Andrew Janiak, "The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

New Books in the History of Science

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13 days ago 47:27

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The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2024) introduces the work and legacy of philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet. As the Enlightenment gained momentum throughout Europe, Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Due to her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker rather than a disciple of some supposedly great man like Isaac Newton or René Descartes, Châtelet posed a threat to an emerging consensus in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman highlights the exclusion of women from colleges and academies in Europe and the fear of rupturing the gender-based order.

Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

742 episodes

New Books in the History of Science

Andrew Janiak, "The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

New Books in the History of Science

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published 13 days ago

MP3•Episode home

Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

742 episodes

#Science #Books #Arts #History #New Books Network

All episodes

New Books in the History of Science

1
William Max Nelson, "Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens" (U Chicago Press, 2024) 1:12:31

3 days ago1:12:31

1:12:31

In Enlightenment Biopolitics (U Chicago Press, 2024), historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals. In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization. William Max Nelson is associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One and a coeditor of The French Revolution in Global Perspective . Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel . Twitter . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

1
Andrew Janiak, "The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2024) 47:27

13 days ago47:27

47:27

The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2024) introduces the work and legacy of philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet. As the Enlightenment gained momentum throughout Europe, Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Due to her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker rather than a disciple of some supposedly great man like Isaac Newton or René Descartes, Châtelet posed a threat to an emerging consensus in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman highlights the exclusion of women from colleges and academies in Europe and the fear of rupturing the gender-based order. Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

1
Anne Greenwood Mackinney, "Nature on Paper: Documenting Science in Prussia, 1770-1850" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024) 42:59

16 days ago42:59

42:59

Over the past two decades, natural things—especially those collected, exchanged, studied, and displayed in museums, such as animals, plants, minerals, and rocks—have emerged as fascinating protagonists for historical research. Nature on Paper: Documenting Science in Prussia, 1770-1850 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024) follows a different, humbler set of objects that make it possible to trace the global routes and shifting meanings of those natural things: the catalogs, inventories, and other paper tools of information management that form the backbone of collection institutions. Anne Greenwood MacKinney focuses on Prussia from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, a place and time that witnessed the dramatic restructuring of research, government, and public collections toward a closer integration of science, state, and a proto-civil society. The documents at the heart of her study are mediators actively shaping the historical trajectories, values, and meanings of the objects they record, and with pasts and paths of their own. MacKinney also reveals how various stakeholders—in the research community, museum sector, government, and general public—can interact with these documents and thereby shape the world of natural science. By centering the history of natural historical collection paperwork and the agents involved in its production, circulation, and safekeeping, Nature on Paper tells a largely neglected story of a form of scientific labor that transformed the infrastructure of modern research at the turn of the nineteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

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M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2024) 52:44

21 days ago52:44

52:44

This book is available open access here . The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figure out which details of brain function are relevant for understanding its role in causing behavior; after all, the biological brain is a highly energetically efficient basis of cognition in contrast to the massive data centers driving AI that are based on the simplification that brain functionality is just a matter of neuronal action potentials. Chirimuuta, who is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, also argues for a Kantian-inspired view of neuroscientific knowledge called haptic realism, according to which what we can know about the brain is the product of interaction between brains and the scientific methods and aims that guide how we investigate them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

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Anthony Grafton, "Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa" (Harvard UP, 2023) 31:36

23 days ago31:36

31:36

Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Harvard UP, 2023) is a revelatory new account of the magus―the learned magician―and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe. In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus―a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world. Magus details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton explores their methods, the knowledge they produced, the services they provided, and the overlapping political and social milieus to which they aspired―often, the circles of kings and princes. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these erudite men anchored debates about licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical, and the nature of “good” and “bad” magicians. Over time, they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary engineering as well as classical astrology, probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self and exploit the cosmos. Resituating the magus in the social, cultural, and intellectual order of Renaissance Europe, Grafton sheds new light on both the recesses of the learned magician’s mind and the many worlds he inhabited. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

1
Christos Lynteris, "Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography" (MIT Press, 2022) 1:17:33

29 days ago1:17:33

1:17:33

How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pandemic.” In Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography (MIT Press, 2022), Christos Lynteris examines the emergence of epidemic photography during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that led to over twelve million deaths. Unlike medical photography, epidemic photography was not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with exposing the patient's body or medical examinations and operations. Instead, it played a key role in reconceptualizing infectious diseases by visualizing the “pandemic” as a new concept and structure of experience—one that frames and responds to the smallest local outbreak of an infectious disease as an event of global importance and consequence. As the third plague pandemic struck more and more countries, the international circulation of plague photographs in the press generated an unprecedented spectacle of imminent global threat. Nothing contributed to this sense of global interconnectedness, anticipation, and fear more than photography. Exploring the impact of epidemic photography at the time of its emergence, Lynteris highlights its entanglement with colonial politics, epistemologies, and aesthetics, as well as with major shifts in epidemiological thinking and public health practice. He explores the characteristics, uses, and impact of epidemic photography and how it differs from the general corpus of medical photography. The new photography was used not simply to visualize or illustrate a pandemic, but to articulate, respond to, and unsettle key questions of epidemiology and epidemic control, as well as to foster the notion of the “pandemic,” which continues to affect our lives today. Christos Lynteris is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the anthropological and historical examination of epidemics with a particular focus on zoonotic diseases, epidemiological epistemology, visual medical culture, and colonial medicine. His regional expertise includes China and Inner Asia. Professor Lynteris holds the first chair in medical anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Focusing on diseases that spread between animals and humans, his research has been foundational in the establishment of the anthropological study of zoonosis. Combining archival and ethnographic research together with visual methods and critical approaches to medical and epidemiological epistemologies, Professor Lynteris's research seeks to understand how specific zoonotic diseases (SARS, COVID-19, plague) and the broader question of zoonosis shape social and multispecies worlds and are in turn shaped by them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

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Peter J. Bowler, "Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 50:47

7 weeks ago50:47

50:47

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents. Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel . Twitter . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

1
Karenleigh A. Overmann, "The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East" (Gorgias Press, 2024) 10:50

9 weeks ago10:50

10:50

What are numbers, and where do they come from? Based on her groundbreaking study of material devices used for counting in the Ancient Near East, Karenleigh Overmann proposes a novel answer to these timeless questions. Tune in as we talk with Karenleigh Overmann about her book, The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Gorgias Press, 2024). Karenleigh Overmann earned a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Oxford, and is research fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

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Vera Keller, "Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 51:37

9 weeks ago51:37

51:37

How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt do they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the career of German polymath Johann Daniel Major (1634–93), Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Vera Keller uncovers how late seventeenth-century scholars crafted the research university as a haven for critical inquiry in defiance of political and economic pressures. Abandoning the surety of established intellectual practice, this 'experimental century' saw Major and his peers reshaping fragments of knowledge into new perspectives. Across new disciplines, from experimental philosophy to archaeology and museology, they reexamined what knowledge was, who it was for, and how it was to be stored, managed, accessed, judged, and transformed. Although later typecast as Baroque obstacles to be overcome by the Enlightenment, these academics arranged knowledge in dynamic infrastructures that encouraged its further advancement in later generations, including our own. This study examines these seventeenth-century practices as part of a continuous intellectual tradition and reconceptualizes our understanding of the Enlightenment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

1
Pierre Sokolsky, "The Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star" (Columbia UP, 2024) 54:01

10 weeks ago54:01

54:01

On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks and court astronomers recorded the appearance of these dark shapes, interpreting them as omens of things to come. In Western Europe, by contrast, where a cosmology originating with Aristotle prevailed, the Sun was regarded as part of the unchanging celestial realm, and it took observations through telescopes by Galileo and others to establish the reality of solar imperfections. In the nineteenth century, amateur astronomers discovered that sunspots ebb and flow about every eleven years--spurring speculation about their influence on the weather and even the stock market. Exploring these and many other crucial developments, Pierre Sokolsky provides a history of knowledge of the Sun through the lens of sunspots and the solar cycle. He ranges widely across cultures and throughout history, from the earliest recorded observations of sunspots in Chinese annals to satellites orbiting the Sun today, and from worship of the Sun as a deity in ancient times to present-day scientific understandings of stars and their magnetic fields. Considering how various thinkers sought to solve the puzzle of sunspots, Sokolsky sheds new light on key discoveries and the people who made them, as well as their historical and cultural contexts. Fast-paced, comprehensive, and learned, The Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star (Columbia UP, 2024) shows readers our closest star from many new angles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

1
Bruce Lieberman and Niles Eldredge, "Macroevolutionaries: Reflections on Natural History, Paleontology, and Stephen Jay Gould" (Columbia UP, 2024) 40:54

10 weeks ago40:54

40:54

One of the twentieth century's great paleontologists and science writers, Stephen Jay Gould was, for Bruce S. Lieberman and Niles Eldredge, also a close colleague and friend. In Macroevolutionaries: Reflections on Natural History, Paleontology, and Stephen Jay Gould (Columbia UP, 2024), they take up the tradition of Gould's acclaimed essays on natural history, offering a series of wry and insightful reflections on the fields to which they have devoted their careers. Lieberman and Eldredge explore the major features of evolution, or "macroevolution," examining key issues in paleontology and their links to popular culture, philosophy, music, and the history of science. They focus on topics such as punctuated equilibria, mass extinctions, and the history of life--with detours including trilobites, Hollywood stuntmen, coywolves, birdwatching, and New Haven-style pizza. Lieberman and Eldredge's essays showcase their deep knowledge of the fossil record and keen appreciation of the arts and culture while touching on different aspects of Gould's life and work. Ultimately, they show why Gould's writings and perspective are still relevant today, following his lead in using the natural history essay to articulate their view of evolutionary theory and its place in contemporary life. At once thought-provoking and entertaining, Macroevolutionaries is for all readers interested in paleontology, evolutionary biology, and Gould's literary and scientific legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

1
Disability and the History of Science (Osiris, Vol 36) 1:28:29

10 weeks ago1:28:29

1:28:29

This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai. Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science . Jaipreet Virdi is a historian of medicine, technology and disability. Her research and teaching interests include the history of medicine, the history of science, disability history, disability technologies and material/visual culture studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto (2014). Mara Mills is Associate Professor and Ph.D. Director in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is cofounder and Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies; a founding editor of the award-winning journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; and a founding member of the steering committees for the NYU cross-school minors in Science and Society and Disability Studies. Sarah Rose is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she founded and directs the Minor in Disability Studies. There are more than 120 Disability Studies graduates from UTA now. She also co-founded and serves as faculty advisor for UTA Libraries’ Texas Disability History Collection, for which she and Trevor Engel co-curated the Building a Barrier-Free Campus traveling and digitized exhibit. Her book, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s , was published by University of North Carolina Press in 2017 and was awarded the 2018 Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working Class History and the 2018 Disability History Association Outstanding Book Award, among other awards. She has also published with Dr. Joshua Salzmann in LABOR on how baseball players and teams have managed health and fitness and in the Journal of Policy History on disabled veterans’ access to the GI bill and higher education after World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

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Patchen Barss, "The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius" (Basic Books, 2024) 35:16

10 weeks ago35:16

35:16

When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries. However, as Patchen Barss documents in The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius (Basic Books, 2024), success came at a price: He was attuned to the secrets of the universe, but struggled to connect with loved ones, especially the women who care for or worked with him. Both erudite and poetic, The Impossible Man draws on years of research and interviews, as well as previously unopened archives to present a moving portrait of Penrose the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Roger the human being. It reveals not just the extraordinary life of Roger Penrose, but asks who gets to be a genius, and who makes the sacrifices that allow one man to be one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

1
Melissa B. Reynolds, "Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print" (U Chicago Press, 2024) 1:09:53

10 weeks ago1:09:53

1:09:53

What do you do when you feel an itchy throat coming on? You probably head online, first to search for your symptoms and then to evaluate the information you found — just as ordinary 15th and 16th century English people would have sifted through information in their almanacs, medical recipe collections, and astrological tracts. As Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (U Chicago Press, 2024) shows, ordinary English readers learned to assess and evaluate information through ordinary, everyday interactions with inexpensive and practical books. By tracing the creation, proliferation, and reading of such 'practical books,' Melissa Reynolds explores changing attitudes towards medicine and science as well as how readers navigated uncertainty and the unknowable. Through its focus on the production of practical books, Reading Practice also charts changing attitudes towards books, first as manuscripts became less expensive and then as print became imbued with authority. Vivid and precise, Reading Practice should be read by those interested in the history of the book, the history of science, and anyone who has ever consulted Dr. Google (which, let's be honest, is probably everyone). In addition to centering the reading practices of ordinary people, Reading Practice also does a fabulous job explaining exactly what it looks like and takes to work with medieval manuscripts and early printed texts, making it perfect reading for graduate students and those heading into library research. Listeners should also check out the companion website , which contains bibliographic information about the manuscripts and prints used in the project, network analysis of the relationship between printers and book, and data visualizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

New Books in the History of Science

1
Mariam Motamedi Fraser, "Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences" (Manchester UP, 2024) 1:05:34

11 weeks ago1:05:34