B iography as a genre, though immensely popular in the public arena, finds little favor in the academy. For some, it assumes that intellectual or cultural accomplishments have sprung from the mind of an isolated genius, and few historians will admit to succumbing to a “great man” theory of history. In some intellectual quarters, however, a contrary attitude reigns: some historians explore scientific works by placing them in sublime isolation from their personal and cultural surroundings. These historians commit the “great books” fallacy, namely, that the work of a mastermind speaks for itself; no personal context is needed for its peculiar features to ring forth. This latter attitude was brought home to me several years ago, when I was trying to come to terms with William James. I had occasion to read a scholar who had written on James. He cautioned: “To provide a proper perspective for the study of James . . . attention must be diverted from his life, however interesting, to his published philosophy.” I wondered what kind of perspective could be gained by neglecting William James the individual. James himself, I thought, would have utterly rejected that admonition. In the Varieties of Religious Experience,
{"title":"The Role of Biography in Intellectual History","authors":"R. Richards","doi":"10.1086/693727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693727","url":null,"abstract":"B iography as a genre, though immensely popular in the public arena, finds little favor in the academy. For some, it assumes that intellectual or cultural accomplishments have sprung from the mind of an isolated genius, and few historians will admit to succumbing to a “great man” theory of history. In some intellectual quarters, however, a contrary attitude reigns: some historians explore scientific works by placing them in sublime isolation from their personal and cultural surroundings. These historians commit the “great books” fallacy, namely, that the work of a mastermind speaks for itself; no personal context is needed for its peculiar features to ring forth. This latter attitude was brought home to me several years ago, when I was trying to come to terms with William James. I had occasion to read a scholar who had written on James. He cautioned: “To provide a proper perspective for the study of James . . . attention must be diverted from his life, however interesting, to his published philosophy.” I wondered what kind of perspective could be gained by neglecting William James the individual. James himself, I thought, would have utterly rejected that admonition. In the Varieties of Religious Experience,","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132277373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the spring of 2016 the eminent medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (who, likeme, has spent much of his career in contact with China) convened a day-longmeeting at the American Academy to address the crisis in area studies and foreign-language learning. Thirty or so concerned professionals showed up: language teachers; historians; professors of literatures bothanglophoneandother, bothancient and modern; linguists; political scientists; anthropologists; sociologists; specialists in public health—and we could easily have drawn on the population of natural scientists, engineers, and computer researchers,whose labs are asmultinational as any place on earth. Given that this was a national and not a supranational academy, we focused on shortcomings in theUnited States.We talked about the receding importance of foreign-language study as recognized in college entrance and graduation requirements; about the plight of the humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts generally; about the job anxiety that pulls students away from time-consuming language classes and in-country experiences; about the creeping English-only norms of globalization; about the failure of the overburdened primary-education system in
{"title":"Languages as Knowledge Reservoirs","authors":"Haun Saussy","doi":"10.1086/693382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693382","url":null,"abstract":"In the spring of 2016 the eminent medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (who, likeme, has spent much of his career in contact with China) convened a day-longmeeting at the American Academy to address the crisis in area studies and foreign-language learning. Thirty or so concerned professionals showed up: language teachers; historians; professors of literatures bothanglophoneandother, bothancient and modern; linguists; political scientists; anthropologists; sociologists; specialists in public health—and we could easily have drawn on the population of natural scientists, engineers, and computer researchers,whose labs are asmultinational as any place on earth. Given that this was a national and not a supranational academy, we focused on shortcomings in theUnited States.We talked about the receding importance of foreign-language study as recognized in college entrance and graduation requirements; about the plight of the humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts generally; about the job anxiety that pulls students away from time-consuming language classes and in-country experiences; about the creeping English-only norms of globalization; about the failure of the overburdened primary-education system in","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117141771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A bout five years ago I proposed to my friend Benjamin Elman, the Princeton intellectual historian of late-imperial China, that we consider organizing a comparative project on China and India. This was not my first foray into comparative studies; I had actually done an earlier project with Ben on the comparative intellectual history of the early-modern world and had thought comparatively about India and Rome in the Classical period for a book on Sanskrit cosmopolitanism published a decade ago. Why I persist in such enterprises when, as you’ll hear, comparison so befuddles me I can’t fully explain. But nowhere I amagain presenting ideas I amvery uncertain of, someof themcontainingwords I cannot evenpronounce. My befuddlement with comparison is primarily methodological and epistemological in nature. But I’m also befuddled by its stunted presence in our disciplinary discourses—the first of several conundrums I want to share here. This is palpably the case in comparative literature, which seems embarrassed and annoyed by the category baked into its academic identity. But theproblem isnotpeculiar to that field. Actually the disquiet with comparison seems to be ubiquitous—
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I have training in classics , Greek and Roman cultures, which is the main ground of my empirical work. But there are other dimensions in my research: the first is comparison. For me, comparison relies on a basic assumption: looking at my own field, at my own discipline and research topics, from a remote vantage point is the best way to shed a new light on them, to look at them from a different perspective, to raise new questions, even on the most familiar issues. Comparison is an intellectual practice because it provokes disorientation: familiar points of reference vanish and certainties may be questioned. So comparison is the first major dimension in my work. The second dimension is an interest in fundamental and theoretical issues: What is knowledge? How is it produced? How can a person, a statement, an artifact or a written text, a room or a building, an institution be a repository of knowledge? And how could this knowledge circulate within a society, through geographical space, through time, and sometimes through cultures and languages?
{"title":"Lieux de savoir: Places and Spaces in the History of Knowledge","authors":"Christian Jacob","doi":"10.1086/692293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/692293","url":null,"abstract":"I have training in classics , Greek and Roman cultures, which is the main ground of my empirical work. But there are other dimensions in my research: the first is comparison. For me, comparison relies on a basic assumption: looking at my own field, at my own discipline and research topics, from a remote vantage point is the best way to shed a new light on them, to look at them from a different perspective, to raise new questions, even on the most familiar issues. Comparison is an intellectual practice because it provokes disorientation: familiar points of reference vanish and certainties may be questioned. So comparison is the first major dimension in my work. The second dimension is an interest in fundamental and theoretical issues: What is knowledge? How is it produced? How can a person, a statement, an artifact or a written text, a room or a building, an institution be a repository of knowledge? And how could this knowledge circulate within a society, through geographical space, through time, and sometimes through cultures and languages?","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"2 17","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132939681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
T he invitation to step back and reflect on my own research and to consider its relation to my field in a broader sense has me standing in a three-way mirror, reflecting, first, my own immediate interest in Babylonian intellectual culture; second, how cuneiform knowledge, especially of the heavenly phenomena, relates to the history of science; and third, how politics have shaped and continue to shape our knowledge of the ancient Near East, from the beginnings of its rediscovery in the period of the British and French colonial presence in the region to the present day specter of ongoing looting and the out-and-out destruction of Near Eastern antiquities. Our formation of knowledge about the distant past is all too entangled with the present. Even under the best of circumstances what is excavated from the lands that were the ancient Near East represents a mere fraction of that historical reality, as Daniel Smail in this volume vividly describes with reference to the European medieval world. For the ancient Near Eastern context, things have not substantially changed since A. L. Oppenheim pessimistically stated:
{"title":"These Bones Live!","authors":"F. Rochberg","doi":"10.1086/692135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/692135","url":null,"abstract":"T he invitation to step back and reflect on my own research and to consider its relation to my field in a broader sense has me standing in a three-way mirror, reflecting, first, my own immediate interest in Babylonian intellectual culture; second, how cuneiform knowledge, especially of the heavenly phenomena, relates to the history of science; and third, how politics have shaped and continue to shape our knowledge of the ancient Near East, from the beginnings of its rediscovery in the period of the British and French colonial presence in the region to the present day specter of ongoing looting and the out-and-out destruction of Near Eastern antiquities. Our formation of knowledge about the distant past is all too entangled with the present. Even under the best of circumstances what is excavated from the lands that were the ancient Near East represents a mere fraction of that historical reality, as Daniel Smail in this volume vividly describes with reference to the European medieval world. For the ancient Near Eastern context, things have not substantially changed since A. L. Oppenheim pessimistically stated:","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127083285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A n ugly duckling , I grewupintoaphilologist.Myschooling— I was the last of the Victorians—was focused on the classical languages (when we weren’t playing rugby or cricket). Pupils were streamed according to their ability in Latin and Greek (science was only for dummies), and the height of sophistication for us at age 16—this was the 1970s, mind—was translating Racine from French into Greek verse. I studied only Greek, Latin, and English through my last and most formative years of high school, before reading classics at Cambridge. I am still proud enough to be called a philologist, especially now that it has become a really trendy moniker again. Through a process too long and complicated to tell, however—but much indebted to Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, who has written about the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of themind for this journal—I have been for the last six years thedirector of what has become the largest and most active interdisciplinary humanities and social science research center around (CRASSH): we currently have forty-three postdoctoral fellows on long-term contracts,
{"title":"How Interdisciplinary Is God?","authors":"S. Goldhill","doi":"10.1086/691679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/691679","url":null,"abstract":"A n ugly duckling , I grewupintoaphilologist.Myschooling— I was the last of the Victorians—was focused on the classical languages (when we weren’t playing rugby or cricket). Pupils were streamed according to their ability in Latin and Greek (science was only for dummies), and the height of sophistication for us at age 16—this was the 1970s, mind—was translating Racine from French into Greek verse. I studied only Greek, Latin, and English through my last and most formative years of high school, before reading classics at Cambridge. I am still proud enough to be called a philologist, especially now that it has become a really trendy moniker again. Through a process too long and complicated to tell, however—but much indebted to Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, who has written about the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of themind for this journal—I have been for the last six years thedirector of what has become the largest and most active interdisciplinary humanities and social science research center around (CRASSH): we currently have forty-three postdoctoral fellows on long-term contracts,","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114507085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article examines the state of the history of science as a discipline and its objectives in the context of its origins and current transformations. The establishment of this discipline and its assumptions about the nature of science together with its goals and structure are briefly discussed. The history of science became a discipline only at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, and its start is associated with the work of chemist James Conant, a high-level administrator in Manhattan project who was also president of Harvard University and a high-ranking bureaucrat. It was based also on the narrative developed by Alfred North Whitehead, Edwin Burtt, Alexandre Koyré and other historians of science, which claimed modern science was the creator of modernity and a necessary condition for the geopolitical domination of the West. In that understanding, modern science meant science since the time of Galileo and Newton. The author provides a critical analysis of this foundation narrative for the discipline and of its consequences while showing how contemporary history of science has overcome it. The contradiction between modernism and historicism has been resolved in favor of the latter. A key role in this was played by the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, which held the potential to undo the presumed monolithic unity of science by rejecting teleology and introducing incommensurability and discontinuities into the historical process. By rejecting explanation of the knowledge of other times and places in terms of modern science, the discipline faced a radical multiplication of independent types of knowledge. This was facilitated by the reorientation to the study of knowledge practices that took place in the 1980s. As a result, the subject matter of the history of science began to erode, and this launched discussion of the prospects for a transition to a history of knowledge based on the study of practices. The sweep of this change of vision is illustrated by the example of classifying sciences according to both their subject matter and the similarities in their research practices. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of the new discipline along with its prospects and the challenges it faces are discussed.
本文考察了作为一门学科的科学史的状态及其在起源和当前转变背景下的目标。本文简要讨论了这门学科的建立及其对科学本质的假设，以及它的目标和结构。科学史直到20世纪下半叶才成为一门学科，它的开始与化学家詹姆斯·科南特的工作有关，他是曼哈顿计划的高级管理人员，也是哈佛大学的校长和高级官僚。它还基于阿尔弗雷德·诺斯·怀特黑德、埃德温·伯特、亚历山大·科伊罗伊特和其他科学史家的叙述，他们声称现代科学是现代性的创造者，是西方地缘政治统治的必要条件。在这种理解下，现代科学意味着自伽利略和牛顿时代以来的科学。作者对这一学科的基础叙事及其后果进行了批判性分析，同时展示了当代科学史是如何克服它的。现代主义和历史主义之间的矛盾得到了解决，有利于后者。托马斯·库恩(Thomas Kuhn)的《科学革命的结构》(the Structure of Scientific Revolutions)在这方面发挥了关键作用，该书通过拒绝目的论，并在历史过程中引入不可通约性和不连续性，有可能推翻科学的单一统一性。由于拒绝用现代科学来解释其他时代和地方的知识，这门学科面临着独立知识类型急剧增加的局面。20世纪80年代发生的对知识实践研究的重新定位促进了这一点。结果，科学史的主题开始受到侵蚀，这引发了向以实践研究为基础的知识史过渡的前景的讨论。根据学科内容和研究实践的相似性对科学进行分类的例子说明了这种看法变化的影响范围。最后，讨论了这门新学科的优势和劣势，以及它的发展前景和面临的挑战。
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T hose who undertake a project studying and writing about Charles Darwin are rarely the same afterward. Darwin has a way, that is, of making things seem both permanent and transitory. No matter how deeply immersed one might become in his books, notebooks, letters, and scribblings, the man and his mind still bear enigmas. Indeed, the closer we get, the less adequate our perceptions and analyses seem to be. There is always something that escapes, that melts into distance, no matter which end of the telescope we look through. Many scholars and authors who study Darwin’s work become addicted to their subject. They feel, perhaps, that they have gained only a beginning on higher matters related to the origins of modern science. Others are pursued by the shadows of things they should have said, insights they should have had, ideas they did not pursue for reasons of belated courage or disciplinary loyalty. Still others are drawn to the minutiae of Darwin’s life, hoping to discover under the stone of a small fact some new revelation about how Origin of
{"title":"The Darwin Complex","authors":"S. Montgomery","doi":"10.1086/692312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/692312","url":null,"abstract":"T hose who undertake a project studying and writing about Charles Darwin are rarely the same afterward. Darwin has a way, that is, of making things seem both permanent and transitory. No matter how deeply immersed one might become in his books, notebooks, letters, and scribblings, the man and his mind still bear enigmas. Indeed, the closer we get, the less adequate our perceptions and analyses seem to be. There is always something that escapes, that melts into distance, no matter which end of the telescope we look through. Many scholars and authors who study Darwin’s work become addicted to their subject. They feel, perhaps, that they have gained only a beginning on higher matters related to the origins of modern science. Others are pursued by the shadows of things they should have said, insights they should have had, ideas they did not pursue for reasons of belated courage or disciplinary loyalty. Still others are drawn to the minutiae of Darwin’s life, hoping to discover under the stone of a small fact some new revelation about how Origin of","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128567164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I started out as a classicist using quite a bit of anthropology to try to get a handle on the reasoning practices—the modes of argumentation—in early Greek thought. It was only at quite an advanced age that, stimulated, or rather provoked, by the Chinese students whom I taught at Beijing Daxue (Peking University) in 1987, I saw that I really had to master classical Chinese to make the most of the evidently startling similarities and differences between ancient Chinese and Greek modes of reasoning. As I delved further into the commonalities and the specificities of human reasoning in different cultures and at different periods, I was drawn further and further into adjacent and sometimes indeed quite distant fields, evolutionary and developmental psychology, paleontology, ethology, linguistics, cognitive science, even neurophysiology. My “field,” insofar as I can call my interdisciplinary and crosscultural explorations a field, has been transformed in recent years, and this opportunity to contribute to KNOW provides the occasion for me to take stock of where I think we have got to and where we go from here. Contemplating recent work in those diverse disciplines
{"title":"Where Now for the Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Study of the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind?","authors":"G. Lloyd","doi":"10.1086/692007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/692007","url":null,"abstract":"I started out as a classicist using quite a bit of anthropology to try to get a handle on the reasoning practices—the modes of argumentation—in early Greek thought. It was only at quite an advanced age that, stimulated, or rather provoked, by the Chinese students whom I taught at Beijing Daxue (Peking University) in 1987, I saw that I really had to master classical Chinese to make the most of the evidently startling similarities and differences between ancient Chinese and Greek modes of reasoning. As I delved further into the commonalities and the specificities of human reasoning in different cultures and at different periods, I was drawn further and further into adjacent and sometimes indeed quite distant fields, evolutionary and developmental psychology, paleontology, ethology, linguistics, cognitive science, even neurophysiology. My “field,” insofar as I can call my interdisciplinary and crosscultural explorations a field, has been transformed in recent years, and this opportunity to contribute to KNOW provides the occasion for me to take stock of where I think we have got to and where we go from here. Contemplating recent work in those diverse disciplines","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131158407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
W hen i think about knowledge, I find it virtually impossible to avoid thinking about uncertainty. Uncertainty adds a new dimension to discussions of knowledge that are especially important in economic analyses when we seek a better understanding ofmarkets and the resulting outcomes for society and quantitative answers to important policy questions. It has been important in my research and also more generally in economic scholarship to take inventory, not only of what we know, but also of the gaps to this knowledge. Thus, part of economic research assesses what we know about what we do not know and how we confront what we do not know. Uncertainty matters not only for how economic researchers interpret and use evidence, but also for how the consumers and enterprises that we seek to model confront the future. Modeling systems as they play out over time is pervasive in many scientific disciplines, including economics. To use this approach to address real-world problems requires thatwe impose a specific structure on the models, guided by economic analysis and empirical evi-
{"title":"Uncertainty in Economic Analysis and the Economic Analysis of Uncertainty","authors":"L. Hansen","doi":"10.1086/692519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/692519","url":null,"abstract":"W hen i think about knowledge, I find it virtually impossible to avoid thinking about uncertainty. Uncertainty adds a new dimension to discussions of knowledge that are especially important in economic analyses when we seek a better understanding ofmarkets and the resulting outcomes for society and quantitative answers to important policy questions. It has been important in my research and also more generally in economic scholarship to take inventory, not only of what we know, but also of the gaps to this knowledge. Thus, part of economic research assesses what we know about what we do not know and how we confront what we do not know. Uncertainty matters not only for how economic researchers interpret and use evidence, but also for how the consumers and enterprises that we seek to model confront the future. Modeling systems as they play out over time is pervasive in many scientific disciplines, including economics. To use this approach to address real-world problems requires thatwe impose a specific structure on the models, guided by economic analysis and empirical evi-","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115913882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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