A01=Jessica Riskin
academic
Author_Jessica Riskin
blind
Category=NHD
Category=PDX
civic
economic
economy
education
emotion
empiricist
enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
experience
facts
france
french
historical
history
institutional
investigation
knowledge
language
mental
moral
natural
physics
political
politics
reform
reformer
research
scholarly
science
scientific
sentiment
sentimental
social life
society
Product details
- ISBN 9780226720784
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 15 Dec 2002
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was inimately 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, practice 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.
Jessica Riskin is assistant professor of history at Stanford University.
