Jessica Riskin is a historian of science and Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University in the United States. She is also the Jean-Paul Gimon Director of the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford. [1] [2]
She grew up in New York City and is the daughter of literary critic Myra Jehlen and political economist and China scholar Carl Riskin.
Riskin received her B.A. in History and Science from Harvard University, where she wrote an Honors thesis under the supervision of Stephen Jay Gould, and her Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley, where her dissertation advisor was J.L. Heilbron. In 1988-89 she studied at the Ecole polytechnique in Paris as an intern in the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée. In 1995–96, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in Science in Human Culture in the History Department at Northwestern University. She then taught in the History Department at Iowa State University and in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT, where she held the Leo Marx Assistant Professorship in the History and Culture of Science and Technology from 1998 to 2001. She has also taught at Sciences Po, Paris, where she held the inaugural chair in Humanités Scientifiques in 2011–2012. [3]
Riskin wrote the 2016 book The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, [4] which was a pick for most influential book of the past 20 years in the Chronicle of Higher Education [5] [6] and is included in The Guardian's 2019 list "The Book that Changed My Mind" [7] and has won the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize from the American Philosophical Society. [8] A Chinese translation was published in July 2020. [9]
Riskin also wrote Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, [10] which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize. She edited Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life and, with Mario Biagioli, Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present which was designated by CHOICE magazine as an "essential" book in 2013. [11]
Riskin is the winner of the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize from the American Philosophical Society. [8]
She is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books, [12] where in 2019 she published a book review of Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now. [13]
Riskin appears in passing as a character in Peter Carey's 2012 novel The Chemistry of Tears. [14] This cameo appearance springs from her article "The Defecating Duck, Or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life," which appeared in Critical Inquiry in 2003. [15]
Riskin was the 9th-place winner in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search for 1984. Her project in plasma physics was conducted at Columbia University under the supervision of Gerald Navratil, Thomas Alva Edison Professor of Applied Physics. [16] [17] [18]
In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence. It is one of several competing views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empiricists argue that empiricism is a more reliable method of finding the truth than purely using logical reasoning, because humans have cognitive biases and limitations which lead to errors of judgement. Empiricism emphasizes the central role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions. Empiricists may argue that traditions arise due to relations of previous sensory experiences.
Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement whose central thesis is the verification principle. This theory of knowledge asserts that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians formed the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism.
In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification", often in contrast to other possible sources of knowledge such as faith, tradition, or sensory experience. More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".
Classification is a broad concept that comprises the process of classifying, the set of groups resulting from classifying, and the assignment of elements to pre-established groups. Classifying is a fundamental concept and a part of almost all kinds of activities. Classification itself is an interdisciplinary field of study, with contributing disciplines including philosophy, biology, knowledge organization, psychology, statistics, and mathematics.
Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and the depth and difficulty of his thought. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosopher, and most of his influence lies in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas.
Early modern philosophy The early modern era of philosophy was a progressive movement of Western thought, exploring through theories and discourse such topics as mind and matter, is a period in the history of philosophy that overlaps with the beginning of the period known as modern philosophy. It succeeded in the medieval era of philosophy. Early modern philosophy is usually thought to have occurred between the 16th and 18th centuries, though some philosophers and historians may put this period slightly earlier. During this time, influential philosophers included Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, all of whom contributed to the current understanding of philosophy.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a work by John Locke concerning the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. It first appeared in 1689 with the printed title An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate filled later through experience. The essay was one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley.
Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel was a German writer, philosopher, logician, and epistemologist. He was a major figure in logical empiricism, a 20th-century movement in the philosophy of science. Hempel articulated the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, which was considered the "standard model" of scientific explanation during the 1950s and 1960s. He is also known for the raven paradox.
Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen is a Dutch-American philosopher noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and formal logic. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University.
Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered. It also became associated with sentimental moral philosophy.
In the history of science, the clockwork universe compares the universe to a mechanical clock. It continues ticking along, as a perfect machine, with its gears governed by the laws of physics, making every aspect of the machine predictable.
Patrick Colonel Suppes was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology and educational technology. He was the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and until January 2010 was the Director of the Education Program for Gifted Youth also at Stanford.
The K. JonBarwise Prize was established in 2002 by the American Philosophical Association (APA), in conjunction with the APA Committee on Philosophy and Computers, on the basis of a proposal from the International Association for Computing and Philosophy for significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing.
Michael Friedman is an American philosopher who serves as Suppes Professor of Philosophy of Science and Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies at Stanford University. Friedman is best known for his work in the philosophy of science, especially on scientific explanation and the philosophy of physics, and for his historical work on Immanuel Kant. Friedman has done historical work on figures in continental philosophy such as Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. He also serves as the co-director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University.
British philosophy refers to the philosophical tradition of the British people. "The native characteristics of British philosophy are these: common sense, dislike of complication, a strong preference for the concrete over the abstract and a certain awkward honesty of method in which an occasional pearl of poetry is embedded".
The kite experiment is a scientific experiment in which a kite with a pointed conductive wire attached to its apex is flown near thunder clouds to collect static electricity from the air and conduct it down the wet kite string to the ground. The experiment was first proposed in 1752 by Benjamin Franklin, who reportedly conducted the experiment with the assistance of his son William. The experiment's purpose was to investigate the nature of lightning and electricity, which were not yet understood. Combined with further experiments on the ground, the kite experiment demonstrated that lightning and electricity were the result of the same phenomenon.
Eric was the first British robot, built in 1928 by First World War veteran Captain William Richards, and aircraft engineer Alan Reffell. He was constructed to open the Exhibition of the Society of Model Engineers at London's Royal Horticultural Hall in 1928, after George VI cancelled and an exasperated Richards, the exhibition's secretary, offered to "make a man of tin" to take the Duke's place. At the event's opening, Eric rose to his feet, bowed and gave a four-minute opening address.
The J. Russell Major Prize is an annual prize given to a historian by the American Historical Association for the best book in English about French history.
Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life is a 2007 book edited by Jessica Riskin. It is a collection of essays about the history of the making of mechanicals in an attempt to emulate or recreate life.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress is a 2018 book written by Canadian-American cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. It argues that the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism have brought progress, and that health, prosperity, safety, peace, and happiness have tended to rise worldwide. It is a follow-up to Pinker's 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.