Download or read book The Tacit Dimension written by Michael Polanyi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Tacit Dimension" argues that tacit knowledge -tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments- is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. This volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.
Download or read book Enlightenment in the Republic of Science written by Michael R. Lynn and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Enlightenment Now written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
Download or read book Paris Savant written by Bruno Belhoste and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelist Honoré de Balzac was the first to use the phrase "Paris savant" to refer to the dynamic Parisian scientific and intellectual community of the late 18th century. This book discusses how the Parisian scientific community came into its important place in the French Enlightenment, focusing on the Academy of Sciences.
Download or read book Artisanal Enlightenment written by Paola Bertucci and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking work that places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, Paola Bertucci places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France’s colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations. Artisanal Enlightenment provides the first in-depth study of the Société, and demonstrates its legacy in scientific programs, academies, and the making of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Through insightful analysis of textual, visual, and material sources, Bertucci provides a groundbreaking perspective on the politics of writing on the mechanical arts and the development of key Enlightenment concepts such as improvement, utility, and progress.
Download or read book Desolation and Enlightenment written by Ira Katznelson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During and especially after World War II, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war’s devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology, and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West’s moral bearing. In light of their epoch’s calamities, these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. Confronting dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity but also which Enlightenment we should wish to have.
Download or read book The Man Who Flattened the Earth written by Mary Terrall and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-05-05 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-styled adventurer, literary wit, philosopher, and statesman of science, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) stood at the center of Enlightenment science and culture. Offering an elegant and accessible portrait of this remarkable man, Mary Terrall uses the story of Maupertuis's life, self-fashioning, and scientific works to explore what it meant to do science and to be a man of science in eighteenth-century Europe. Beginning his scientific career as a mathematician in Paris, Maupertuis entered the public eye with a much-discussed expedition to Lapland, which confirmed Newton's calculation that the earth was flattened at the poles. He also made significant, and often intentionally controversial, contributions to physics, life science, navigation, astronomy, and metaphysics. Called to Berlin by Frederick the Great, Maupertuis moved to Prussia to preside over the Academy of Sciences there. Equally at home in salons, cafés, scientific academies, and royal courts, Maupertuis used his social connections and his printed works to enhance a carefully constructed reputation as both a man of letters and a man of science. His social and institutional affiliations, in turn, affected how Maupertuis formulated his ideas, how he presented them to his contemporaries, and the reactions they provoked. Terrall not only illuminates the life and work of a colorful and important Enlightenment figure, but also uses his story to delve into many wider issues, including the development of scientific institutions, the impact of print culture on science, and the interactions of science and government. Smart and highly readable, Maupertuis will appeal to anyone interested in eighteenth-century science and culture. “Terrall’s work is scholarship in the best sense. Her explanations of arcane 18th-century French physics, mathematics, astronomy, and biology are among the most lucid available in any language.”—Virginia Dawson, American Historical Review Winner of the 2003 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society
Download or read book The Early Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic 1650 1750 written by Wiep Van Bunge and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains twelve major essays written by prominent historians from the Netherlands, Belgium and the United States on the early Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic, and more in particular on the main schools of thought that made up its philosophical profile.
Download or read book Placing the Enlightenment written by Charles W. J. Withers and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.
Download or read book Conserving the Enlightenment written by Jānis Langins and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of French military engineers at a crucial point in the evolution of modern engineering.
Download or read book Encyclopaedic Visions written by Richard Yeo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-29 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural history of Enlightenment encyclopaedias revealing Enlightenment debates concerning organisation and communication of knowledge.
Download or read book Industrial Enlightenment written by Peter M. Jones and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Industrial Enlightenment explores the transition through which England passed between 1760 and 1820 on the way to becoming the world’s first industrialised nation. In drawing attention to the important role played by scientific knowledge, it focuses on a dimension of this transition which is often overlooked by historians. The book argues that in certain favoured regions, England underwent a process whereby useful knowledge was fused with technological ‘know how’ to produce the condition described here as Industrial Enlightenment. At the forefront of the process were the natural philosophers who entered into a close and productive relationship with technologists and entrepreneurs. Much of the evidence for this study is drawn from the extraordinary archival record of the activities of Matthew Boulton (1728–1809) and his Soho Manufactory. The book will appeal to those keen to explore the dynamics of change in eighteenth-century England, and to those with a broad interest in the cultural history of science and technology.
Download or read book The Time of Enlightenment written by William Max Nelson and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-12-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. The Time of Enlightenment argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.
Download or read book Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution written by Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab offers a groundbreaking analysis of Egyptian and Syrian debates over enlightenment and their import for the 2011 uprisings. Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution is the first book to document these debates for the Anglophone audience and to analyze their importance for contemporary intellectual life and politics.
Download or read book Religion the Enlightenment and the New Global Order written by John M. Owen IV and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-17 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Largely due to the cultural and political shift of the Enlightenment, Western societies in the eighteenth century emerged from sectarian conflict and embraced a more religiously moderate path. In nine original essays, leading scholars ask whether exporting the Enlightenment solution is possible or even desirable today. Contributors begin by revisiting the Enlightenment's restructuring of the West, examining its ongoing encounters with Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. While acknowledging the necessity of the Enlightenment emphasis on toleration and peaceful religious coexistence, these scholars nevertheless have grave misgivings about the Enlightenment's spiritually thin secularism. The authors ultimately upend both the claim that the West's experience offers a ready-made template for the world to follow and the belief that the West's achievements are to be ignored, despised, or discarded.
Download or read book The Practices of the Enlightenment written by Dorothea E. von Mücke and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century Pietist traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, The Practices of Enlightenment unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern secular discourse. Mapping surprising routes of exchange between the religious and aesthetic writings of the period and recentering concerns of authorship and audience, this book revitalizes scholarship on the Enlightenment. By engaging with three critical categories—aesthetics, authorship, and the public sphere—The Practices of Enlightenment illuminates the relationship between religious and aesthetic modes of reflective contemplation, autobiography and the hermeneutics of the self, and the discursive creation of the public sphere. Focusing largely on German intellectual life, this critical engagement also extends to France through Rousseau and to England through Shaftesbury. Rereading canonical works and lesser-known texts by Goethe, Lessing, and Herder, the book challenges common narratives recounting the rise of empiricist philosophy, the idea of the "sensible" individual, and the notion of the modern author as celebrity, bringing new perspective to the Enlightenment concepts of instinct, drive, genius, and the public sphere.
Download or read book Journal of My Life written by Jacques-Louis Ménétra and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jaques-Louis Menetra's journal reads like a historian's dream come true. It conveys his understanding of what it meant to grow up in Paris, where he was born in 1738; to tramp around provincial shops on a journeyman's tour de France; to settle down as a Parisian master with a shop and family of his own; and to live through the great events of the Revolution as a militant in his local Section.
