The Mind Is Its Own Place

Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4516673
AutoresSteven Shapin (University of California San Diego, autor de correspondencia)
Año1991
Volumen4
Número1
Páginas191-218
Fecha de publicación1991-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaScience in Context (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0269-8897 • E-ISSN: 1474-0664
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s026988970000020x
OpenAlexW2057659458
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas56
Referencias citadas60

The ArgumentIt is not easy to point to the place of knowledge in our culture. More precisely, it is difficult to locate the production of our most valued forms of knowledge, including those of religion, literature and science. A pervasive topos in Western culture, from the Greeks onward, stipulates that the most authentic intellectual agents are the most solitary. The place of knowledge is nowhere in particular and anywhere at all. I sketch some uses of the theme of the solitary philosopher across a broad sweep of history, giving particular attention to its deployment in and around the scientific culture of seventeenth-century England. I argue that the rhetoric of solitude is strongly implicated in individualistic views of society and empiricist portrayals of scientific knowledge. Solitude is a state that symbolically expresses direct engagement with the sources of knowledge - divine and transcendent or natural and empirical. At the same time, solitude publicly expresses disengagement from society, identified as a set of conventions and concerns which act to corrupt knowledge. Hence, the study of the social uses of solitude adds further support to the notion that problems of knowledge and problems of social order are solved together

Argument (complex analysis · Sketch · Solitude · Historical Philosophy and Science · History of Science and Medicine · Philosophy and History of Science