ABSTRACT
In Greek mythology, Perseus confronted the three-headed monster called the Gorgon. He cut off the monster’s only mortal head, Medusa, whose head was covered with snakes and whose gaze turned to stone all who encountered it. The imagination of the enlightenment is incomplete without the new plants and animals, minerals, fossils, and geographies recorded and brought back by explorers. Explorers’ knowledge might thus seem to be the exemplification of enlightenment concerns about the difficulty of knowing anything securely about the external world, of making a secure relationship between knowledge and the knower, or of persuading others of the validity of knowledge gathered through ineluctably individual sense impressions. In the end, the authority of the knowledge so produced was lodged in the authority of the person of the explorer and continued to be so at a time when other forms of scientific experience based on objectivity values were equally relentlessly pushing apart the observer and his observation.
