Science in the Age of Sensibility

[Dave Monroe]

Riskin, Jessica.   Science in the Age of Sensibility:
   The Sentimental Empiricists of the French
   Enlightenment.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.

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. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations 
Acknowledgments 
List of Abbreviations 
1. Introduction: Sensibility and Enlightenment Science

2. The Blind and the Mathematically Inclined 
3. Poor Richard's Leyden Jar 
4. From Electricity to Economy 
5. The Lawyer and the Lightning Rod 
6. The Mesmerism Investigation and the Crisis of
Sensibilist Science 
7. Languages of Science and Revolution 
8. Conclusion: The Legacy of the Sentimental
Empiricists 
Bibliography 
Index

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/15338.ctl

Thanks to Jon Bailey for alerting us to this some time
back, I finally stumbled on it, so ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&msg=65223&keywords=riskin

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0405&msg=90787

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&msg=65454

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0505&msg=96119

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com