Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725

This study shows that modernity has its origins in the advancement of knowledge, and not in the Scientific Revolution.

Vera Keller (Author)

9781107110137, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 November 2015

310 pages, 12 b/w illus.
23.6 x 16 x 2.4 cm, 0.63 kg

'In this erudite work Keller traces the long transition, from the Scientific Revolution to the cusp of the Enlightenment, of what Francis Bacon once described as a 'wish list' of desiderata, often since tied to early modern notions of usefulness. This is a tour de force, an impressive reach into Continental sources seldom related to the creation of Western European academies of science and refining the notion of a public interest.' Larry Stewart, Isis

Many studies relate modern science to modern political and economic thought. Using one shift in order to explain the other, however, has begged the question of modernity's origins. New scientific and political reasoning emerged simultaneously as controversial forms of probabilistic reasoning. Neither could ground the other. They both rejected logical systems in favor of shifting, incomplete, and human-oriented forms of knowledge which did not meet accepted standards of speculative science. This study follows their shared development by tracing one key political stratagem for linking human desires to the advancement of knowledge: the collaborative wish list. Highly controversial at the beginning of the seventeenth century, charismatic desiderata lists spread across Europe, often deployed against traditional sciences. They did not enter the academy for a century but eventually so shaped the deep structures of research that today this once controversial genre appears to be a musty and even pedantic term of art.

1. Collecting the future in the early modern past
Part I. Origins: 2. Knowledge in ruins
3. A charlatan's promise
Part II. Inventing the Wish List: 4. Jakob Bornitz and the joy of things
5. Francis Bacon's new world of sciences
6. Things fall apart: desiderata in the Hartlib circle
7. Rebelling against useful knowledge
Part III. Institutionalizing Desire: 8. Restoring societies: the Orphean charms of science
9. What men want: the private and public interests of the Royal Society
10. Enemy camps: desiderata and priority disputes
11. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the hubris of the wish list
12. Georg Hieronymus Welsch's fiction of consensus
13. Wish lists enter the Academy: a new intellectual economy
14. No final frontiers.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], Economic history [KCZ], History of ideas [JFCX], Social & political philosophy [HPS], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH]