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"Wilkins, John, 1614-1672."
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The mirror of information in early modern England : John Wilkins and the universal character
\"This book examines the seventeenth-century project for a \"real\" or \"universal\" character: a scientific and objective code. Focusing on the Essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (1668) of the polymath John Wilkins, Fleming provides a detailed explanation of how a real character actually was supposed to work. He argues that the period movement should not be understood as a curious episode in the history of language, but as an illuminating avatar of information technology. A non-oral code, supposedly amounting to a script of things, the character was to support scientific discourse through a universal database, in alignment with cosmic truths. In all these ways, J.D. Fleming argues, the world of the character bears phenomenological comparison to the world of modern digital information- what has been called the infosphere.\"--Back cover.
Book
Academic Freedom in the English Revolution: Libertas Scholastica, Libertas Philosophandi, and the Reformation of the Universities
This article contributes to the genealogy of the concept of academic freedom with a focus on the English universities in the middle of the seventeenth century. It argues that libertas scholastica (the corporate freedom of the universities) and libertas philosophandi (liberty of philosophizing, within and without the universities) were distinctive guiding concepts, sometimes in opposition but occasionally complementary, in debates over the universities in this period. If these two notions together constitute the antecedents of the modern concept of academic freedom, their conjunction must be recognized as a much more contingent and irregular phenomenon than has been previously understood.
Journal Article
Rhyme and Reason in John Wilkins’s Philosophical Language Scheme
John Wilkins (1614-1672) popularized Galilean astronomy in England and helped found the Royal Society. In An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), the early Royal Society's most important work on language, Wilkins tried to invent a language based on and adequate to the new science. He created hundreds of pages of encyclopedic taxonomy that approximated the order of nature and then assigned words to things based on their place in this taxonomy. The goal was a language that would be isomorphic with reality. Here, Smith explores the complex contours of Wilkins's project and takes the unusual step of trying to better understand it by using it--by creating words as Wilkins advised they be created and by close reading the translations he produced as examples of his language in action.
Journal Article
John Wilkins and 17th-Century British Linguistics
In this reader, 19 articles have been collected that bring out the central position of John Wilkins and his Essay Toward a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) in the history of ideas in 17th-century Britain.
eBook
Forgotten but Important Lexicographers
No detailed description available for \"Forgotten But Important Lexicographers: John Wilkins and William Lloyd\".
eBook
