Jessica Riskin is professor of history at Stanford University and author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
"The Restless Clock is a work of high scholarly order. Considering
its chronological and thematic embrace, this study makes for a
challenging scholarly undertaking. The result is both impressive
and rewarding. This book is the combined product of Riskin's
penchant for meticulous research as well as her judicious choices
and penetrating readings of sources. She uncovers a rich and
compelling story that should interest all historians and
philosophers of science as well as scientists."-- "Metascience"
"The Restless Clock is gorgeous and erudite, full of flute-playing
androids and defecating ducks, animal spirits and invisible forces.
It explores the hardest problems: where does life come from, and
how is it that thoughts seem to dance out of grey matter? This is a
book that brings history and language to bear on contemporary
science--an important thing in itself in an age where science
sometimes looks set to obliterate the humanities."-- "Literary
Review"
"The Restless Clock examines more than four centuries of debate
over the extent to which living beings can be understood as
governed by 'mechanism, ' and in the process it reorients our
understanding of some of the most important themes and individuals
in the Western canon during this period, including the thought of
Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Lamarck, and Darwin, plus contemporaries
such as Dennett, Dawkins, and Gould, among others. Riskin has
written a work of tremendous intellectual scope and
accomplishment."-- "Ken Alder, author of The Lie Detectors"
"The Restless Clock unravels the history of thinking about agency
in the history of modern science so as to determine how mechanism
and passivity became the dominant paradigm. In this expansive
work--which draws on primary sources, correspondences between
intellectual radicals, and archival materials from across the
Western world--Riskin expertly demonstrates not only how the
principle of passivity came to dominate modern science in the first
place but also how this principle has influenced contemporary
science. In taking on the problem of agency as supposedly banished
from modern science, she compels us to think about how agency is
actually essential in and to nature. Riskin captivatingly tells the
story of this "centuries-long argument" over agency with the
patience, precision, and the profound depth of explanation that
history demands. The Restless Clock provides a much-needed
investigation of how scientific understandings of material reality
have been undergirded by historical understandings and calls for
more deliberate historical analysis not only in scientific work,
but also in critical analyses of scientific discourse and ideology.
Such a work deepens our comprehension and awareness of the
taken-for-granted ideologies that underpin modern science and,
subsequently, the contemporary challenges posed to it by movements
such as new materialisms. The Restless Clock will become a frequent
reference for anyone interested in the matter of matter."--
"PopMatters"
"[M]uch of the intellectual energy of the modern era has been
devoted to figuring out whether the non-human world is alive or
dead, active or passive, full of agency or wholly without it.
Jessica Riskin's extraordinary book The Restless Clock tells that
vital and almost wholly neglected story.... The body of powerful,
influential, but now utterly neglected ideas explored in The
Restless Clock might illuminate for many scientists and many
philosophers a few of their pervasive blind spots. 'By recognizing
the historical roots of the almost unanimous conviction (in
principle if not in practice) that science must not attribute any
kind of agency to natural phenomena, and recuperating the
historical presence of a competing tradition, we can measure the
limits of current scientific discussion, and possibly, think beyond
them.'"
-- "Education & Culture: A Critical Review"
"Astonishing. The Restless Clock...has seriously altered my
understanding of the last five hundred years of intellectual and
cultural history, and has significantly intensified my belief that
the only truly theological account of modernity is one deeply
immersed in the technological history of this past
half-millennium."-- "The New Atlantis"
"In The Restless Clock, Jessica Riskin brings a fresh view to the
historical discourse around the use of mechanical metaphors in
biological thought. Using agency as her theoretical starting point,
Riskin traces a line through the last six centuries of biological
thought with thorough evidence and analysis."-- "Isis"
"In this impressive cultural and intellectual narrative of the
sciences of life and the techniques of mechanics, Riskin shows
decisively how a richer and broader history of such sciences offers
indispensable lessons for controversies surrounding agency and
purpose in our understanding of the world. The Restless Clock
explores fascinating projects launched by medieval churchmen and
Renaissance artisans, enlightened philosophers and modern
experimenters. It documents the construction of automata and
experimentation in biology, the ambitions of Darwinism and of germ
theory, the visions of cybernetics and of neurosciences. These
stories reveal the power and importance of a tradition of living
machines within the development of western sciences that has been
strangely underestimated or dismissed. Its legacies today need just
this kind of astute re-evaluation. This book will become a central
reference for many vital debates about the long history of life
sciences and the possible futures of intelligent machines."
-- "Simon Schaffer, coauthor of Leviathan and the Air-Pump"
"Recuperating the tradition of active mechanism--the vision of an
animated yet material universe--Riskin demonstrates what a powerful
challenge it poses to contemporary modes of thought that claim the
authority of science. Ultimately, The Restless Clock offers nothing
less than an alternative way of seeing the natural world, and being
in it."-- "The Baffler"
"Riskin has written a lengthy, detailed, impressive monograph based
on her concern over a vital paradox of science. The author begins
by discussing the argument that some scientific ideas commenced
with a model of nature as a clock, which God designed and produced.
This argument appeared to be supported by clever automata, which
medieval mechanics had developed in Christian churches. Soon there
were objections to that model, and skeptics seemed to triumph with
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection in The Origin of
Species (1859). However, there are philosophers of science who
still argue that Darwin's theory is an incomplete understanding of
nature, and Riskin takes this claim very seriously. Highly
recommended."-- "Choice"
"Riskin's book provides an excellent strictly chronological
examination of the development of two strands of mechanistic
thinking since the seventeenth century. In the course of doing so
she provides accessible and clearly written introductions to the
central ideas of philosophers and scientists who have engaged in
mechanistic thinking. Moreover, Riskin's book is a treasure trove
of information about the history of machines and automata. . . . A
highly valuable, clearly written, and extremely informative
contribution to the literature on mechanistic science and the
history of
machines and machine metaphors in the life sciences."-- "History
and Philosophy of the Life Sciences"
"There is an inherent contradiction at the heart of modern science
since its inception, and [The Restless Clock] tells this story
beautifully. The exclusion of 'agency' from scientific explanations
has paradoxically rendered the appeal to a 'divine engineer'
necessary; Riskin argues in this compelling and wide-ranging
account of the history of mechanism in biological thought. . . .
nothing short of a historical 'tour de force' that sheds new light
on the history of mechanism and on the rise of the modern
scientific worldview. Thanks to its historical breadth and depth of
analysis, Riskin's ambitious book will continue to invigorate
scholarship in the field of history of (life) science for
decades."-- "Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte: "
"This timeless fascination with the question of what it means to be
living has been explored most recently be Riskin, a history
professor at Stanford University. In her latest book, The Restless
Clock, she moves past the previous theologically and
philosophically grounded discussions and looks at these questions
of autonomy through the lens of a historian....By putting forth
these questions in the words of past intellectuals, Riskin engages
the reader in evaluating these existential questions with respect
to big-picture "processes" like evolution, artificial intelligence
and epistemology."-- "The Tartan"
"The Restless Clock is a sweeping survey of the search for answers
to the mystery of life. Riskin writes with clarity and wit, and the
breadth of her scholarship is breathtaking."-- "Times Higher
Education"
"The most influential book of the past twenty years. . . . Interest
in the similarities and the differences between human beings and
machines goes back many centuries--and Jessica Riskin's The
Restless Clock is a rich and resonant telling of that long history.
. . . Riskin's sweeping survey isn't didactic or moralizing, but it
contains two vitally important lessons for us: Never bet against
human ingenuity in making machines do what people once considered
impossible. And never bet against human ingenuity in redefining the
uniquely human such that machine-intelligence can never match our
own."
--Steven Shapin "Chronicle of Higher Education"
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