The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

The original idea for a conference on the "shapes of knowledge" dates back over ten years to conversations with the late Charles Schmitt of the Warburg Institute. What happened to the classifications of the sciences between the time of the medieval Studium and that of the French Encyclopedie is a complex and highly abstract question; but posing it is an effective way of mapping and evaluating long term intellectual changes, especially those arising from the impact of humanist scholarship, the new science of the seventeenth century, and attempts to evaluate, to apply, to reconcile, and to institutionalize these rival and interacting traditions. Yet such patterns and transformations cannot be well understood from the heights of the general history of ideas. Within the ~eneral framework of the organization of knowledge the map must be filled in by particular explorations and soundings, and our project called for a conference that would combine some encyclopedic (as well as interdisciplinary and inter­ national) breadth with scholarly and technical depth.

1. Introduction.- I. Classification of Learning.- 2. History and the Encyclopedia.- 3. The Classification of the Visual Arts in the Renaissance.- 4. The Sixteenth-Century Transformation of the Aristotelian Division of the Speculative Sciences.- II. Movers and Shapers.- 5. Galen and Francis Bacon: Faculties of the Soul and the Classification of Knowledge.- 6. Forgotten Ways of Knowing: The Kabbalah, Language, and Science in the Seventeenth Century.- 7. Demonstration, Dialectic, and Rhetoric in Galileo’s Dialogue.- 8. Interpreting Nature: Gassendi versus Diderot on the Unity of Knowledge.- III. Institutions.- 9. The Curriculum of Italian Elementary and Grammar Schools, 1350-1500.- 10. The Forms of Queen Christina’s Academies.- 11. The Early Society and the Shape of Knowledge.- 12. Periodical Publication and the Nature of Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Europe.- 13. Epilogue.- Contributors.