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The Ends of Knowledge

Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
The Ends of Knowledge brings together scholars, knowledge workers, and activists from diverse fields to explore a central Enlightenment question: what is the ultimate goal or endpoint of knowledge? Amid the transition into the knowledge economy of the Information Age, this collection interrogates whether disciplines still possess inherent purposes and natural conclusions. Essays span AI, biology, Black studies, literary studies, physics, political activism, and disciplinarity itself, proposing new frameworks for understanding knowledge production beyond traditional boundaries.
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Format: Paperback / softback
$11300

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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book is suited for readers interested in the philosophy of knowledge, interdisciplinary studies, and the evolving nature of academic disciplines in the modern knowledge economy. It will appeal particularly to scholars, educators, and activists engaged in critical inquiry across diverse fields.

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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

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 reorganisation of knowledge that characterised 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 conceptualise 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 reorganisation of knowledge production as a whole.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Al Coppola, Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, CUNY, highlights the book's clever central pun, engaging with the concept of knowledge’s 'ends' as both goals and cessation. He praises the editors for assembling a diverse and generative collection that remains open-ended and reflective of the Enlightenment encyclopedia’s spirit.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781350242289

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 29 June 2023

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic

Contributors:

  • Edited by Rachael Scarborough King
  • Edited by Seth Rudy

Audience: Tertiary education

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 12.0mm

Width: 156.0mm

Height: 232.0mm

Weight: 420g

Pages: 272

About the Author

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.

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