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The Ends of Knowledge

Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences

Rachael Scarborough King Seth Rudy

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Paperback

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English
Bloomsbury Academic
25 August 2023
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.

Edited by:   ,
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 234mm,  Width: 156mm,  Spine: 25mm
Weight:   454g
ISBN:   9781350242289
ISBN 10:   1350242284
Pages:   272
Publication Date:  
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Primary
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

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.

Reviews for The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences

This book is organized around a central pun like all great works of scholarship. It queries the ends of knowledge, but here the end might mean telos, completion or cessation. The editors have assembled a genuinely productive and heterogeneous collection, but they wisely acknowledge that their volume is open-ended, unfinished and generative in the spirit of the Enlightenment encyclopedia project which provides its inspiration and warrant. - Al Coppola, Associate Professor of English, John Jay College, CUNY, USA


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