Conflicting Values of Inquiry: Ideologies of Epistemology in Early Modern Europe

Product Description


Historical research in previous decades has done a great deal to explore the social and political context of early modern natural and moral inquiries. Particularly since the publication of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's
Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) several studies have attributed epistemological stances and debates to clashes of political and theological ideologies. The present volume suggests that with an awareness of this context, it is now worth turning back to questions of the epistemic content itself. The contributors to the present collection were invited to explore how certain non-epistemic values had been turned into epistemic ones, how they had an effect on epistemic content, and eventually how they became ideologies of knowledge playing various roles in inquiry and application throughout early modern Europe.


Review


"this book is indispensable not only for those who want to know the intellectual panorama of the time, but also for those who want to understand the basis of rationality and historicity that constitutes epistemological thinking associated with ethical-moral development at the dawn of modernity."
Luiz C. Bombassaro, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. In:
Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Winter 2016), pp. 1470-1471.



About the Author


Tamás Demeter is Research Group Leader at the Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and teaches at the University of Pécs, Hungary. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has published widely on the connections of early modern natural and moral philosophies.

Kathryn Murphy, D.Phil. (2009), is Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oriel College, Oxford. Her research focuses on early modern English prose, discourses of knowledge, and the reception of ancient philosophy.

Claus Zittel teaches German literature and philosophy at the Universities of Stuttgart, Frankfurt am Main, and Olsztyn (Poland), and is deputy director of the Stuttgart Research Centre for Text Studies. He has published monographs, editions and many articles on Early Modern Philosophy and Literature and Philosophy, including
The Artist as Reader (Brill 2013).