Linnaeus’s Oeconomia Naturae (1749) signaled the growing prominence, in the early modern period, of new questions about the organization of nature. These questions took shape within a broader and evolving conceptual field structured around the ideas of economy, household, and dwelling (oikos). Moving across philosophy, theology, medicine, and natural history, this vocabulary offered different ways of conceiving nature as an ordered and inhabited whole, in which living beings—including humans—occupied places, performed functions, and entered into relations with one another and with their surroundings.

The household model was neither fixed nor simply a metaphor of harmony. It brought into view the distribution of resources and functions, production and consumption, reproduction and destruction, dependence and domination, growth and limitation, stability and disturbance. In different contexts—from Burnet and Poiret to Wolff, Crusius, Buffon, Blumenbach, and Linnaeus himself—the “economy of nature” could thus encompass preservation and balance, but also scarcity, regulation, correction, and loss.

This conference traces the transformations of this conceptual field across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before Haeckel coined the term ecology in 1866. It focuses on the exchanges and reconfigurations taking place between philosophy, theology, medicine, natural history, and geography, and on the ways in which these different fields of knowledge helped redefine the order of nature and the place of living beings within it.

PROGRAMME / PROGRAM

Jeudi 15 octobre / Thursday, 15 October

14h00 – Accueil et introduction / Welcome and introduction

14h15 – Fabrizio Baldassarri (Università Roma Tre)
Œconomy of Nature in 17th-Century Study of Plants and Animals: Excerpts from La Brosse, Malpighi, and some Cartesians

15h05 – Arnaud Pelletier (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Living in a Ruined House: Thomas Burnet and the Habitability of the Earth

15h55 – Pause café / Coffee break

16h20 – Márcio Suzuki (Universidade de São Paulo, en ligne / online)
Arbuthnot : la théorie du climat et l’écologie

17h10 – Pause / Break

17h25–19h00 – Table ronde / Round Table

De PHILOMED à Oecologie
Philosophie, médecine et économie de la nature

Avec / With :

• Delphine Antoine-Mahut (ENS de Lyon / IHRIM)
• Marie Gaille (CNRS / République des Savoirs)
• Anne-Lise Rey (Université Paris Nanterre / IRePh)
• Claire Etchegaray (Université Paris Nanterre / IRePh)

Vendredi 16 octobre / Friday, 16 October

9h30 – Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Cambridge)
Oeconomizing nature: Growth and its limitations from Linnaeus to Darwin

10h20 – Christian Leduc (Université de Montréal)
Pierre Poiret et l’idée d’économie divine

11h10 – Pause café / Coffee break

11h35 – Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet (Académie roumaine / Université de Bucarest)
Crusius on the World as “a Big House Built by God”

12h25 – Stéphane Schmitt (CNRS / AHP-PReST)
Espèce et génération chez Buffon et C. F. Wolff

13h15 – Déjeuner / Lunch

14h30 – Stefanie Buchenau (Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris / ERC Oecologie)
The Chain of Being as Household: Blumenbach on the Economy of Nature

15h20 – Pause / Break

15h40 – Charles Wolfe (Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, en ligne / online)
Diderot: natural history and materialism

16h30–17h00 – Discussion générale et clôture / General discussion and closing remarks

Modération / Chairs : Maxime Barbier et Sven Spaltner (Sorbonne Nouvelle / ERC Oecologie)

Informations pratiques / Practical information

Maison de la Recherche, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
4 rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris – salle Mezzanine

Entrée libre / Free admission

Contact : aurore.franco@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

Organisation / Organization :
Stefanie Buchenau (Sorbonne Nouvelle, ERC Oecologie)
Christian Leduc (Université de Montréal)
Arnaud Pelletier (Université libre de Bruxelles).