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Between Experience and Experiment

Forum: Between Experience and Experiment
Edited by Cécile Alduy and Roland Greene
Putting Experience First
Timothy Hampton Volume 1, Issue 2

In an essay entitled “Putting Cruelty First,” from her book Ordinary Vices, the philosopher Judith Shklar asks what the consequences are for moral action if we take cruelty, as Montaigne does in his essay on cruelty, as the worst of all vices.[1] I borrow from her title for my own comments on a different text by Montaigne, his final essay, “Of Experience.” Like Shklar, I want to shift slightly the itinerary of Montaigne’s Essays (with their expressed project of “self-portraiture”) to ask what it means to put...

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Atheism as a Devotional Category
George Hoffmann Volume 1, Issue 2

“Atheism” retains an uncomfortable, parochial quality that suggests less a condition of conscience than a sort of special-interest group. Even after loving swipes in media coverage, the strident neoatheism of Richard Dawkins, Michel Onfray, and Christopher Hitchens has done little to dispel such an impression. Whether confined to the Atheists United Newsletter, used as a tag in the international directory of Who’s Who in Hell, or diagnosed in Freudian analyses whose general tenor can be summed up in one title, Faith of the Fatherless, “atheist” never quite seems to have become a common...

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Montaigne: The Eclectic Pragmatist
Anthony Long Volume 1, Issue 2

Unlike my fellow contributors, I am not an expert on Montaigne, so what was I doing at the roundtable where these presentations were originally given? As someone who works on the history of ancient philosophy, I had read enough Montaigne to know that he was steeped in Greek and Roman philosophical authors, and so I was attracted by the invitation by the organizers of the 2007 conference “Experience and Experiment in the Early Modern World” to present some reactions to the great man’s essay De L’Expérience “from the perspective of philosophy and the history of epistemology.” I have...

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Machines in the Garden
Jessica Riskin Volume 1, Issue 2

What can Renaissance-era automata and garden water pranks tell us about early modern notions of animation and consciousness?

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Artificial Men: Alchemy, Transubstantiation, and the Homunculus
Mary Baine Campbell Volume 1, Issue 2

Metaphor is a figure of resemblance, even if its literary charm and its pedagogical powers depend on the kick of difference.

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Between Experience and Experiment: Five Articles at an Early Modern Crossroads
Cécile Alduy and Roland Greene Volume 1, Issue 2

When in Petrarch’s first sonnet he announces that “ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, / spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono” (where they may be who understand love by proof / I hope to find pity, not only pardon), he opens not only a sequence of poems, his Rime sparse or Canzoniere, but a new episode in the mutual entanglement of two concepts: experiment and experience, the topic of five articles in Republics of Letters.[1] The articles collected here were delivered at a conference, “Between Experience and...

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