Early Modern Scientific and Intellectual Biography (seminar): Difference between revisions

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This was a spring 2004 faculty weekend seminar.
This was a spring 2004 faculty weekend seminar.


This seminar aimed to introduce historians and literary scholars to some relatively unfamiliar sociological and philosophical resources for re-thinking how biographers—past and present-write about the lives of scientific and philosophical truth-speakers. Part of the exercise was devoted to explicating the codes and conventions used by early modern commentators to talk about their contemporaries: e.g., Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle, Hooke, Locke, Newton. Another part assessed how traditions of telling such lives have changed from the early modern period to our own. Topics addresseded included: asceticism and the moral and physical constitution of scientific and philosophical thinkers; the relationship between conceptions of individual authenticity and the idea of truth; the relationship between ideas about knowledge and the mental and moral make-up of knowers; the social role of scholars and its bearing on the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics attributed to them; the uses of intellectual biography in constituting the authority of knowledge; how individuality and the social state figure in such biographies and how motives come to be attributed; and the differences between telling the lives of those who speak truth about reality and those whose cultural products are recognized as works of the imagination.
This seminar aimed to introduce historians and literary scholars to some relatively unfamiliar sociological and philosophical resources for re-thinking how biographers—past and present-write about the lives of scientific and philosophical truth-speakers. Part of the exercise was devoted to explicating the codes and conventions used by early modern commentators to talk about their contemporaries: e.g., Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle, Hooke, Locke, Newton. Another part assessed how traditions of telling such lives have changed from the early modern period to our own. Topics addressed included: asceticism and the moral and physical constitution of scientific and philosophical thinkers; the relationship between conceptions of individual authenticity and the idea of truth; the relationship between ideas about knowledge and the mental and moral make-up of knowers; the social role of scholars and its bearing on the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics attributed to them; the uses of intellectual biography in constituting the authority of knowledge; how individuality and the social state figure in such biographies and how motives come to be attributed; and the differences between telling the lives of those who speak truth about reality and those whose cultural products are recognized as works of the imagination.


'''Director''': Steven Shapin is Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His books include ''A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England'' (1994), ''The Scientific Revolution'' (1996), and ''Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life'' (1985, with Simon Schaffer). He is currently working on a book about the ideas of scientific knowledge and personal virtue in late modernity.
'''Director''': Steven Shapin is Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His books include ''A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England'' (1994), ''The Scientific Revolution'' (1996), and ''Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life'' (1985, with Simon Schaffer). He is currently working on a book about the ideas of scientific knowledge and personal virtue in late modernity.
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[[Category: 17th century]]
[[Category: 17th century]]
[[Category: 18th century]]
[[Category: 18th century]]
[[Category:2003-2004]]

Revision as of 14:58, 14 August 2014

For more past programming from the Folger Institute, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive.

This was a spring 2004 faculty weekend seminar.

This seminar aimed to introduce historians and literary scholars to some relatively unfamiliar sociological and philosophical resources for re-thinking how biographers—past and present-write about the lives of scientific and philosophical truth-speakers. Part of the exercise was devoted to explicating the codes and conventions used by early modern commentators to talk about their contemporaries: e.g., Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle, Hooke, Locke, Newton. Another part assessed how traditions of telling such lives have changed from the early modern period to our own. Topics addressed included: asceticism and the moral and physical constitution of scientific and philosophical thinkers; the relationship between conceptions of individual authenticity and the idea of truth; the relationship between ideas about knowledge and the mental and moral make-up of knowers; the social role of scholars and its bearing on the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics attributed to them; the uses of intellectual biography in constituting the authority of knowledge; how individuality and the social state figure in such biographies and how motives come to be attributed; and the differences between telling the lives of those who speak truth about reality and those whose cultural products are recognized as works of the imagination.

Director: Steven Shapin is Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His books include A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (1994), The Scientific Revolution (1996), and Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985, with Simon Schaffer). He is currently working on a book about the ideas of scientific knowledge and personal virtue in late modernity.