Overview
- Offers a very interdisciplinary approach, bringing together philosophers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, technical experts, and artists.
- Includes illustrative visuals.
- Confronts central questions of today’s global condition: What are the technologies, myths, and aesthetic styles for depicting and realizing knowledge of the universe and universal knowledge.
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About this book
Current obsessions in information technology, communications theory, and digital culture often concern the value and possibility of a grand accumulation of universally accessible forms of knowledge: total libraries, open data bases, ubiquitous computing, and ‘smart’ technologies. These obsessions have important social and philosophical origins, and they raise profound questions about the very nature of knowledge and its organization. This volume’s contributors draw on the histories of maps and of encyclopedias, worldviews and visionary collections, to make sense of the crucial relation between the way the world is known and how it might be displayed and transformed.
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Keywords
Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Visions: How Aesthetics and Museology Affect the Ways in Which Worlds can be Shown and Known
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Worlds: How the Performance of Cosmologies can Change the Way the Moral History of the World is Told and Understood
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Economies: How Different Models of Knowledge and Their Contents Matter to Politics and Society
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
John Tresch is Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author of The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon, among other works.
Pasquale Gagliardi, former Professor of Sociology of Organizations at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy, is now Secretary General of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, Italy. He is the author of Symbols & Artifacts. Views of the Corporate Landscape and Le imprese come culture, among other books.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge
Editors: Simon Schaffer, John Tresch, Pasquale Gagliardi
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Fondazione Giorgio Cini onlus 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-42594-8Published: 24 May 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-82615-8Published: 22 June 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-42595-5Published: 15 May 2017
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 271
Number of Illustrations: 25 b/w illustrations, 32 illustrations in colour
Topics: Philosophy of Technology, Literature and Technology/Media, Computer Appl. in Arts and Humanities, Popular Science in Humanities / Arts, Geographical Information Systems/Cartography, Quantum Field Theories, String Theory