Date/Time
Date(s) - 13 Nov 2014
6:15 PM - 6:15 PM
Location
612 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University
Category(ies) No Categories
This Thursday, November 13, David Simon (University of Chicago) will be speaking at Columbia’s Department of English Early Modern Colloquium.
David Simon (University of Chicago)
Idylls of the Mind: Robert Boyle, Izaak Walton, and the Scientific Imagination
This paper explores the development of a nontechnical literature of experiment in which easy tranquility lends assistance to the quest for knowledge. Contesting the motifs of conscientiousness and meticulousness around which our understanding of England’s scientific revolution is organized, I describe the interest of natural philosophers and their intellectual kin in discomposure, carelessness, and the mind’s propensity to drift. How does the invention of method accommodate an appetite for languorous inattention? What role does literature play in the investigation of states of feeling and their perceptual corollaries?
The talk will take place in 612 Philosophy Hall, starting at 6:15pm.