Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment

by Jessica Riskin

Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was intimately bound up with sensibility. In what she calls a "sentimental empiricism," natural knowledge was taken to rest on a blend of experience and emotion.

Riskin argues that sentimental empiricism brought together ideas and institutions, practices and politics. She shows, for instance, how the study of blindness, led by ideas about the mental and moral role of vision and by cataract surgeries, shaped the first school for the blind; how Benjamin Franklin's electrical physics, ascribing desires to nature, engaged French economic reformers; and how the question of the role of language in science and social life linked disputes over Antoine Lavoisier's new chemical names to the founding of France's modern system of civic education.

Recasting the Age of Reason by stressing its conjunction with the Age of Sensibility, Riskin offers an entirely new perspective on the development of modern science and the history of the Enlightenment.

Genres: History, History Of Science, Science

345 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Riskin tries to bridge the gap between the concept of sensibility, used in literary criticism, and sensitivity, used in neurophysiology, using her notion of the sentimental-emiricist to refer to individuals in France in the fifty years before the Revolution, who took feeling as a warrant for truth. From" I think therefore I am" to "I feel therefore I am" perhaps represents the shift in attitude she attempts to document. Diderot, a scientist and literary figure, is perhaps the prototype. The book consists of 6 rather distinct essays tracking the theme across the period. While some of them were far from my interests, the last chapter, on the Commission investigating Mesmer was very helpful in my effort to understand the emergence of psychological categories at the end of the eighteenth century. It felt like discovering a nugget of gold at the end of a long period of prospecting.