The Ends of Knowledge

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ISBN 10: 1350242284 / ISBN 13: 9781350242289

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Ends of Knowledge
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350242284
• ISBN 13: 9781350242289
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Brand New

About this title

Synopsis

Bringing together an exciting group of knowledge workers, scholars and activists from across fields, this book revisits a foundational question of the Enlightenment: what is “the last or furthest end of knowledge”? It is a book about why we do what we do, and how we might know when we are done.

In the reorganization of knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment, disciplines were conceived as having particular “ends,” both in terms of purposes and end-points. As we experience an ongoing shift to the knowledge economy of the Information Age, this collection asks whether we still conceptualize knowledge in this way. Does an individual discipline have both an inherent purpose and a natural endpoint? What do an experiment on a fruit fly, a reading of a poem, and the writing of a line of code have in common?

Focusing on areas as diverse as AI; biology; Black studies; literary studies; physics; political activism; and the concept of disciplinarity itself, contributors uncover a life after disciplinarity for subjects that face immediate threats to the structure if not the substance of their contributions. These essays – whether reflective, historical, eulogistic, or polemical – chart a vital and necessary course towards the reorganization of knowledge production as a whole.

About the Authors

Rachael Scarborough King is Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, USA; she studies the literature and media of the long eighteenth century, with particular interests in newspapers, periodicals, and letters. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures. She completed her Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York University, and her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.

Seth Rudy is Associate Professor and Charles M. Glover Chair of English at Rhodes College, USA, where he studies the history of ideas and encyclopedic knowledge projects of the eighteenth century. He is the author of Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He completed his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York University, and his BFA in Film Production at the Tisch School of the Arts.