JD Fleming

Education

• BA (British Columbia)
• MA (Toronto)
• PhD (Columbia)

Biography

I work on history and philosophy of Western science and technology in the early-modern period (1500-1700). I try to show how modern intellectual norms--ways of thinking, background assumptions--emerged in this period, from surprising sources. Discovery and information are two of the main concepts I have addressed in this way.

My most recent book is *The Mirror of Information: John Wilkins and the Universal Character* (Palgrave, 2017). This is about the leading early-modern attempt to construct a scientific and objective writing system (or "character"), with the hope of displacing ordinary human language. Wilkins's work, which profoundly influenced Leibniz, is by that token genealogical for modern information theory. More to the point, I argue, it critically reflects some aspects of today's informational systems.

Wilkins started from shorthand: a system of notation for taking down speech verbatim. This was a craze of seventeenth-century England, which had about 100 different shorthand systems. The first of them all was laid out in a book called *Characterie,* published in 1588 by the London physician Timothy Bright (1551-1615). My next book will be on him.

Future projects include a theory a priori of literary-critical subject-matters; an accessible articulation of philosophical hermeneutics; and an attempt to trace the modern notion of scientific discovery to the Biblical trope of apocalypse.