In the Spirit of Linnaeus

The year 2007 marked the tercentenary of the birth of the remarkable botanist and naturalist Carl Linnæus (Carl von Linnée, 1707-1778). In Manila, capital of the Philippines, a series of special events were devoted to his contribution to the field of scientific research. Linnaeus was an entusiastic man and believed that curiosity was essential for the development of the sciences. He was always interested in finding, studying, cataloguing and classifying all living beings, because he wanted to understand the order and principles that rule the Creation. Linnaeus' approach included the giving of names to the living beings thanks to a binary nomenclature. With his method, he called them systematically. Being Latin the lingua franca among the scientists of the eighteenth century, Linnaeus' idea and his creation of the concept of "species" contributed greatly in making scientific dialogue simple and precise. In this sense, he raised it to a universal level. Exploration, medicine, geology, anthropology ecology and philosophy were among the many fields cultivated by Linnaeus, a man of humble origin who was to become the rector of the University of Uppsala, then capital of the Swedish Kingdom. Linnaeus' deductive approach and his systematic classification of the living beings were important to the sciences in the Age of Reason and remain so nowadays. In his search for unknown species, those that had to be found, observed, examined, described, named and classified, Linnaeus explored most of Scandinavia and quite a number of other European countries. In the Old Continent, Linnaeus was the first to plant a banana tree and have its fruit too. He called it Musa paradisiaca. The eighteenth century was an epoch of Encyclopaedia and Illustration, reflexion, exploration and discovery. Indefatigable traveller and researcher, brilliant lecturer and admirable author, Linnaeus was an archetype of his times. As a rector, he conceived and supported incredible voyages for his students and seventeen of them travelled across the world. Linnaeus' taxonomic system and part of his classifications are relevant even today. Homo sapiens, for example, is the very name that Linnaeus gave to man.

In the forum that took place in Manila during the months of January and February 2007, I called Linnaeus Rara avis—a Latin name that follows his taxonomy and alludes to the especial the unusual. It is also an expression that can be used for an extraordinary human being.

During the Linnaeus-Manila interdisciplinary forum, a series of twelve lectures were given in the frame of an educative program known as “In the Spirit of Linnaeus.” It gathered students of both sciences and arts. It offered whole set of new ideas concerning both Linnaeus and the reality that surrounds us.
The lectures were received with enthusiasm by more than 2000 students. Over 7000 have visited the official Linnaeus-Filipinas website. Many of the students participated in an essay competition inspired by three maxims of Linnaeus. In their essays, the students had to focus on "The importance of Ecology." The best of those essays can be found online today. In May 2007, the winner of the essay competition was visiting Sweden during fifteen days. Five other students received prizes as well. The repercussion of the Tercentenary Lectures on Science and Art was positive in both Sweden and the Philippines.

I thank the Kingdom of Sweden and Ambassador Annika Markovic for having invited me to develop the Linnaeus-Manila Program of 2007. Mariano Akerman