The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick
- ISBN-10
- 022652826X
- ISBN-13
- 9780226528267
- Category
- Philosophy
- Pages
- 548
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2018-02-08
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Author
- Jessica Riskin
Description
Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science. The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a “divine engineer.” Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines. The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science—and even what it means to be alive.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2016-03-10
- 548 pages
- Paperback
- University of Chicago Press
-
- 2016-03-10
- 544 pages
- Ebook
- University of Chicago Press
Similar books
-
Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment
By Jessica RiskinEmpiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was intimately bound up with sensibility.
-
The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present
By Joanne Reitano... 1991), 107–116; Barbara Sinclair Deckard, The Women's Movement: Political, Socioeconomic and Psychological Issues ... Cannato, Ungovernable City, 504–512; Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett, City For Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of ...
-
Misconceiving Merit: Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion in Academic Science and Engineering
By Mary Blair-Loy, Erin A. CechMisperceiving merit, excellence, and devotion in academic STEM -- The cultural construction of merit in academic STEM -- The work devotion schema and its consequences -- Mismeasuring merit : the schema of scientific excellence as a ...
-
Clock Dance: A novel
By Anne TylerGo west a ways and then north a ways. But Towson itself was a maze of small streets, not easily sorted out. Denise's hair had the bruised-fruit smell of her shampoo, which Willa had helped her suds up last night at the kitchen sink.
-
A History of America in 100 Maps
By Susan SchultenLET THERE BE LIGHT Additional sources: James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of ... THE TERROR OF AIDS Additional sources: Abraham Verghese, Steven L. Berk, and Felix Sarubbi, “Urbs in Rure: Human ...
-
The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations
By John McCain, Mark Salter... our staffs had written and introduced in 2005, working with colleagues Chuck Hagel, Mel Martinez, Lindsey Graham, and prominent conservative Sam Brownback. The House had passed a very different immigration bill near the end of 2005.
-
Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World
By Benjamin ReissIn lyrical prose, he leads readers from bedrooms and laboratories to factories and battlefields to Henry David Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, telling the stories of troubled sleepers, hibernating peasants, sleepwalking preachers, ...
-
A Restless Truth
By Freya MarskeA Restless Truth is the second entry in Freya Marske’s beloved, award-winning Last Binding trilogy, the queer historical fantasy series that began with A Marvellous Light. Magic! Murder! Shipboard romance!
-
Newton's Clock: Chaos in the Solar System
By Ivars PetersonRelates the history of the human search for an understanding of the motions of the moon and planets against the backdrop of the stars
-
Temporary People
By Deepak UnnikrishnanThis is why novels matter.” —Susan Hans O’Connor, Penguin Bookshop (Sewickley, PA) “Deepak Unnikrishnan uses linguistic pyrotechnics to tell the story of forced transience in the Arabian Peninsula, where citizenship can never be ...