Science in the Age of Sensibility
Subtitle: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: December 15, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 345
ISBN-13: 9780226720791
Subjects: European history (ie other than Britain & Ireland); History of science; Science; Science/Mathematics; Europe; History; Science / History; Physiological Psychology; 18th century; Enlightenment; France; Sensitivity (Personality trait)
First sentence: This book is about the sentimental youth of scientific empiricism, and about a time and place in which its dramas of self-definition were center stage: eighteenth-century France.
Description: 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. 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.