Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self

Pears' Cyclopaedia by Chris Cook Hardback, Collins English Paperback Dictionary Tattoo Colouring Book by Megamunden Paperback, 3. Eyewitness Travel Phrase Book Spanish: Essential Reference for Every Travell You may also like.

Self Improvement Paperback Books. Cultural Paperback History Books. Self Improvement Paperback Books in Chinese. Self Improvement Paperback Books in Japanese.

Self Improvement Paperback Signed Books. This item doesn't belong on this page. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented, followed by discussions of android automata in early modern philosophy; automaton-making before and during the eighteenth century; and the automata of the eighteenth century. University Press Scholarship Online. It integrates Pierre Jaquet-Droz's training and early career as a clock-maker with the complex history of Europe's beginning industrialization and traces the channels through which he was introduced to the European court society as a young man.

It investigates how he and his son designed and built their three android automata and showed them in a few exhibitions. The second half of chapter examines brief mentions of their automata that appeared between the s and s in letters and diaries of local dignitaries of La Chaux-de-Fonds and in printed texts in mass media such as newspapers, travel reports, and pocket calendars.

These texts serve as windows into the economic and cultural conditions of print mass media at the time and the role of automaton spectacles in them. David Roentgen became the most distinguished and sought-after furniture-maker of his time, and his manufacture was the biggest and most productive of its kind in the entire Holy Roman Empire.

Account Options

His success, like that of the Jaquet-Droz clock-making workshop in Switzerland, had its roots in a society in which early industrialization and the court culture's continuing need for luxury commodities coincided. Roentgen's dulcimer player exemplifies the multifaceted social, spiritual, and political circumstances in the second half of the eighteenth century that facilitated the production of an android automaton.

First, it analyzes their clockworks to uncover correspondences between individual mechanical modules and the effects they bring about in the moving android. The analysis also gives insight into other parts of the automata's history, such as the exceptional skill that went into designing and building them; key similarities and differences between the two; choices that the artisans made as to where to devote most of their technical skill and effort; conflicts between artistic and mechanical principles that the artisans solved; and social and economic functions that the automata served in their makers' lives.

The chapter then explores the automata's mechanical performance as a cultural scenario in its own right.

This scenario's connotations and valences are examined in three contexts: Hoffmann, humans, machines ] This chapter examines literary texts that use the two piano-playing women as motifs to develop broader intellectual and poetic agendas about the boundaries between humans and machines. In the years between and , numerous writers concerned themselves with android automata and other artificial humans, and two of them used piano-playing women automata specifically: Hoffmann in the second decade of the next century.

The texts by Richter and Hoffmann that feature piano-playing women automata are read and discussed in relation to other texts about automata from the time.

The journey through the industrial age demonstrates how widely eighteenth-century automata were used and reveals the conduits through which they remained visible and credible motifs throughout this long time window, to this day. Representative texts from key episodes are used to provide an overview, treating some in greater detail to explain the origins of explicit and implicit assumptions about Enlightenment automata and their role in our imagination of the machine age.

• Androids in the Enlightenment?
• Chapter 23, Nutritional Rickets.
• Situations and Reputations.