James Dougal Fleming

The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England (eBook, PDF)

John Wilkins and the Universal Character

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland
• Seitenzahl: 292
• Erscheinungstermin: 26. Oktober 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9783319403014
• Artikelnr.: 46936774

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction.- Mercurial messages: What is information?.- Unreal characters: Orality and technology in seventeenth-century England.- Through a glass, literally: From shorthand to Wilkins's Essay.- The next big thing: How the real character works.- The Circularity: Or, how to end the world.

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)