A01=Steven Connor
alternative facts
artificial intelligence
Author_Steven Connor
Category=QDTK
charlatan
cognition
desire
epistemology
epistemophilia
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
freud
history
ignorance
information
intellectualism
knowing
knowledge
library
madness
magical thinking
neuroscience
nonfiction
objectivity
philosophy
place
pretension
prophecy
psychology
quarrel
quizzes
revelation
secrets
space
study
stupidity
truth
Product details
- ISBN 9781789140729
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 15 Apr 2019
- Publisher: Reaktion Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge – the lusts, fantasies, dreams and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud’s epistemophilia, or love of knowledge, and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking and the desire for knowledge. Steven Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and ‘general knowledge’, charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library.
In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life.
Steven Connor is Professor of English and Director of Research at the Digital Futures Institute, King’s College, London. He is the author of 18 books, most recently The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (2019).
