Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI

Gayle Rogers

Published by Columbia University Press 2021

Speculation

A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI

Gayle Rogers

https://doi.org/10.7312/roge20020

Overview
Contents

About this book

In this cultural, literary, and intellectual history, Gayle Rogers traces the debates over speculation from antiquity to the present. Recasting centuries of contests over the power to anticipate tomorrow, this book reveals the crucial role speculation has played in how we create—and potentially destroy—the future.

Author / Editor information

Gayle Rogers is professor and chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature (Columbia, 2016) and Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (2012).

Reviews

Baruch Fischhoff, Howard Heinz University Professor in the Institute for Politics and Strategy and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University:
Speculation takes readers on a fascinating tour across time, disciplines, genres, cultures, languages, and domains. Rogers shows how people have struggled to bound and describe uncertainties in themselves and their world, sometimes declaring victory over themselves and others, sometimes agonizing or reveling in defeat. It bears more than one great.

Michael North, author of What Is the Present?:
Gayle Rogers’ Speculation begins as a definition but soon becomes a sweeping cultural history. As the story develops, this apparently simple term expands to take in all sorts of mixed feelings about the practical and the ideal, the present and the future, the tangible and the intangible. The human tendency to look ahead is shown to be the source of our highest flights of fancy and our most devious schemes. Right now, when the uncertainty of the future sharpens our desire to imagine it, this account of the ins and outs, the highs and lows, of speculation is especially welcome.

Sophia Rosenfeld, author of Common Sense: A Political History:
Speculation is at once an erudite study of the long history of a single term and a timely, entertaining read about the way words can reshape the relationship between ideas.

G. Elliott Morris, data journalist and author:
Thanks to the technological revolution, humans have a mass of tools that can aid them in speculating about the future. Yet we continue to make spectacularly bad predictions about events that are only a few days or weeks away. Simultaneously, the modern "risk society," as Rogers deems it, has dramatically expanded the risks of poor speculation from our political and thought leaders. In retelling the history, psychology, and neurological mysticism of speculation, Rogers offers an enticing remedy to challenges in an engaging read. Speculation will change the way you think.

Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island: A Novel:
Like the finest lens makers, Rogers has reflected, refracted, magnified and generally brought into focus two millennia of thought and culture, all around the perfectly tempered curvature of a single term. Speculation, I suspect, will stand on the ridge of contemporary critical inquiry like a specula, a watchtower, for years to come.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
INTRODUCTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 THE MIRROR AND THE WATCHTOWER Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	9
2 EXPERIMENTING ON THOUGHT Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	38
3 GAMBLING ON A WORD Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
4 AMERICA THE SPECULATIVE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
5 SPECULITIS, OR THE TECHNOLOGIES OF PROPHECY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
6 THE LADY SPECULATOR Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
CONCLUSION Speculative Risks, Inhuman Imaginations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	172
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: General/trade;

eBook

Published: September 8, 2021
ISBN: 9780231553490