The impact of Prussian science and philosophy on the development of geomorphology as a scientific discipline

Keywords: Geography of knowledge; history of nature; geomorphology; epistemology of geography.
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 22

Abstract

Reflections on geography and geology in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth century founded a geomorphology that, before being conceived as climatic or structural, understood relief both as an environment and an epistemological medium capable of connecting society and nature. These epistemological foundations are still important in the present. The aim of this study is to analyze relationships between epistemological foundations of geomorphology and natural sciences, philosophy and geography. In this context, Timothy Lenoir (2003) sheds light on the institution of science as a discipline. He establishes a link between the cultural production of scientific disciplines and their starting points in different moments in the history of science, in search for internal and external factors and an understanding of the authors and the institutions in order to observe the processes of epistemological formation of the sciences. In addition, “geomorphology is, by its domain, a natural science, although by its ideas and conceptions it is a human science” (Reynaud (1971). Thus, the premise of this study is that geomorphology constituted itself from the intersection of philosophical, artistic and scientific debates supported by writers of German Naturphilosophie like Goethe, Schelling and Humboldt. Discoveries and advances in Newtonian science in combination with landscape painting, based on a conception of space, nature and morphology, allowed the representation of relief and the investigation of geology and stratigraphic formations (ABREU, 2003). These indications are responsible for the formation and matrix of geography and geomorphology based on their own philosophical and scientific development (VITTE, 2007).