Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian EnglandUniversity of Chicago Press, 15 nov 2010 - 320 páginas "Dying to Know is the work of a distinguished scholar, at the peak of his powers, who is intimately familiar with his materials, and whose knowledge of Victorian fiction and scientific thought is remarkable. This elegant and evocative look at the move toward objectivity first pioneered by Descartes sheds new light on some old and still perplexing problems in modern science." Bernard Lightman, York University, Canada In Dying to Know, eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge. This long-awaited book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the nineteenth century? Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die. Dying to Know is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a shareable form of knowledge. |
Índice
1 | |
17 | |
2 Dying to Know Descartes | 44 |
Lessen Thy Denominator | 66 |
The Effacement of Self | 85 |
Francis Galton with Some Reflections on A R Wallace | 104 |
Women and Scientific Autobiography | 126 |
Our Mutual Friend | 148 |
A New Epistemology | 171 |
I Think Therefore Im Doomed | 200 |
Karl Pearson and the Romance of Science | 220 |
Pearson and Pater | 244 |
Epilogue Objectivity and Altruism | 268 |
Notes | 285 |
Index | 317 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todo
Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England George Levine Vista previa restringida - 2002 |
Términos y frases comunes
affirm argues argument Arthur authority autobiography becomes believe bildungsroman body Cambridge Carlyle Carlyle’s Cartesian claims commitment condition consciousness critics critique culture Daniel Deronda Darwin death Descartes Descartes’s desire detachment Dickens Discourse disinterest dying to know dying-to-know embodiment essay ethical Evelyn Fox Keller experience fact feeling fiction Galton George Eliot Grammar of Science Gwendolen Hardy Harmon Harré human Huxley Ibid idea ideal imagination implies individual insistence intellectual John Jude Jude the Obscure Karl Pearson kind knowledge Lorraine Daston Martineau Mary Somerville material metaphor Mill mind moral Mordecai Mutual Friend narrative of scientific nature nineteenth-century novel objectivity one’s paradox passion Pater philosophy positivism possible problem protagonists quest question rational reality requires rhetoric Sartor Resartus says scientific epistemology scientist seems self-effacement sense skepticism social story T. H. Huxley Theodore Porter theory things thinking thought tion tradition transcendence truth uniformitarianism University Press Victorian Webb Whewell William Whewell women writing
Pasajes populares
Página 184 - I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a, well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail ; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for : no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in -anything else. The fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me, as completely as those of benevolence.
Página 250 - ... impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind.
Página 297 - I can discover no logical halting-place between the admission that such is the case, and the further concession that all vital action may, with equal propriety, be said to be the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it.
Página 89 - I am rather below than above par ; what I could do, could assuredly be done by any boy or girl of average capacity and healthy physical constitution...
Página 249 - Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the " relative " spirit in place of the
Página 83 - I then said, that the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages a zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time write: 'It is only with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.
Página 97 - Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and often went to excess in consideration for them by imaginatively investing their feelings with the intensity of its own.
Página 37 - our' problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own 'semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real...
Página 98 - ... to forward the application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems of life to the best of my ability, in the conviction which has grown with my growth and strengthened with my strength, that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.
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Frankenstein's Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture ... Christa Knellwolf King,Jane R. Goodall Vista previa restringida - 2008 |