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Age of the Earth, The

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Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences

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Definition

Between the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century, the picture of the earth had changed drastically. Time in the narrative of earth was reversed from cyclic theories involving contingent events to linear theories, concerned with cyclic phenomena. Chronologies became longer, assimilating more and more contingent events. Early modern theories of the earth show a world in constant change with an increasingly older past and even more uncertain future. The story of this “incredible discovery of the own history of Earth before, and without, the human one” (Rudwick 2014) is sketched, highlighting the question of the nature of time, the distinction between the formation and the history of earth, the role the legacy of historical narratives played in the birth of stratigraphy (Rappaport 1997), the issue of “slicing history into periods of time” (Le Goff 2014), and finally the first experimental results of the age of the earth.

Introduction

Geology is today generally...

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Acknowledgments

The financial support is provided by Horizon 2020, grant agreement Marie Skłodowska-Curie n°665850. I’d like to thank Mohammadreza Bahrami Hessari (Tehran, Iran) and Azadeh Radbooei (Montreal, Canada) for their kind advice about this chapter. All opinions are mine.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire SPHERE, Université Paris-Diderot, Paris, France

    Babette Chabout-Combaz

  2. Département de Philosophie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada

    Babette Chabout-Combaz

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  1. Babette Chabout-Combaz
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

  2. Dept. of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University Dept. Philosophy & Moral Sci, Ghent, Oost-Vlaanderen, Belgium

    Charles T. Wolfe

Section Editor information

  1. Département Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences, Université de Paris, Paris, France

    Justin E. H. Smith

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Chabout-Combaz, B. (2020). Age of the Earth, The. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_183-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_183-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-20791-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-20791-9

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