Suchergebnisse

This article examines the connection between early scientific ideas and It-Narratives in Britain over the long eighteenth century. A set of It-Narratives - fictional texts narrated by, or centred on, non-human entities like things or animals - will be read against the attempt to detect the voice of natural things by a number of early-modern experimental and natural philosophers. It will be argued that, although causal links are hard to prove, there is a degree of epistemic vicinity between these early scientific ideas and It-Narratives. In particular, it will be shown how in both disciplines fiction helped contemplate the possibility that non-human knowledge is more reliable than human-derived one.

Reviews of Miller, Reading Popular Newtonianism: Print, the Principia, and the Dissemination of Newtonian Science, University of Virginia Press 2018; Jacoud (ed.), Économie politique et politique. Textes saint-simoniens (1830-1831), Classiques Garnier 2019; Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802, Cambridge UP 2019; Fioravanti, Controllare il potere. Il mandato imperativo e la revoca degli eletti (XVIII-XX secolo), Viella 2020.