GEOMORPHOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OF NATURAL SCIENCES IN 18th-19th CENTURY GERMANY

It is common in international literature that deals with the history of geographical thought, to locate in Germany the conceptual foundations that allowed the institutionalization of geography as a modern science to occur. However, little attention has been given by researchers on the formation of Physical Geography and Geomorphology in particular, and most of the time there is a rapid affiliation of this to the Davisian corollary that has been reworked and disseminated by French physical geographers. However, the German geographical-geological reflection of the 18th-19th centuries (until at least the 1890s) was based on a geomorphology that, before being climatic or structural, understood the relief as an environment and at the same time an epistemological medium capable of connecting society and nature, from which they generate spatialities and their thresholds, an epistemological foundation so important for the present day. Thus, the objective of this work is to establish some relationships between the epistemological foundations of Geomorphology and the context of Natural Sciences, Philosophy and Geography in the 18th-19th century. Timothy Lenoir (2003) in the book "Instituting science: the cultural production of scientific disciplines" offers us light and paths to walk on the institution of science as a discipline. His trajectory by establishing a reading on the "cultural production of scientific disciplines"; its starting point is several historical episodes from the history of sciences, seeking to elucidate the internal and external factors in science, an understanding of authors, institutions, in order to trace institute an epistemology of science. In fact, for the author, the practice in the systematization and organization of sciences as cultural products is permeated in the very trajectory of writing, of producing science. The relationship of ideas, images about the history of nature and, also, how chronological time contributes to the consolidation of Earth Sciences and Society were, emerging forms of knowledge between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that influenced the sciences in the nineteenth century. The investigation of nature, in this context, traces a scientific methodology, "since the form was a momentary product of a space-time dynamic, involving a complex web given by the relationship between the history of nature and environmental conditions (VITTE, 2014, p. 4). Finally, it is fundamental to understand that scientific fields (geomorphology) are a cultural production, which offers us trails to relate the historical-epistemological aspects of geomorphology in the context of philosophical and scientific development of sciences of the eighteenth-nineteenth century; adding the role of authors, ideas, the circulation of ideas, but also political, economic and cultural institutions in the context of the industrial revolution and European imperialist expansion.