{"title":"Jessica Riskin","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"restless-clock-book-jessica-riskin-9780226528267","title":"The Restless Clock","description":"Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science. The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a \"divine engineer.\" Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines. The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science and even what it means to be alive.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729189839121,"sku":"NGR9780226528267","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49748283457809,"sku":"CIN022652826XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50000458809617,"sku":"CIN022652826XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50250244423953,"sku":"GOR009713993","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000287559953,"sku":"NIN9780226528267","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022652826X.jpg?v=1751433933"},{"product_id":"science-in-the-age-of-sensibility-book-jessica-riskin-9780226720791","title":"Science in the Age of Sensibility","description":"In the French Enlightenment, empiricism was intimately bound up with sensibility. What Riskin describes as a 'sentimental empiricism' is the ideology which brought together ideas and institutions, practices and politics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49794613969169,"sku":"CIN0226720799G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51480845320465,"sku":"GOR008805013","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52738097479953,"sku":"CIN0226720799VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52891058897169,"sku":"CIN0226720799LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226720799.jpg?v=1750876529"},{"product_id":"genesis-redux-book-jessica-riskin-9780226720814","title":"Genesis Redux","description":"Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life's measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. \"Genesis Redux\" examines key moments from this centuries-long experimental tradition: efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms. Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching result: attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery. On the contrary, designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a history of theories of soul and intellect. Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, \"Genesis Redux\" is essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing projects.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346901700881,"sku":"CIN0226720810G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226720810.jpg?v=1751227767"},{"product_id":"restless-clock-book-jessica-riskin-9780226302928","title":"The Restless Clock","description":"Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. Since the seventeenth century, many thinkers have made agency, in various forms, central to science. The Restless Clock examines the history of this principle, banning agency, in the life sciences. It also tells the story of dissenters embracing the opposite idea: that agency is essential to nature. The story begins with the automata of early modern Europe, as models for the new science of living things, and traces questions of science and agency through Descartes, Leibniz, Lamarck, and Darwin, among many others. Mechanist science, Jessica Riskin shows, had an associated theology: the argument from design, which found evidence for a designer in the mechanisms of nature. Rejecting such appeals to a supernatural God, the dissenters sought to naturalize agency rather than outsourcing it to a \"divine engineer.\" Their model cast living things not as passive but as active, self-making machines.  The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science-and even what it means to be alive.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52303487533329,"sku":"GOR011571701","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52403684868369,"sku":"CIN022630292XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780226302928.jpg?v=1757936600"},{"product_id":"power-of-life-book-jessica-riskin-9780593852576","title":"The Power of Life","description":"\u003cb\u003eNAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2026 BY \u003ci\u003eTHE NEW YORKER\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"A truly remarkable achievement.\" -Jill Lepore\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"A gorgeous story of human nature and animal behavior-and of the way science itself evolves.\" -Dava Sobel\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The tumultuous life and radical science of a revolutionary thinker, and the history of an idea that changed the world\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science- biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck's life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview- What is a living being, and what is science?\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e New findings suggest Lamarck's basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, \u003ci\u003eThe Power of Life\u003c\/i\u003e shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52694644654353,"sku":"NGR9780593852576","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53239179149585,"sku":"NIN9780593852576","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780593852576.jpg?v=1769684331"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/author-books-by-jessica-riskin.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}