Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (The MIT Press)

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Albertus Magnus

Paracelsus

a person trying to learn on his or her own may not be able to separate fiction from fact because he or she hasn’t been taught what is right by someone else.

Sometimes; clearly, home schooling is FAR more subject to the perils and pitfalls described.

De occulta philosophia

Abbot Trithemius

Haha

the possibility for the living adept to transcend the natural sphere through magical work and to re-enter the godhead.

~ Buddhism

Victor’s sense that he can equal God might have come from this text because he read it outside the context of Renaissance theology and without understanding the tremendous discipline required

His creature serves as an object lesson about the threats posed by undisciplined, ambition-fueled, and ego-driven science.

evidence for the importance of the increasingly common peer-reviewed and institutionally defined investigations that came to be known as science in the early nineteenth century.

The young, rebellious, intelligent, and ambitious Victor is motivated by the search for glory and public renown.

a student-deficit model of instruction,

a constructivist activity

Dramatic encounters with natural phenomena are inspirations for scientific as well as literary imagination.

Francis Bacon

Benjamin Franklin’s

Percy Shelley’s

delight, curiosity, awe,

the relentless rains and thunderstorms that plagued Geneva in the summer of 1816.

Leclerc,

Thomas Jefferson,

Mary Wollstonecraft (27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason. Wollstonecraft died within a month of giving birth to her daughter Mary.

Ironically, when he succeeds in making the creature, he makes a motherless one.

Victor’s grief at his mother’s death plays a central role in shaping his character going forward. It is the mirror of the creature’s experience in the novel.

It remains to be seen whether scientists and engineers, as creators, can afford to recognize themselves in their work or can afford not to.

Such a nihilist about education. Anyway, that’s not a question that Mary Shelley asks, and nihilistic pontification is not appreciated by this proponent and devotee of a liberal education and science backed by institutions and peer reviewed experimentation.

Haha

But before we challenge the obvious hubris, it bears remembering that the opposite has also not changed: those who do not seek immortality and power too often suffer, die young, and serve under another’s yoke.

Interesting ….

it raises questions for modern readers about the common idea that the sciences of the past had more scope for imagination (“boundless grandeur,” as Victor puts it) than the sciences of today.

Interesting ….

And a third: a monster of today not Ancient Greece.

Mentor–mentee dynamics create the stimuli that drive Victor’s curiosity, creativity, and learning.

Biologists can seem godlike in their laboratory research, making decisions pertaining to animal and human life while having little immediate need to answer to anyone save their conscience.

What kind of ethics does practicing applied biological science require?

A personal...

A research ethics

a social ethics

His ambition reflects several forms of mechanistic thought current at the time Mary wrote

René Descartes

explained the transition from physical machine to a living, thinking entity as an act of God.

Victor installs life into his constructed “frame” using only his scientific prowess.

twenty-first-century efforts

the “chassis.”

envelopes for biological ...

a similar concept of life as machine.

He pictures his imagination as an element of his personality motivated by its own success.

this type of imagination is empowered by its own interplay internally.

“creation,”

biblical resonances