Supritha Rajan

This book investigates the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment segregation of the human and natural sciences. Drawing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical and imaginative literature, as well as histories of science, it provides an intellectual history of how the segregation of the human and natural sciences implicitly classified certain cognitive and emotional attitudes as indicative of disciplinary-specific temperaments, methodological practices, and forms of proof. By examining conceptions of temperament, wonder, trust, and regret, however, the book demonstrates that this process of disciplinary segregation concealed common affective attitudes and methodologies across the human and natural sciences that have yet to be fully appreciated.