Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725
Cambridge University Press, 11/12/2015
EAN 9781107110137, ISBN10: 1107110130
Hardcover, 310 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Many studies relate modern science to modern political and economic thought. Using one shift in order to explain the other, however, has begged the question of modernity's origins. New scientific and political reasoning emerged simultaneously as controversial forms of probabilistic reasoning. Neither could ground the other. They both rejected logical systems in favor of shifting, incomplete, and human-oriented forms of knowledge which did not meet accepted standards of speculative science. This study follows their shared development by tracing one key political stratagem for linking human desires to the advancement of knowledge: the collaborative wish list. Highly controversial at the beginning of the seventeenth century, charismatic desiderata lists spread across Europe, often deployed against traditional sciences. They did not enter the academy for a century but eventually so shaped the deep structures of research that today this once controversial genre appears to be a musty and even pedantic term of art.
1. Collecting the future in the early modern past
Part I. Origins
2. Knowledge in ruins
3. A charlatan's promise
Part II. Inventing the Wish List
4. Jakob Bornitz and the joy of things
5. Francis Bacon's new world of sciences
6. Things fall apart
desiderata in the Hartlib circle
7. Rebelling against useful knowledge
Part III. Institutionalizing Desire
8. Restoring societies
the Orphean charms of science
9. What men want
the private and public interests of the Royal Society
10. Enemy camps
desiderata and priority disputes
11. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the hubris of the wish list
12. Georg Hieronymus Welsch's fiction of consensus
13. Wish lists enter the Academy
a new intellectual economy
14. No final frontiers.