Download or read book Jonathan Swift s Hostility to Science written by Robert Reiley Owens and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Spectacle of the Growth of Knowledge and Swift s Satires on Science written by Beat Affentranger and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a revisionist study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satires on science with an emphasis on the writings of Jonathan Swift and, to a lesser degree, Samuel Butler and other satirists. To say, as some literary commentators do, that the satirists attacked only pseudo-scientists who failed to employ the empirical method properly is to beg a crucial question: how could the satirists possibly have distinguished the genuine scientist from the crank? By a failsafe set of Baconian principles perhaps? No, the matter is more complicated. I read the satiric literature on early modern science against a totally different understanding of what science is, how it came into being, and how it developed. Satire has a decided advantage over scientific discourse. It can rely on common sense; scientific discourse often cannot. There is always a counter-intuitive element in the genuinely new. New knowledge is in some ways always at odds with received assumptions of what is possible, reasonable, or probable. Satire on science, I suggest, can be seen as a systematic exploitation of that gap of plausibility. Natural philosophers of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century were keenly aware of their discursive disadvantage and at times even hesitated to publish their material. They feared the satirists and the wits, who they knew would find it easy to debunk their work on commonsense grounds. But commonsense and laughter are unreliable yardsticks for measuring scientific merit. Ironically, the satirists and the natural philosophers shared some of the most fundamental epistemological assumptions of early English empiricism, for instance, the stereotypical Baconian assumption that knowledge about nature would come to us unambiguously once the mind was freed from preconception and bias. It is an assumption about scientific method that is decidedly hostile towards speculative hypothesising. Indeed, the motto of the day was not bold speculation and learning from error, but avoiding error at all costs. Yet in practice, error (or what appeared to be erroneous) was of course frequent; for science is an essentially speculative enterprise. Natural philosophers of the early modern period, however, were embarrassed by their failures and tried to explain them away. The satirists, on the other hand, could prey on these mistakes and conclude that the work of the natural philosophers was purely speculative. The reason for this rigid, anti-speculative epistemological stance, I argue, was a religious one, having to do with the conception of nature as a divine book that could be read like Scripture. This conflation of the epistemological and the theological is especially obvious in Swift. In both his satirical and non-satirical writings, he is obsessed with proposing proper standards of interpretation, and with criticising those whom he thought had corrupted these standards. Dissenters and religious enthusiasts are taken to task for their misreading of Scripture, for their corrupt religious doctrine which they erroneously claim to be based on Scripture and reason. The natural philosophers are accused of some similar hermeneutic sin; only, they have committed their interpretive transgressions against the proper interpretive standard of the book of nature. Where the natural philosophers claim to have found a new, more accurate way of reading the book of nature, Swift, I argue, sees only mis-readings. Rhetorically, Swift's satires on religious dissent perpetuate the typically Tory High-Church insinuation of sectarian and heretical sexual promiscuity. In his satires on science, Swift makes the same insinuation with respect to natural philosophers, most vividly so in A Tale of a Tub and the flying island of Laputa. The study concludes with a fresh look at Swift's rational horses in part four of Gulliver's Travels.
Download or read book Swift and Science written by G. Lynall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is thought that Swift was opposed to the new science that heralded the beginning of the modern age, but this book interrogates that assumption, tracing the theological, political, and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considering what they can reveal about Swift's imagination.
Download or read book Jonathan Swift the Brave Desponder written by Patrick Reilly and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jonathan Swift s Relations to Science written by Mabel Phillips and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jonathan Swift s Relation to Science written by George William Griffith and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Atlantis written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Swiftian Inspirations written by Jonathan McCreedy and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses key problems regarding Swiftian thought and satire, analyzing the inspirational cultural legacy which generations of writers, thinkers, and satirists have recurrently relied upon since the Enlightenment. Section One deals with the eighteenth century and the topics of truth, falsehood and madness. Section Two focuses on two film adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels as well as on allusions to Swiftian satire during the US Enlightenment and in post-racial America. Section Three looks at the politics of language, politeness, and satire within translation, and Section Four dwells upon the process of reading Swift in the age of post-truth and Brexit. It will be of interest to students and scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture, modern-day politics as well as to those interested in satire, science fiction, and film adaptations of literary works.
Download or read book Jonathan Swift s Attitude Toward Science written by Rebecca Merle Vaughn and published by . This book was released on 1937 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jonathan Swift and the Burden of the Future written by Alan D. Chalmers and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Alan Chalmers's Jonathan Swift and the Burden of the Future explores Swift's temporal apprehension in the context of the pertinent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious, scientific, and cultural debates. It also compares Swift's imaginative understanding of time with that of such other writers as Juvenal, Rabelais, Milton, Pope, Gray, and Whitman."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Jonathan Swift and Philosophy written by Janelle Pötzsch and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-12-07 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Swift and Philosophy is the first book to analyse and interpret Swift’s writing from a philosophical angle. By placing key texts of Swift in their philosophical and cultural contexts and providing background to their history of ideas, it demonstrates how well informed Swift’s criticism of the politics, philosophy, and science of his age actually was. Moreover, it also sets straight preconceptions about Swift as ignorant about the scientific developments of his time. The authors offer insights into, and interpretations of, Swift’s political philosophy, ethics, and his philosophy of science and demonstrate how versatile a writer and thinker Swift actually was. This book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy, history of ideas, and 18th century literature and culture.
Download or read book Jonathan Swift The Reluctant Rebel written by John Stubbs and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich and riveting portrait of the man behind Gulliver’s Travels, by a “vivid, ardent, and engaging” (New York Times Book Review) author. One of Europe’s most important literary figures, Jonathan Swift was also an inspired humorist, a beloved companion, and a conscientious Anglican minister—as well as a hoaxer and a teller of tales. His anger against abuses of power would produce the most famous satires of the English language: Gulliver’s Travels as well as the Drapier Papers and the unparalleled Modest Proposal, in which he imagined the poor of Ireland farming their infants for the tables of wealthy colonists. John Stubbs’s biography captures the dirt and beauty of a world that Swift both scorned and sought to amend. It follows Swift through his many battles, for and against authority, and in his many contradictions, as a priest who sought to uphold the dogma of his church; as a man who was quite prepared to defy convention, not least in his unshakable attachment to an unmarried woman, his “Stella”; and as a writer whose vision showed that no single creed holds all the answers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, in Jonathan Swift Stubbs has found the perfect subject for this masterfully told biography of a reluctant rebel—a voice of withering disenchantment unrivaled in English.
Download or read book Jonathan Swift and Philosophy written by Janelle Pötzsch and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the rich philosophical content of the writings of Jonathan Swift. It discusses these philosophical topics against their ideengeschichtliche background and demonstrates that Swift's work offers starting points for philosophical reflection that are still topical today.
Download or read book Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness written by Kenneth Craven and published by Brill's Studies in Intellectua. This book was released on 1992 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swift like Aristotle earlier rejects this classical faith in favor of the more somber Kronos myth.
Download or read book Dissertations in English and American Literature written by Laurence F. McNamee and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 1148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Critical Theory and Science Fiction written by Carl Freedman and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-24 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book of the Year. This innovative cultural critique offers valuable insights into science fiction, thus enlarging our understanding of critical theory. Carl Freedman traces the fundamental and mostly unexamined relationships between the discourses of science fiction and critical theory, arguing that science fiction is (or ought to be) a privileged genre for critical theory. He asserts that it is no accident that the upsurge of academic interest in science fiction since the 1970s coincides with the heyday of literary theory, and that likewise science fiction is one of the most theoretically informed areas of the literary profession. Extended readings of novels by five of the most important modern science fiction authors illustrate the affinity between science fiction and critical theory, in each case concentrating on one major novel that resonates with concerns proper to critical theory. Freedman's five readings are: Solaris: Stanislaw Lem and the Structure of Cognition; The Dispossessed: Ursula LeGuin and the Ambiguities of Utopia; The Two of Them: Joanna Russ and the Violence of Gender; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Samuel Delany and the Dialectics of Difference; The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick and the Construction of Realities.
Download or read book The Scientific Milieu of Jonathan Swift written by Robert Charles Olson and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
