Buffon

Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon · French natural historian (1707-1788) · 1707–1788

Appears in 9 videos · 9 passages, 3 of them in depth.

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani mainly mentions Buffon in connection with natural history. He credits him with being the first to show that an entire animal can be reconstructed from a single organ, or even a single tooth. For him, this is the very principle of palaeontology, which he takes up in 2021 in a reflection on whether the sciences of history can be real1, and in other contexts in 2015 and 20222 3. He links this principle to a philosophical idea: in living beings, the whole is present in each part, a connection he draws in a session devoted to Hegel4. He also presents Buffon as the first to glimpse the great age of animal remains and the "antediluvian monsters". He sees in this the first seeds, or still sketchy hypotheses, of the theory of evolution, notably in sessions on Nerval5 6 7. Finally, he cites him once as the author of the phrase "style is the man himself"8.

Summary produced automatically from 9 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Who is this?

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French:; 7 September 1707 – 16 April 1788) was a French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist. He held the position of intendant (director) at the Jardin du Roi. Buffon's works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including two prominent French scientists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. Buffon published thirty-six quarto volumes of his Histoire Naturelle during his lifetime, with additional volumes based on his notes and further research being published in the two decades following his death. […]

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Text: Wikipédia, CC BY-SA 4.0, excerpt · Portrait: François-Hubert Drouais, Public domain

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