James Dougal Fleming

Broschiertes Buch

The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England

John Wilkins and the Universal Character

Beschreibung

This book examines the seventeenth-century project for a "real" or "universal" character: a scientific and objective code. Focusing on the Essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (1668) of the polymath John Wilkins, Fleming provides a detailed explanation of how a real character actually was supposed to work. He argues that the period movement should not be understood as a curious episode in the history of language, but as an illuminating avatar of information technology. A non-oral code, supposedly amounting to a script of things, the character was to support scientific discourse through a universal database, in alignment with cosmic truths. In all these ways, J.D. Fleming argues, the world of the character bears phenomenological comparison to the world of modern digital information-what has been called the infosphere.

Autor

James Dougal Fleming is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He studies the history and theory of interpretation and understanding. In 2012, he co-founded the international conference series Scientiae: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World. This is his third book.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan / Springer International Publishing / Springer, Berlin
• Artikelnr. des Verlages: 978-3-319-82073-6
• Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017
• Seitenzahl: 308
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Juni 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 210mm x 148mm x 17mm
• Gewicht: 414g
• ISBN-13: 9783319820736
• ISBN-10: 3319820737
• Artikelnr.: 53571479

Rezensionen

"Fleming's is an engaging ... book that provides an important addition to existing scholarship on the oddly early modern preoccupation with the need for a universal language." (Allison B. Kavey, Metascience, September 5, 2019)