Repository | Book | Chapter

The uses of curiosity in early emergent Renaissance cultural and scientific practices are the focus of this chapter. As a pedagogical concern this chapter emphasizes curiosity's pivotal role in the always socially enabled production of theory. Its focus is on the revaluation of curiosity from the sixteenth century onward toward Enlightenment culture. It traces a general harnessing and "taming of the passions" in the interest of the formation of social contracts, emergent nation-states, colonial enterprises, and the role of the natural and empirical sciences. Curiosity and intellectual inquiry were recast as allies in the countervailing discourses of exploration and economic "interest." Curiosity was mobilized as a justification for mercantile trade and the mechanistic natural sciences. It served as a laudable rationale for investigations serving economic, artisanal, and utilitarian purposes in the establishment of empires and the plundering of the earth. In the wake of its medieval condemnations, curiosity is rechristened during the Renaissance. Curiosity is revalued and set into motion in the material interests and powers of the expanding imperial empires. This chapter introduces the claim that curiosity is an expression, response, and movement of embodied thinking or thinking bodies. I adapt Spinoza's tenets regarding the affects and passions in breaking mind–body dualisms. It is presented to advance a non-reductive pedagogical appreciation of curiosity as a form of continual desire and force acting in and upon social fields of knowledge and practice.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-2117-3_2

Full citation: