Science in the Age of Sensibility

Science in the Age of Sensibility
Author: Jessica Riskin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2010-11-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226720853

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.

Science and Sensibility

Science and Sensibility
Author: Michael Vincent McGinnis
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2016-03-22
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0520960750

If humans are to understand and discover ways of addressing complex social and ecological problems, we first need to find intimacy with our particular places and communities. Cultivating a relationship to place often includes a negotiating process that involves both science and sensibility. While science is one key part of an adaptive and resilient society, the cultivation of a renewed sense of place and community is essential as well. Science and Sensibility argues for the need for ecology to engage with philosophical values and economic motivations in a political process of negotiation, with the goal of shaping humans' treatment of the natural world. Michael Vincent McGinnis aims to reframe ecology so it might have greater “trans-scientific” awareness of the roles and interactions among multiple stakeholders in socioecological systems, and he also maintains that deep ecological knowledge of specific places will be crucial to supporting a sustainable society. He uses numerous specific case studies from watershed, coastal, and marine habitats to illustrate how place-based ecological negotiation can occur, and how reframing our negotiation process can influence conservation, restoration, and environmental policy in effective ways.

The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry

The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry
Author: Koen Vermeir
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2011-11-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400721021

Attracting philosophers, politicians, artists as well as the educated reader, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, first published in 1757, was a milestone in western thinking. This edited volume will take the 250th anniversary of the Philosophical Enquiry as an occasion to reassess Burke’s prominence in the history of ideas. Situated on the threshold between early modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, Burke’s oeuvre combines reflections on aesthetics, politics and the sciences. This collection is the first book length work devoted primarily to Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry in both its historical context and for its contemporary relevance. It will establish the fact that the Enquiry is an important philosophical and literary work in its own right.

The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility

The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility
Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2010-11-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199594937

How did we come to have a scientific culture -- one in which cognitive values are shaped around scientific ones? Stephen Gaukroger presents a rich and fascinating investigation of the development of intellectual culture in early modern Europe, a period in which understandings of the natural realm began to fragment.

Science and Sensibility

Science and Sensibility
Author: Keith J. Laidler
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2011-12-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1615927034

This volume reviews the major contributions of the different branches of science and shows how they all lead to a unified conception of humans' place in the universe.

Sensibility and Sense

Sensibility and Sense
Author: Arnold Berleant
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2011-11-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1845402936

Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth's surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice.

Cents and Sensibility

Cents and Sensibility
Author: Gary Saul Morson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691183228

In Cents and Sensibility, an eminent literary critic and a leading economist make the case that the humanities—especially the study of literature—offer economists ways to make their models more realistic, their predictions more accurate, and their policies more effective and just. Arguing that Adam Smith’s heirs include Austen, Chekhov, and Tolstoy as much as Keynes and Friedman, Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro trace the connection between Adam Smith’s great classic, The Wealth of Nations, and his less celebrated book on ethics, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The authors contend that a few decades later, Jane Austen invented her groundbreaking method of novelistic narration in order to give life to the empathy that Smith believed essential to humanity. More than anyone, the great writers can offer economists something they need—a richer appreciation of behavior, ethics, culture, and narrative. Original, provocative, and inspiring, Cents and Sensibility demonstrates the benefits of a dialogue between economics and the humanities and also shows how looking at real-world problems can revitalize the study of literature itself. Featuring a new preface, this book brings economics back to its place in the human conversation.