System
The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (Infrastructures)
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Narrated by:
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Tim Andres Pabon
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By:
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Clifford Siskin
About this listen
A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the 14 engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genre - a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called "system" to compete with the essay and the treatise. Drawing on the history of system from Galileo's "message from the stars" and Newton's "system of the world" to today's "computational universe", Siskin illuminates the role that the genre of system has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge.
Previous engagements with systems have involved making them, using them, or imagining better ones. Siskin offers an innovative perspective by investigating system itself. He considers the past and present, moving from the "system of the world" to "a world full of systems". He traces the turn to system in the 17th and 18th centuries, and describes this primary form of Enlightenment as a mediator of political, cultural, and social modernity - pointing to the moment when people began to "blame the system" for working both too well ("you can't beat the system") and not well enough (it always seems to "break down"). Throughout, his touchstones are: what system is and how it has changed; how it has mediated knowledge; and how it has worked in the world.
©2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2016 Gildan Media LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire
- By: Richard Carrier
- Narrated by: Richard Carrier
- Length: 18 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In this extensive sequel to Science Education in the Early Roman Empire, Dr. Richard Carrier explores the social history of scientists in the Roman era. Was science in decline or experiencing a revival under the Romans? What was an ancient scientist thought to be and do? Who were they, and who funded their research? And how did pagans differ from their Christian peers in their views toward science and scientists?
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This Book is a Bombshell
- By James on 06-15-18
By: Richard Carrier
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The Twilight of the American Enlightenment
- The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief
- By: George M. Marsden
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular liberalelites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course.
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Such a relevant book to our current world
- By Adam Shields on 09-14-16
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The Hedgehog and the Fox (Second Edition)
- An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
- By: Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy - editor, Michael Ignatieff - foreword
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 2 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.
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The Fox Who Tried To Be A Hedgehog
- By Rich S. on 12-14-21
By: Isaiah Berlin, and others
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The Invention of Science
- A New History of the Scientific Revolution
- By: David Wootton
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 22 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fascinating history spanning continents and centuries, historian David Wootton offers a lively defense of science, revealing why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history. The Invention of Science goes back 500 years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently.
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A Good Read Spoiled
- By David A. Donnelly on 12-23-16
By: David Wootton
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- By: Thomas S. Kuhn
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were - and still are. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book.
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The problem is not with the book
- By Marcus on 08-09-09
By: Thomas S. Kuhn
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The Art Instinct
- Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
- By: Denis Dutton
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The Art Instinct combines two of the most fascinating and contentious disciplines, art and evolutionary science, in a provocative new work that will revolutionize the way art itself is perceived. Aesthetic taste, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. It's not, as almost all contemporary art criticism and academic theory would have it, "socially constructed".
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A breath of fresh air!
- By Michael on 02-19-14
By: Denis Dutton
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The Master and His Emissary
- The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
- By: Iain McGilchrist
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 27 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain - the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the "rational" side, the superior partner to the right. But is this distinction true? Drawing on a vast body of experimental research, Iain McGilchrist argues while our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master.
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The Master and His Emissary
- By Michael on 11-07-20
By: Iain McGilchrist
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The King of Infinite Space
- Euclid and His Elements
- By: David Berlinski
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Geometry defines the world around us, helping us make sense of everything from architecture to military science to fashion. And for over 2,000 years, geometry has been equated with Euclid's Elements, arguably the most influential book in the history of mathematics. In The King of Infinite Space, renowned mathematics writer David Berlinski provides a concise homage to this elusive mathematician and his staggering achievements.
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Funniest Highest and Fullest math overview
- By Francisco Garcia on 12-12-22
By: David Berlinski
What listeners say about System
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Fred S.
- 11-28-23
If you like nuance then this is for you
Not what I expected, if you want main points from this book just listen to the coda and save the time.
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- Logical Paradox
- 02-09-17
Difficult Read, but Worth It
The only way to accurately describe this book is as a historical and philosophical survey of that human notion we know of as "System". Both as a conceptual tool for organizing and generating knowledge of the world (an explanatory model approximating reality) as well as an actual feature of the organization and behavior of that world, perhaps even fundamental to nature of reality itself as an information system containing many other systems at various scales, Siskin examines the subject with deft analytical and academic energy.
The book is at times earth shakingly profound in the revelations and suppositions put forward relating system to the world as well as to knowledge of the world and the magnificent moments when the author is able to steer what amounts to an intellectual locomotive in such a way as to unify vast strands of thought that serve to hint at tantalizing uniformities and commonalities across the disciplines. The depth of historical evaluation is equally impressive, almost recursive, as we are taking not just through the history of the idea of System, but the history of the idea of systems it relates to the history of ideas and indeed to the historiography of how history emerged as as separate discipline and how that discipline diverged so far from its brethren in both the humanities and the sciences for its phasis on the particular and the peculiar (the outliers) rather than a coherent knowledge system with unifying principles and explanatory forms.
Where the book suffers is a ponderous and dense writing style (even by my standards) that tends to (among other things) repeat the word "system" as a pronoun so often it becomes insufferable.
but, if you can make it through, you will come away with a richer understanding and a wider perspective of just how much is contained in (and promised by) that innocuous, overly repeated word: "system".
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3 people found this helpful
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- Abby T.
- 04-06-18
How very strange.
A complicated, yet beautiful exploration of the architecture of knowledge. I will surely listen to it again, maybe this time at a slower speed.
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- rrwright
- 01-30-17
Unreadable
This author might be an excellent thinker, but as a _writer_ this book represents utter failure by the author. I've rated two stars because there are a few interesting ideas lurking in this book, but the book is so poorly written that you probably would need to have had a few dozen interactive conversations with its author to be able to tease them out. The goal is interesting, but the execution ruins this attempt.
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