System cover art

System

The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (Infrastructures)

Preview

Try for £0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

System

By: Clifford Siskin
Narrated by: Tim Andres Pabon
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £17.99

Buy Now for £17.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the 14 engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genre - a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called "system" to compete with the essay and the treatise. Drawing on the history of system from Galileo's "message from the stars" and Newton's "system of the world" to today's "computational universe", Siskin illuminates the role that the genre of system has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge.

Previous engagements with systems have involved making them, using them, or imagining better ones. Siskin offers an innovative perspective by investigating system itself. He considers the past and present, moving from the "system of the world" to "a world full of systems". He traces the turn to system in the 17th and 18th centuries, and describes this primary form of Enlightenment as a mediator of political, cultural, and social modernity - pointing to the moment when people began to "blame the system" for working both too well ("you can't beat the system") and not well enough (it always seems to "break down"). Throughout, his touchstones are: what system is and how it has changed; how it has mediated knowledge; and how it has worked in the world.

©2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2016 Gildan Media LLC
Epistemology History Philosophy Physics Science

Listeners also enjoyed...

Comparative Literature cover art

What listeners say about System

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.