PREVIOUS EVENTS
-
Mon26Sep2011Professor George Rousseau, cultural historian and professor in the History Faculty at Oxford University
Sensibility, as the word suggests, denoted everything related to the senses of mankind, especially the emotions and passions. But it also boasted its lineage in sense: ordinary common sense. It arose during the Enlightenment as a philosophical challenge to mechanism and cause and effect rationality, and eventually toppled them. Its encounters with science of all types over the next century were as fraught as they were controversial.