Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Economies of Knowledge
- 2 The Learned and Conversable Worlds
- 3 Physics and its Audiences
- 4 Philosophy's Place Between Science and Literature
- 5 Poetry Among the Intellectual Disciplines
- Coda: Common Sense and Common Language
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Coda: Common Sense and Common Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Economies of Knowledge
- 2 The Learned and Conversable Worlds
- 3 Physics and its Audiences
- 4 Philosophy's Place Between Science and Literature
- 5 Poetry Among the Intellectual Disciplines
- Coda: Common Sense and Common Language
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Scene five of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo opens with a burst of laughter emerging from an assemblage of monks, scholars, and prelates in the Collegium Romanum. They exchange witticisms about Galileo's alleged proof that the earth revolves around the sun. A small group gather to pretend that the earth is indeed moving beneath their feet, forcing them to reel drunkenly about the stage:
a monk: It's rolling fast, I'm dizzy. May I hold onto you, Professor? (He sways dizzily and clings to one of the scholars for support.)
the scholar: Old Mother Earth's been at the bottle again. Whoa!
monk: Hey! Hey! We're slipping off! Help!
second scholar: Look! There's Venus! Hold me, lads. Whee!
second monk: Don't, don't hurl us off onto the moon. There are nasty sharp mountain peaks on the moon, brethren!
variously: Hold tight! Hold tight! Don't look down! Hold tight! It'll make you giddy!
Brecht's scene beautifully draws out the struggle that new knowledge confronts in overcoming the mind's enthrallment to received wisdom and to what Adam Smith has called “the natural prejudices of sense.” Indeed, early in his career, Adam Smith commented on the reception of the Copernican system of astronomy, as supported by Galileo:
When it appeared in the world, it was almost universally disapproved of, by the learned as well as by the ignorant. The natural prejudices of sense, confirmed by education, prevailed too much with both, to allow them to give it a fair examination. A few disciples only, whom he himself had instructed in his doctrine, received it with esteem and admiration.
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- Information
- Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820 , pp. 173 - 177Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009