Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725

Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 PDF Author: Vera Keller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107110130
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This study shows that modernity has its origins in the advancement of knowledge, and not in the Scientific Revolution.

Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725

Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 PDF Author: Vera Keller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107110130
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This study shows that modernity has its origins in the advancement of knowledge, and not in the Scientific Revolution.

Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies

Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies PDF Author: Inger Leemans
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100033032X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies researches the development of knowledge economies in Early Modern Europe. Starting with the Southern and Northern Netherlands as important early hubs for marketing knowledge, it analyses knowledge economies in the dynamics of a globalizing world. The book brings together scholars and perspectives from history, art history, material culture, book history, history of science and literature to analyse the relationship between knowledge and markets. How did knowledge grow into a marketable product? What knowledge about markets was available in this period, and how did it develop? By connecting these questions the authors show how knowledge markets operated, not only economically but also culturally, through communication and affect. Knowledge societies are analysed as affective communities, spaces and practices. Compelling case studies describe the role of emotions such as hope, ambition, desire, love, fascination, adventure and disappointment – on driving merchants, contractors and consumers to operate in the market of knowledge. In so doing, the book offers innovative perspectives on the development of knowledge markets and the valuation of knowledge. Introducing the reader to different perspectives on how knowledge markets operated from both an economic and cultural perspective, this book will be of great use to students, graduates and scholars of early modern history, economic history, the history of emotions and the history of the Low Countries.

Semantic Change and Collective Knowledge in 18th Century Britain

Semantic Change and Collective Knowledge in 18th Century Britain PDF Author: John Regan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350360511
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
An in-depth digital investigation of several 18th-century British corpora, this book identifies shared communities of meaning in the printed British 18th century by highlighting and analysing patterns in the distribution of lexis. There are forces of attraction between words: some are more likely to keep company than others, and how words attract and repel one another is worthy of note. Charting these forces, this book demonstrates how distant reading 18th-century corpora can tell us something new, methodologically defensible and, crucially, interesting, about the most common constructions of word meanings and epistemes in the printed British 18th century. In the case studies in this book, computation brings to light some remarkable facts about collectively-produced forms of meaning, without which the most common meanings of words, and the ways of knowing that they constituted, would remain matters of conjecture rather than evidence. Providing the first investigation of collective meaning and knowledge in the British 18th century, this interdisciplinary study builds on the existing stores of close reading, praxis, and history of ideas, presenting a view constructed at scale, rather than at the level of individual texts.

Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Subha Mukherji
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030376516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Placing ‘literature’ at the centre of Renaissance economic knowledge, this book offers a distinct intervention in the history of early modern epistemology. It is premised on the belief that early modern practices of change and exchange produced a range of epistemic shifts and crises, which, nonetheless, lacked a systematic vocabulary. These essays collectively tap into the imaginative kernel at the core of economic experience, to grasp and give expression to some of its more elusive experiential dimensions. The essays gathered here probe the early modern interface between imaginative and mercantile knowledge, between technologies of change in the field of commerce and transactions in the sphere of cultural production, and between forms of transaction and representation. In the process, they go beyond the specific interrelation of economic life and literary work to bring back into view the thresholds between economics on the one hand, and religious, legal and natural philosophical epistemologies on the other.

Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World

Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World PDF Author: Christine Zabel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000364070
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This volume historicizes the use of the notion of self-interest that at least since Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith’s theories is considered a central component of economic theory. Having in the twentieth century become one of the key-features of rational choice models, and thus is seen as an idealized trait of human behavior, self-interest has, despite Albert O. Hirschman’s pivotal analysis of self-interest, only marginally been historicized. A historicization(s) of self-interest, however, offers new insights into the concept by asking why, when, for what reason and in which contexts the notion was discussed or referred to, how it was employed by contemporaries, and how the different usages developed and changed over time. This helps us to appreciate the various transformations in the perception of the notion, and also to explore how and in what ways different people at different times and in different regions reflected on or realized the act of considering what was in their best interest. The volume focuses on those different usages, knowledges, and practices concerned with self-interest in the modern Atlantic World from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, by using different approaches, including political and economic theory, actuarial science, anthropology, or the history of emotions. Offering a new perspective on a key component of Western capitalism, this is the ideal resource for researches and scholars of intellectual, political and economic history in the modern Atlantic World.

The Necessity of Nature

The Necessity of Nature PDF Author: Mónica García-Salmones Rovira
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009332163
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
To understand our current world crises, it is essential to study the origins of the systems and institutions we now take for granted. This book takes a novel approach to charting intellectual, scientific, and philosophical histories alongside the development of the international legal order by studying the philosophy and theology of the Scientific Revolution and its impact on European natural law, political liberalism, and political economy. Starting from analysis of the work of Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle and John Locke on natural law, the author incorporates a holistic approach that encompasses global matters beyond the foundational matters of treaties and diplomacy. The monograph promotes a sustainable transformation of international law in the context of related philosophy, history, and theology. Tackling issues such as nature, money, necessities, human nature, secularism, and epistemology which underlie natural lawyers' thinking, Dr García-Salmones explains their enduring relevance for international legal studies today.

Errors, False Opinions and Defective Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Errors, False Opinions and Defective Knowledge in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Marco Faini
Publisher: Firenze University Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
This volume offers a series of insights into the fascinating topic of errors and false opinions in early modern Europe. It explores the semantic richness of the category of ‘error’ in a time when such category becomes crucial to European thought and culture. During decades of increasing normativity in the social and religious sphere as well as in the epistemological status of disciplines, recognizing and correcting error becomes an imperative task whose importance can hardly be overestimated. The efforts at establishing religious, political, and scientific orthodoxy led philosophers, doctors, philologist, scientist, and theologians, to reconsider the very foundations of knowledge in the attempt to dispel errors. Spanning geographically from Italy to France, England, and Germany, the articles here gathered provide stimulating glimpses into one of the most fascinating, multifaceted, and controversial aspects of early modern culture.

Forbidden Knowledge

Forbidden Knowledge PDF Author: Hannah Marcus
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673661X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
“Wonderful . . . offers and provokes meditation on the timeless nature of censorship, its practices, its intentions and . . . its (unintended) outcomes.” —Times Higher Education Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities. Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge. “Marcus deftly explains the various contradictions that shaped the interactions between Catholic authorities and the medical and scientific communities of early modern Italy, showing how these dynamics defined the role of outside expertise in creating 'Catholic Knowledge' for centuries to come.” —Annals of Science “An important study that all scholars and advanced students of early modern Europe will want to read, especially those interested in early modern medicine, religion, and the history of the book. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

Possible Knowledge

Possible Knowledge PDF Author: Debapriya Sarkar
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512823368
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The Renaissance, scholars have long argued, was a period beset by the loss of philosophical certainty. In Possible Knowledge, Debapriya Sarkar argues for the pivotal role of literature--what early moderns termed poesie--in the dynamic intellectual culture of this era of profound incertitude. Revealing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, Sarkar offers a defense of poiesis, or literary making, as a vital philosophical endeavor. Working across a range of genres, Sarkar theorizes "possible knowledge" as an intellectual paradigm crafted in and through literary form. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton marshalled the capacious concept of the "possible," defined by Philip Sidney as what "may be and should be," to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality. These early modern thinkers mobilized the imaginative habits of thought constitutive to major genres of literary writing--including epic, tragedy, romance, lyric, and utopia--in order to produce knowledge divorced from historical truth and empirical fact by envisioning states of being untethered from "nature" or reality. Approaching imaginative modes such as hypothesis, conjecture, prediction, and counterfactuals as instruments of possible knowledge, Sarkar exposes how the speculative allure of the "possible" lurks within scientific experiment, induction, and theories of probability. In showing how early modern literary writing sought to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world, Possible Knowledge also highlights its most audacious intellectual ambition: its claim that while natural philosophy, or what we today term science, might explain the physical world, literature could remake reality. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, Possible Knowledge suggests that what we have termed a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.

The Evolution of Knowledge

The Evolution of Knowledge PDF Author: Jürgen Renn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691218595
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
A fundamentally new approach to the history of science and technology This book presents a new way of thinking about the history of science and technology, one that offers a grand narrative of human history in which knowledge serves as a critical factor of cultural evolution. Jürgen Renn examines the role of knowledge in global transformations going back to the dawn of civilization while providing vital perspectives on the complex challenges confronting us today in the Anthropocene—this new geological epoch shaped by humankind. Renn reframes the history of science and technology within a much broader history of knowledge, analyzing key episodes such as the evolution of writing, the emergence of science in the ancient world, the Scientific Revolution of early modernity, the globalization of knowledge, industrialization, and the profound transformations wrought by modern science. He investigates the evolution of knowledge using an array of disciplines and methods, from cognitive science and experimental psychology to earth science and evolutionary biology. The result is an entirely new framework for understanding structural changes in systems of knowledge—and a bold new approach to the history and philosophy of science. Written by one of today's preeminent historians of science, The Evolution of Knowledge features discussions of historiographical themes, a glossary of key terms, and practical insights on global issues ranging from climate change to digital capitalism. This incisive book also serves as an invaluable introduction to the history of knowledge.