Dying To Know - Scientific Epistemology And Narrative In Victorian England - Levine George

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Résumé :
In Dying to know, eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge. This long-awaited book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to bc established and moralized in the nineteenth century? Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die. Dying to know is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirites defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a shareable foret of knowledge.

Biographie:
George Levine is the Kenneth Burke Professor of English and director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of sixteen books, including The Realistic Imagination and Darwin and The Novelists, both published by the University of Chicago Press, as well as Lifebirds.

Sommaire:
["Dying to know","The narrative of scientific epistemology","Dying to know Descartes","Carlyle, Descartes, and objectivity: lessen thy denominator","Autobiography as epistemology: the effacement of self","My life as a machine: Francis Galton, with some reflections on A-R Wallace","Self-effacement revisited: women and scientific autobiography","The test of truth: our mutual friend","Daniel Deronda: a new epistemology","The cartesian hardy: I think, therefore I'm doomed","Daring to know: Karl Pearson and the romance of science","The epistemology of science and art: Pearson and Pater","Objectivity and altruism"]