作者:
Hugh Aldersey-Williams 出版社: W. W. Norton & Company 副标题: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century’s Most Inquiring Mind 出版年: 2015-6-15 页数: 320 定价: USD 26.95 装帧: Hardcover ISBN: 9780393241648
The extraordinary life and ideas of one of the greatest—and most neglected—minds in history.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh...
The extraordinary life and ideas of one of the greatest—and most neglected—minds in history.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind.
Mixing botany, etymology, medicine, and literary history, Aldersey-Williams journeys in his hero's footsteps to introduce us to witches, zealots, natural wonders, and fabulous creatures of Browne's time and ours. We meet Browne the master prose stylist, responsible for introducing hundreds of words into English, including electricity, hallucination, and suicide. Aldersey-Williams reveals how Browne’s preoccupations—how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs, what to make of order in nature, how to unite science and religion—are relevant today.
In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is more than just a biography—it is a cabinet of wonders and an argument that Browne, standing at the very gates of modern science, remains an inquiring mind for our own time. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, Browne is "unnervingly one of our most adventurous contemporaries."
作者简介
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Hugh Aldersey-Williams is the author of Anatomies, Periodic Tales, and The Most Beautiful Molecule, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in Norfolk, England.
原文摘录
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The compilers of the modern Oxford English Dictionary have computers to help them in their work, and are able to monitor the creation and usage of words. Browne ranks twenty-fifth among all sources responsible for providing first evidence of a word in English. He comes behind Shakespeare, Chaucer and King Alfred the Great, but well ahead of Spenser, Milton and Sir Francis Bacon. (查看原文)
Though Browne had a taste for Latinate car crashes – something later critics found a problem with Johnson too – his words were at least purposeful. As Johnson was forced to admit: ‘in defence of his uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express in many words that idea for which any language could supply a single term’. (查看原文)
还没人写过短评呢
还没人写过短评呢