The Sciences in Enlightened Europe

by William Clark, Jan Golinski, Simon Schaffer

Overview

Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this book explores the complex relations between "enlightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academies and boisterous clubs are all given their due place in the landscape of enlightened Europe.

The contributors examine the production of new disciplines through work with instruments and techniques; consider how institutions of public taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of Europe.

Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain controversial today. Through careful scrutiny of how these values influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its sciences, this book gives us an entirely new sense of the Enlightenment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226109404
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	07/01/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	580
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

William Clark is visiting assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and coeditor of The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Jan Golinski is professor of history and humanities at the University of New Hampshire and the author of Making Natural Knowledge, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Lissa L. Roberts is associate professor of the history of science at the University Twente, the Netherlands.

Simon Schaffer is professor of the history of science at the University of Cambridge.

Peter Dear is professor of the history of science at Cornell University.

Table of Contents

Preface
Bibliographical Note
Pt. 1 Orientations
Introduction
William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer
1 The Enlightenment Our Contemporary
Dorinda Outram
Pt. 2 Bodies and Technologies
Introduction
2 Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment
Andrea A. Rusnock
3 Barometers of Change: Meteorological Instruments as Machines of Enlightenment
Jan Golinski
4 French Engineers Become Professionals; or, How Meritocracy Made Knowledge Objective
Ken Adler
5 Enlightened Automata
Simon Schaffer
Pt. 3 Humans and Natures
Introduction
6 Enlightened Monsters
Michael Hagner
7 The Science and Conversation of Human Nature
Marina Frasca-Spada
8 Metaphysics, Mathematics, and the Gendering of Science in Eighteenth-Century France
Mary Terrall
9 The "Nature" of Enlightenment
E.C. Spary
Pt. 4 Provinces and Peripheries
Introduction
10 A Forgotten Newtonian: Women and Science in the Italian Provinces
Paula Findlen
11 Going Dutch: Situating Science in the Dutch Enlightenment
Lissa Roberts
12 Daedalus Hyperboreus: Baltic Natural History and Mineralogy in the Enlightenment
Lisbet Koerner
13 The Death of Metaphysics in Enlightened Prussia
William Clark
Pt. 5 Departures
14 Inner History; or, How to End Enlightenment
Nicholas Jardine
15 Afterword: The Ethos of Enlightenment
Lorraine Daston
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

Roy Porter

The consistently first-rate essays in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe move analysis of eighteenth -century science onto a new plane. Readers will particularly appreciate the well-integrated range of thematic topics and the commitment to engage with modern theoretical appraoches. This book is essential reading.
— (Roy Porter, autor of The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity)