Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment

by Jessica Riskin

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Author: Jessica Riskin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Paperback:
ISBN 10: 0226720799
ISBN 13: 978-0226720791

Hardcover:
ISBN 10: 0226720780
ISBN 13: 978-0226720784

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. 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.

Review

J. Russell Major Prize for best book in French History, American Historical Association, 2004

Berkshire Conference First Book Prize, shortlist, 2002

"[A] thoughtful, subtle book .... Some scholars have pointed to parallels between scientific and epistemological debates on the one hand, and political and moral debates on the other. Riskin goes further, and shows that they were inextricably bonded." -The Times Literary Supplement

"[B]rilliant ... carefully nuanced and provocative ... fascinating." - The American Historical Review

"[A]n important and compelling contribution to the histories of sensibility and of French science." - History of European Ideas

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Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment