Handicraft Philosophies : Craft, Representation, and Social Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The term "Enlightenment" still carries its tie to a grand philosophical tradition that in Britain moves through Bacon, Locke, and Hume.But the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment was full of practical knowledge associated with the body and with craft.This book is an account of the eighteenth-century thinkers from across social classes who turned to the body to formulate new ways of knowing natural and social worlds-what Ruth Mack calls handicraft philosophies. The writers discussed in this book include a formerly enslaved man, Olaudah Equiano, and a washerwoman, Mary Collier, as well as gentlemen Joseph Banks and James Boswell, and the artist William Hogarth.In their efforts to communicate embodied ways of knowing, they bring together theory and practice; they set aside objectivity and relish the practical ways of knowing that are traditionally associated with lower classes and less-than-privileged bodies.Mack focuses on how such knowledge proved especially helpful for under