The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England John Wilkins and the Universal Character |
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| Author:
| Fleming, James Dougal |
| ISBN: | 978-3-319-82073-6 |
| Publication Date: | Jun 2018 |
| Publisher: | Springer International Publishing AG
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| Imprint: | Palgrave Macmillan |
| Book Format: | Paperback |
| List Price: | USD $99.99USD $89.99 |
Book Description:
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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...
More Description
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.