Science In The Age Of Sensibility

Author : Jessica Riskin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226720853
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Science in the Age of Sensibility written by Jessica Riskin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was intimately bound up with sensibility. In what she calls a "sentimental empiricism," natural knowledge was taken to rest on a blend of experience and emotion. Riskin argues that sentimental empiricism brought together ideas and institutions, practices and politics. She shows, for instance, how the study of blindness, led by ideas about the mental and moral role of vision and by cataract surgeries, shaped the first school for the blind; how Benjamin Franklin's electrical physics, ascribing desires to nature, engaged French economic reformers; and how the question of the role of language in science and social life linked disputes over Antoine Lavoisier's new chemical names to the founding of France's modern system of civic education. Recasting the Age of Reason by stressing its conjunction with the Age of Sensibility, Riskin offers an entirely new perspective on the development of modern science and the history of the Enlightenment.

Author : Jessica Riskin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226720799
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Science in the Age of Sensibility written by Jessica Riskin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-12-15 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was intimately bound up with sensibility. In what she calls a "sentimental empiricism," natural knowledge was taken to rest on a blend of experience and emotion. Riskin argues that sentimental empiricism brought together ideas and institutions, practices and politics. She shows, for instance, how the study of blindness, led by ideas about the mental and moral role of vision and by cataract surgeries, shaped the first school for the blind; how Benjamin Franklin's electrical physics, ascribing desires to nature, engaged French economic reformers; and how the question of the role of language in science and social life linked disputes over Antoine Lavoisier's new chemical names to the founding of France's modern system of civic education. Recasting the Age of Reason by stressing its conjunction with the Age of Sensibility, Riskin offers an entirely new perspective on the development of modern science and the history of the Enlightenment.

Author : Koen Vermeir
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9789400721029
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry written by Koen Vermeir and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Attracting philosophers, politicians, artists as well as the educated reader, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, first published in 1757, was a milestone in western thinking. This edited volume will take the 250th anniversary of the Philosophical Enquiry as an occasion to reassess Burke’s prominence in the history of ideas. Situated on the threshold between early modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, Burke’s oeuvre combines reflections on aesthetics, politics and the sciences. This collection is the first book length work devoted primarily to Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry in both its historical context and for its contemporary relevance. It will establish the fact that the Enquiry is an important philosophical and literary work in its own right.

Author : Adrian Wesołowski
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000927849
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Philanthropic Celebrity in the Age of Sensibility written by Adrian Wesołowski and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, an original combination of biography, cultural history, and media studies, investigates the first moment in history when philanthropy was used as a self-standing claim to fame and philanthropists started being considered as a distinct breed of public figures. In its search for the cause of this development, it examines the way in which public images of early philanthropists in different parts of Europe were shaped in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The work draws on a comparison between British prison reformer John Howard, Alsatian pastor and humanitarian Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, and Stanisław Staszic, a key figure of Enlightenment politics in Congress Poland. Revealing parallel mechanisms at play in different national contexts, it argues that famous philanthropists ushered in a new genre of fame, ‘philanthropic celebrity’, that placed Enlightenment ideals about virtue within the framework of early celebrity culture. The book is primarily aimed at advanced students and scholars of history, cultural studies, and social sciences, especially those interested in the concepts of fame and celebrity and in the origins of modern humanitarianism.

Author : Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351901877
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment written by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Air-pumps, electrical machines, colliding ivory balls, coloured sparks, mechanical planetariums, magic mirrors, hot-air balloons - these are just a sample of the devices displayed in public demonstrations of science in the eighteenth century. Public and private demonstrations of natural philosophy in Europe then differed vastly from today's unadorned and anonymous laboratory experiments. Science was cultivated for a variety of purposes in many different places; scientific instruments were built and used for investigative and didactic experiments as well as for entertainment and popular shows. Between the culture of curiosities which characterized the seventeenth century and the distinction between academic and popular science that gradually emerged in the nineteenth, the eighteenth century was a period when scientific activities took place in a variety of sites, ranging from academies, and learned societies to salons and popular fairs, shops and streets. This collection of case studies describing public demonstrations in Britain, Germany, Italy and France exemplifies the wide variety of settings for scientific activities in the European Enlightenment. Filled with sparks and smells, the essays raise broader issues about the ways in which modern science established its legitimacy and social acceptability. They point to two major features of the cultures of science in the eighteenth-century: entertainment and utility. Experimental demonstrations were attended by apothecaries and craftsmen for vocational purposes. At the same time, they had to fit in with the taste of both polite society and market culture. Public demonstrations were a favourite entertainment for ladies and gentlemen and a profitable activity for instrument makers and booksellers.

Author : Stephen Gaukroger
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 019161646X
Total Pages : 520 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding the emergence of a scientific culture - one in which cognitive values generally are modelled on, or subordinated to, scientific ones - is one of the foremost historical and philosophical problems with which we are now confronted. The significance of the emergence of such scientific values lies above all in their ability to provide the criteria by which we come to appraise cognitive enquiry, and which shape our understanding of what it can achieve. The period between the 1680s and the middle of the eighteenth century is a very distinctive one in this development. It is then that we witness the emergence of the idea that scientific values form a model for all cognitive claims. It is also at this time that science explicitly goes beyond technical expertise and begins to articulate a world-view designed to displace others, whether humanist or Christian. But what occurred took place in a peculiar and overdetermined fashion, and the outcome in the mid-eighteenth century was not the triumph of 'reason', as has commonly been supposed, but rather a simultaneous elevation of the standing of science and the beginnings of a serious questioning of whether science offers a comprehensive form of understanding. The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility is the sequel to Stephen Gaukroger's acclaimed 2006 book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. It offers a rich and fascinating picture of the development of intellectual culture in a period where understandings of the natural realm began to fragment.

Author : Amanda Jo Goldstein
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022648470X
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sweet Science written by Amanda Jo Goldstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: "sweet science" -- Blake's mundane egg: epigenesis and milieux -- Equivocal life: Goethe's journals on morphology -- Tender semiosis: reading Goethe with Lucretius and Paul de Man -- Growing old together: Lucretian materialism in Shelley's The triumph of life -- A natural history of violence: allegory and atomism in Shelley's The mask of anarchy -- Coda: old materialism, or romantic Marx

Author : Al Coppola
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190269723
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Theater of Experiment written by Al Coppola and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of natural philosophy in eighteenth-century plays like Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table, and John Rich's Necromancer, or Harelequin Doctor Faustus, influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play public life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, experimental philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Precisely because Enlightenment public science initiatives, taking their cue from the public stages, came to embrace the stagecraft and spectacle that Restoration natural philosophy sought to repress from the scene of experimental knowledge production, eighteenth-century science organized itself around not the sober, masculine "modest witness" of experiment but the sentimental, feminized, eager observer of scientific performance.

Author : Rosalind Powell
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526157039
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Perception and analogy written by Rosalind Powell and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perception and analogy explores ways of seeing scientifically in the eighteenth century. The book examines how sensory experience is conceptualised during the period, drawing novel connections between treatments of perception as an embodied phenomenon and the creative methods employed by natural philosophers. Covering a wealth of literary, theological, and pedagogical texts that engage with astronomy, optics, ophthalmology, and the body, it argues for the significance of analogies for conceptualising and explaining new scientific ideas. As well as identifying their use in religious and topographical poetry, the book addresses how analogies are visible in material culture through objects such as orreries, camera obscuras, and aeolian harps. It makes the vital claim that scientific concepts become intertwined with Christian discourse through reinterpretations of origins and signs, the scope of the created universe, and the limits of embodied knowledge.

Author : Sasha Handley
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300220391
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sleep in Early Modern England written by Sasha Handley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX