SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS AND THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE NATURAL WORLD IN THE 18th CENTURY
Scientific illustration. System of classification of living beings. Enlightenment. Cultural history of science. Nature of science.
We intended to carry out a historiographic study of scientific illustrations, exploring their historic and sociocultural context of production and their role in eighteenth century’s Natural History, especially in the period of the “Philosophical Journey”, headed by the Brazilian Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, as well as to present a description of the characteristic elements of this type of visual representation of the nature of the signaled time. We observe that there is a gap, mainly in Brazil, in this type of investigation, which considers scientific illustrations as historical sources of research and proposes an articulation between this type of visual image and science teaching, in the interface with history of science and the nature of science through “themes” and “questions”. Thus, the general aim of this study was to investigate the importance and the meaning of the use of scientific illustrations in the process of classification of the natural world in the Enlightenment period, pointing out the contributions of the understanding of this historical process and its meanings to the teaching of natural sciences. It is, therefore, a bibliographic and qualitative work, interdisciplinary and based on the literature of modern historiography of science, in the field of Cultural History of Science. We defend that a scientific illustration is configured in a specific type of visual representation of nature, which was essential to identify distinctive structures and characteristics of the specimens and disclose the taxonomic knowledge of plants and animals in the eighteenth century, and that, from its historical and sociocultural context, we can reflect about the relevant aspects of the nature of science.