Burke argues instead that polymaths created their own distinct discipline-“the art of learning.” This contribution was a necessary and vital part of the constitution of knowledge in the modern era.īurke discusses 500 polymaths whose life trajectories that were often idiosyncratic and difficult to reduce to a limited number of patterns. They hover in the gaps between theory and practice, pure and applied knowledge, detailed analysis and general vision, rigor and impressionism, uncertain spaces that many historians of knowledge prefer to ignore. Burke argues that polymaths have long provoked conflicting opinions over where scholars should place them within the history of knowledge. Jefferson, like others equally famous, may be saluted as the “last of the Renaissance men.” Nonetheless, his activities as a farmer, a musician and composer, an architect, an archaeologist, or an inventor are generally noted only in passing, a curiosity about the man, rather than something essential to who he was or how his contemporaries saw him. Thomas Jefferson, for example, is best known for his work in politics, practical and philosophical, that contributed to the founding of the United States. Famous polymaths whose reputations have endured are known primarily for contributions in only one of the many fields in which they labored. They are associated with charlatans and dilettantes. Labeled “specialists in generalities,” polymaths are typically condemned for the superficiality of their ideas. Burke argues that, for this heresy, historians have generally treated polymaths with contempt. Burke’s polymaths worked in multiple fields, now considered completely separate disciplines, but his subjects insisted instead on the unity of knowledge. During this period of time, typically referred to as the “modern age,” learning increasingly was organized around an intellectual division of labor and the proliferation of super-specialists. This new prosopographical study examines the careers of 500 polymaths over the last 500 years. The Author(s)īritish historian Peter Burke has written many books and essays exploring the history of knowledge. The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag.
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