LC copy replaced by microfilm.

This Concise Companion presents fresh perspectives on eighteenth-century literature. Contributes to current debates in the field on subjects such as the public sphere, travel and exploration, scientific rhetoric, gender and the book trade, and historical versus literary perceptions of life on London streets. Searches out connections between the remarkable number of new genres that appeared in the eighteenth century. Crosses conventional disciplinary lines. Demonstrates that philosophy, history, politics and social theory both influence and are influenced by literature.

The Flowering of a Tradition, which describes the development of technical, or practical, writing in England during the seventeenth century, from 1641 to 1700, follows Emergence of a Tradition, which tracks the emergence of English technical writing from 1475 to 1640, during the English Renaissance. Together, the books present the emergence and development of technical writing in England from 1475 to 1700 by describing and exemplifying the main characteristics and genres of technical writing as they appeared and flowered. Topics include format and page design; recognition of readers' needs in content and presentation; plain style; technical description; technical writing's contribution to the development of the paragraph; text and the use of technology in technical writing; the history of instructions; and the emergence and development of proposals and reports. The two books cover the major topics that continue to form the foundation of the teaching and practice of technical writing and help define the history of practical discourse during approximately 300 years of English history. The history of technical, or practical, writing has not yet been written, and these two books fill a major deficiency in the history of English technical writing. Chapters on the history of the proposal and the history of reports deal with topics never before researched. The chapter on the history of the paragraph shows that paragraphs existed 300 years before composition historians have stated, because technical writing has not been included in studies of the history of English discourse. Even though the majority of English writing is practical writing in any era, it continues to be ignored by social and literary historians. Only book-length studies of the type published here will fill this void. Technical writing will not become a discipline unless we have a series of books providing a clear foundation that unearths its existence and shows its contribution to all of our writing today, in the workplace and other nonacademic settings.

Historical records show that there was no real concept of probability in Europe before the mid-seventeenth century, although the use of dice and other randomizing objects was commonplace. Ian Hacking presents a philosophical critique of early ideas about probability, induction, and statistical inference and the growth of this new family of ideas in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Hacking invokes a wide intellectual framework involving the growth of science, economics, and the theology of the period. He argues that the transformations that made it possible for probability concepts to emerge have constrained all subsequent development of probability theory and determine the space within which philosophical debate on the subject is still conducted. First published in 1975, this edition includes an introduction that contextualizes his book in light of developing philosophical trends. Ian Hacking is the winner of the Holberg International Memorial Prize 2009.

No part of philosophy is as disconnected from its history as is epistemology. After Certainty offers a reconstruction of that history, understood as a series of changing expectations about the cognitive ideal that beings such as us might hope to achieve in a world such as this. The story begins with Aristotle and then looks at how his epistemic program was developed through later antiquity and into the Middle Ages, before being dramatically reformulated in the seventeenth century. In watching these debates unfold over the centuries, one sees why epistemology has traditionally been embedded within a much larger sphere of concerns about human nature and the reality of the world we live in. It ultimately becomes clear why epistemology today has become a much narrower and specialized field, concerned with the conditions under which it is true to say, that someone knows something. Based on a series of lectures given at Oxford University, Robert Pasnau's book ranges widely over the history of philosophy, and examines in some detail the rise of science as an autonomous discipline. Ultimately Pasnau argues that we may have no good reasons to suppose ourselves capable of achieving even the most minimal standards for knowledge, and the final chapter concludes with a discussion of faith and hope.