12/16/2014

Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society: A Sourcebook (Scholarly Communication)

Tina Skouen, University of Oslo and Ryan J. Stark, Corban University

Title: Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society

Brill, (12/01/2014)

ISBN-13: 9789004283695

The Royal Society’s establishment in 1660 signaled a new beginning for the rhetoric of science, mainly because the organization’s founders advocated a modern plain style for scientific communication. Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society aims to initiate fresh debates about this watershed event in the history of rhetoric and science. In the last twenty years, scholars in numerous disciplines have produced significant work, ranging from theoretical essays to case studies of founding members such as Wilkins, Hooke and Boyle. This is the first book to collect in one volume the key contributions. The newly written introduction by editors Skouen and Stark places the reprinted essays into perspective by evaluating the Society’s pioneering role in shaping modern scholarly communication.

Introduction

                  --Tina Skouen (University of Oslo)and Ryan J. Stark (Corban University)

PART ONE: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

1.     Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society
                  --Peter Dear (Cornell University)
                                    Reprint from Isis (University of Chicago Press), 76: 2 (1985), 144-161.

2.     Rhetoric in the Early Royal Society
                  -- Richard Nate (Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)
                                    Reprint of chapter from Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern
                                    Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett, eds. Thomas O. Sloane and Peter L.
                                    Oesterreich, Brill, 1999, pp. 215-231.

3.     Language Reform in the Late Seventeenth Century
                  --Ryan J. Stark (Corban University)
                                    Excerpt from chapter 2 in Rhetoric, Science and Magic in Seventeenth-Century
                                    England, CUA Press, 2009, pp. 47-87.

4.     Argument and 17th-Century Science: A Rhetorical Analysis with Sociological Implications
                  --Alan G. Gross (University of Minnesota), Joseph E. Harmon (Argonne National Laboratory) and Michael S. Reidy (Montana State University)
                                    Reprint from Social Studies of Science (Sage), 30: 3 (2000), 371-396.

PART TWO: CASE STUDIES

5.     Invitation and Engagement: Ideology and Wilkins's Philosophical Language
                  --Robert E. Stillman (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
                                    Reprint from Configurations (Johns Hopkins University Press), 3: 1 (1995), 1-26.

6.     'The Spirit of Invention': Hooke's Poetics for a New Science in an Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth by Observation
                  --Frédérique Aït-Touati (St. John's College, Oxford)
                                    Reprint from Etudes Epistémè (Etudes-episteme.org; Institut du Monde
                                    anglophone, Sorbonne Nouvelle), 14 (2008), 105-121.

7.     The Looking Glass of Facts: Collecting, Rhetoric and Citing the Self in the Experimental Natural

         Philosophy of Robert Boyle
                  --Michael Wintroub (UC Berkeley)
                                    Reprint from History of Science (Science History Publications Ltd), 35 (1997), 189-217.

8.     Science versus Rhetoric? Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society Reconsidered
                  --Tina Skouen (University of Oslo)
                                    Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric (University of California Press),29: 1
                                    (2011), 23-52.

FURTHER READING

INDEX