1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910960366703321

Autore

Riskin Jessica

Titolo

Science in the age of sensibility : the sentimental empiricists of the French enlightment / / Jessica Riskin

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2002

ISBN

9786612932885

9781282932883

1282932888

9780226720852

0226720853

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (355 p.)

Classificazione

TB 2360

Disciplina

509.44/09/033

Soggetti

Science - France - History - 18th century

Enlightenment - France

Sensitivity (Personality trait)

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-321) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Chapter One. Introduction: Sensibility and Enlightenment Science -- Chapter Two. The Blind and the Mathematically Inclined -- Chapter Three. Poor Richard's Leyden Jar -- Chapter Four. From Electricity to Economy -- Chapter Five. The Lawyer and the Lightning Rod -- Chapter Six. The Mesmerism Investigation and the Crisis of Sensibilist Science -- Chapter Seven. Languages of Science and Revolution -- Chapter Eight. Conclusion: The Legacy of the Sentimental Empiricists -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.