Related Papers
Review: The Return of Curiosity by Nicholas Thomas
Science Museum Group Journal
Review: The Return of Curiosity by Nicholas Thomas Museums are on the up. More than fifty per cent of the UK population now visits one every year; with attendances across many western countries having grown as much as ten per cent in the last decade. During half that period, a variety of funding agencies and individuals have poured no less than five billion dollars into America's museum infrastructure, with entirely new museums (such as the Eli Broad in LA and Smithsonian's African American Museum) or hefty extensions of established ones (like that at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) being built as a consequence. While on the other side of the planet, somewhere between two and four new Chinese museums have been set up roughly every week for the last five years; though not all of them, it seems, are full of either exhibits or visitors. Across the entire planet, it has been estimated that there were something like 23,000 museums twenty years ago, with the figure more than doubling to 55,000 today (Fiammetta Rocco, 'Temples of Delight,' The Economist, 21 December 2013, p 152). Museums then are unmistakably gaining in both social and cultural significance. These words will no doubt sound complacently hollow and implausibly distant to those working with dwindling budgets or through drastic cuts; but it is difficult to resist a sense that we might be entering a new international museum age. This swelling of overall fortunes provides the backdrop to Nicholas Thomas' timely and rewarding The Return of Curiosity.
Science and Christian Belief
Review: The Penultimate Curiosity by Roger Wagner and Andrew Briggs
2017 •
Tim Middleton
Curiosity Studies
What is Curiosity Studies?
2020 •
Perry Zurn, Arjun Shankar
Curiosity Studies
Introduction:: What Is Curiosity Studies?
2020 •
Arjun Shankar
Journal of Family Therapy
The pleasure and usefulness of chasing after curiosity and its risks. Tim Parks, The Novel: A Survival Skill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 185 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-873959-3. £12.99
Afterthoughts on Critiques to The Philosophy of Curiosity
ilhan inan
In this paper I respond to and elaborate on some of the ideas put forth on my book The Philosophy of Curiosity (2012) as well as its follow-up “Curiosity and Ignorance” (2016) by Nenad Miščević, Erhan Demircioğlu, Mirela Fuš, Safiye Yiğit, Danilo Šuster, Irem Günhan Altıparmak, and Aran Arslan.
Review of the book Curious
Acacia Parks
[2014] 2 - The Curiousness of Curiosity
Gilbert V Levin
UCL Graduate Review Competition First Prize. Review of Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing
Colin Sterling
Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Desire to Know (Cambridge Scholars' Publishing)
IMPERIOUS CURIOSITY: CURIOSITY'S BURDENS AND THE PROMISE OF RESISTANCE
2019 •
Corey McCall
This essay represents a somewhat belated attempt to extend my previous work on curiosity by providing a programmatic overview of some of the roles that curiosity played in various European imperial projects. Here, I begin to think how curiosity operates in some of the spaces defined by European colonialism. I am interested in two features of curiosity’s operation within these imperial spaces. First, I am interested in the fate of curiosity in imperialism: Broadly speaking, we might say that curiosity came to be understood as a virtue during the early modern period because it was constitutive of both scientific and colonial reason. These forms of rationality must be thought together, in terms of their efforts to classify and fix the nature of their objects (natural objects in the case of biological taxonomy and colonial subjects in the case of colonial reason). The sciences and the arts of colonial governance become professionalized and bureaucratized during the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, following a general trend that saw the systematization of disciplines in the modern research university and the bureaucratization of government institutions. With this professionalization and bureaucratization, curiosity increasingly comes to be seen as a liability. Objectivity becomes the defining trait of both scientific and colonial reason, while curiosity comes to be seen as simultaneously both too passionate and too idiosyncratic once methods of objective control come to define both scientific reason and colonial reason. This means that the burden of curiosity gradually shifts from those who claim control to those who are claimed by this control within these imperial spaces. In the bland face of the colonial bureaucrat appealing to rules, it is the colonial subject who must be curious about these rules and seek to know everything about them that she can. The first section traces the effacement of curiosity in colonial reason, while the second section looks at how curiosity becomes a burden for those who are governed by colonial and post-colonial regimes. Furthermore, it is this burden of curiosity that might eventually light the spark of resistance. My focus in the second section is on the French imperial context, but I hope eventually to more comprehensively trace how this burdensome curiosity can ignite resistance to imperial domination in various cultural contexts.
