What Reason Promises: Essays on Reason, Nature and History

✍ Scribed by Wendy Doniger (editor); Peter Galison (editor); Susan Neiman (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 302
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This collection demonstrates the range of approaches that some of the leading scholars of our day take to basic questions at the intersection of the natural and human worlds. The essays focus on three interlocking categories: Reason stakes a bigger territory than the enclosed yard of universal rules. Nature expands over a far larger region than an eternal category of the natural. And history refuses to be confined to claims of an unencumbered truth of how things happened.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Processional Poem: If we could know
Introduction
Reason Expanded
Is Reason Defensible?
The Natural and the Moral Order: What’s to Blame?
Rationality for Dummies?
Objectivity and the Theory of the Archetype
Thus We See: Objectivity and Archaeology
Love =
Medieval Miracles as Evidence
Myth, Reason, and Rationality
Nature Enframed
Dwelling Under the Sea, or the Wonder of a Glass Sponge
Miss Fielde’s Nests
Revisiting Mein Weltbild
Knowledge and Rational Action: The Economization of Environment, and After
Galilei’s Spiral Scribbles, Campanella and Fludd
Heraclitus Fragment B123 DK
Some Comments on Emergence
Anthropomorphism and Science Fiction
Empirical Observation and Embodied Nature in Sixteenth-century South India
History Refracted
Limits of Localism: The Scale of Sight
Discipline(s)
Good Company: Spinoza the Traditionalist and Some Unexpected Friends
Historicizing Novelty
Literary Knowledge between Translation and Migration: The Case of Dostoevsky in Israel
Crab Nebulous
Reason, Nature, Metaphor
A Page at the Orchestra
Athanasius Kircher on the Beauty of Knowing Everything
The Note
Epilogue: “Man, That Woman Can Talk!”
Recessional Poem: “Josefa de Ayala/Josepha von Óbidos (1630–1684): Stilleben, ca. 1660–1670”
Contributors
Curriculum Vitae of Lorraine Daston
Index of Authors and Subjects