourse continued to resonate during the Tambora crisis, as is evident in eyewitness accounts of the eruption, in the utopian predictions of John Barrow and Eleanor Anne Porden, and in the grim speculations of Byron’s ‘Darkness’. Romantic writing offers a powerful analogue for thinking about climate change in the Anthropocene.