What Reason Promises : Essays on Reason, Nature and History.

Print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Frontmatter -- 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.

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.

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