Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian EnglandUniversity of Chicago Press, 2002年9月15日 - 326 頁 "Dying to Know is the work of a distinguished scholar, at the peak of his powers, who is intimately familiar with his materials, and whose knowledge of Victorian fiction and scientific thought is remarkable. This elegant and evocative look at the move toward objectivity first pioneered by Descartes sheds new light on some old and still perplexing problems in modern science." Bernard Lightman, York University, Canada In Dying to Know, eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge. This long-awaited book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the nineteenth century? Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die. Dying to Know is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a shareable form of knowledge. |
內容
The Narrative of Scientific Epistemology | 17 |
Dying to Know Descartes | 44 |
Carlyle Descartes and Objectivity Lessen Thy Denominator | 66 |
Autobiography As Epistemology The Effacement of Self | 85 |
My Life As a Machine Francis Galton with Some Reflections on A R Wallace | 104 |
SelfEffacement Revisited Women and Scientific Autobiography | 126 |
The Test of Truth Our Mutual Friend | 148 |
Daniel Deronda A New Epistemology | 171 |
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affirms argues argument Arthur authority autobiography becomes believe bildungsroman body Carlyle Carlyle's Cartesian claims commitment condition consciousness critics critique culture Daniel Deronda Darwin death Descartes Descartes's desire detachment Dickens Discourse disinterest dying to know dying-to-know embodiment essay ethical Evelyn Fox Keller experience fact feeling fiction Galton George Eliot Grammar of Science Gwendolen Hardy Hardy's Harmon Harré human Huxley Ibid idea ideal imagination implies individual insistence intellectual John Jude Jude the Obscure Karl Pearson kind knowledge Lorraine Daston Martineau Mary Somerville material metaphor Mill Mill's mind modern moral Mordecai Mutual Friend narrative of scientific nature nineteenth-century novel objectivity paradox passion Pater philosophy positivism possible problem protagonists question rational reality requires rhetoric Sartor Resartus says scientific epistemology scientist seems self-effacement sense skepticism social story T. H. Huxley Theodore Porter theory things thinking thought tion tradition transcendence truth uniformitarianism University Press Victorian Webb Whewell William Whewell women writing
熱門章節
第 7 頁 - But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witnessbox narrating my experience on oath.