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Books > History > Theory & methods > Historiography
While Kierkegaard's use of the Greek authors, particularly Plato and Aristotle, has attracted considerable attention over the years, his use of the Roman authors has, by contrast, remained sadly neglected. This neglect is somewhat surprising given the fact that Kierkegaard was extremely well read in Latin from his early youth when he attended the Borgerdyd School in Copenhagen. Kierkegaard's interest in the Roman authors is perhaps best evidenced by his book collection. In his private library he had a long list of Latin titles and Danish translations of the standard Roman authors in any number of different genres. His extensive and frequent use of writers such as Cicero, Horace, Terence, Seneca, Suetonius and Ovid clearly warrants placing them in the select group of his major sources. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that Kierkegaard made use of the Roman sources in a number of different ways. His readings from the Borgerdyd school seem to have stuck with him as an adult. He constantly refers to Roman authors, such as Livy, Nepos, and Suetonius for colourful stories and anecdotes. In addition, he avails himself of pregnant sayings or formulations from the Roman authors, when appropriate. But his use of these authors is not merely as a rhetorical source. He is also profoundly interested in the Roman philosophy of Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. Similarly, just as he is fascinated by Tacitus' portrayal of the early Christians, so also he is amused by the humour of Terence and Apuleius. In short, the Roman authors serve to enrich any number of different aspects of Kierkegaard's authorship with respect to both content and form.
This volume explores in detail Kierkegaard's various relations to his German contemporaries. Kierkegaard read German fluently and made extensive use of the writings of German-speaking authors. It can certainly be argued that, apart from his contemporary Danish sources, the German sources were probably the most important in the development of his thought generally. The volume has been divided into three tomes reflecting Kierkegaard's main areas of interest with regard to the German-speaking sources, namely, philosophy, theology and a more loosely conceived category, which has here been designated "literature and aesthetics." This third tome is dedicated to the German literary sources that were significant for Kierkegaard; in particular the work of authors from German Classicism and Romanticism. Important forerunners for many of Kierkegaard's literary motifs and characters can be found in the German literature of the day. His use of pseudonyms and his interest in irony were both profoundly influenced by German Romanticism. This volume demonstrates the extent to which Kierkegaard's views of criticism and aesthetics were decisively shaped by the work of German authors.
Although Kierkegaard's reception was initially more or less limited to Scandinavia, it has for a long time now been a highly international affair. As his writings were translated into different languages his reputation spread, and he became read more and more by people increasingly distant from his native Denmark. While in Scandinavia, the attack on the Church in the last years of his life became something of a cause celebre, later, many different aspects of his work became the object of serious scholarly investigation well beyond the original northern borders. As his reputation grew, he was co-opted by a number of different philosophical and religious movements in different contexts throughout the world. The three tomes of this volume attempt to record the history of this reception according to national and linguistic categories. Tome II covers the reception of Kierkegaard in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe. The first set of articles, under the rubric 'Southern Europe', covers Portugal, Spain and Italy. A number of common features were shared in these countries' reception of Kierkegaard, including a Catholic cultural context and a debt to the French reception. The next rubric covers the rather heterogeneous group of countries designated here as 'Central Europe': Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. These countries are loosely bound in a cultural sense by their former affiliation with the Habsburg Empire and in a religious sense by their shared Catholicism. Finally, the Orthodox countries of 'Eastern Europe' are represented with articles on Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia and Romania.
Religions have always been associated with particular forms of knowledge, often knowledge accorded special significance and sometimes knowledge at odds with prevailing understandings of truth and authority in wider society. New religious movements emerge on the basis of reformulated, often controversial, understandings of how the world works and where ultimate meaning can be found. Governments have risen and fallen on the basis of such differences and global conflict has raged around competing claims about the origins and content of religious truth. Such concerns give rise to recurrent questions, faced by academics, governments and the general public. How do we treat statements made by religious groups and on what basis are they made? What authorities lie behind religious claims to truth? How can competing claims about knowledge be resolved? Are there instances when it is appropriate to police religious knowledge claims or restrict their public expression? This book addresses the relationship between religion and knowledge from a sociological perspective, taking both religion and knowledge as phenomena located within ever changing social contexts. It builds on historical foundations, but offers a distinctive focus on the changing status of religious phenomena at the turn of the twenty-first century. Including critical engagement with live debates about intelligent design and the 'new atheism', this collection of essays brings recent research on religious movements into conversation with debates about socialisation, reflexivity and the changing capacity of social institutions to shape human identities. Contributors examine religion as an institutional context for the production of knowledge, as a form of knowledge to be transmitted or conveyed and as a social field in which controversies about knowledge emerge.
The 'water controversy' concerns one of the central discoveries of modern science, that water is not an element but rather a compound. The allocation of priority in this discovery was contentious in the 1780s and has occupied a number of 20th century historians. The matter is tied up with the larger issues of the so-called chemical revolution of the late eighteenth century. A case can be made for James Watt or Henry Cavendish or Antoine Lavoisier as having priority in the discovery depending upon precisely what the discovery is taken to consist of, however, neither the protagonists themselves in the 1780s nor modern historians qualify as those most fervently interested in the affair. In fact, the controversy attracted most attention in early Victorian Britain some fifty to seventy years after the actual work of Watt, Cavendish and Lavoisier. The central historical question to which the book addresses itself is why the priority claims of long dead natural philosophers so preoccupied a wide range of people in the later period. The answer to the question lies in understanding the enormous symbolic importance of James Watt and Henry Cavendish in nineteenth-century science and society. More than credit for a particular discovery was at stake here. When we examine the various agenda of the participants in the Victorian phase of the water controversy we find it driven by filial loyalty and nationalism but also, most importantly, by ideological struggles about the nature of science and its relation to technological invention and innovation in British society. At a more general, theoretical, level, this study also provides important insights into conceptions of the nature of discovery as they are debated by modern historians, philosophers and sociologists of science.
The years between 1700 and 1900 witnessed a fundamental transition in attitudes towards science, as earlier concepts of natural philosophy were replaced with a more modern conception of science. This process was by no means a simple progression, and the changing attitudes to science was marked by bitter arguments and fundamental differences of opinion, many of which are still not entirely resolved today. Approaching the subject from a number of cultural angles, the essays in this volume explore the fluid relationship between science and belief during this crucial period, and help to trace the development of science as an independent field of study that did not look to religion to provide answers to the workings of the universe. Taking a broadly chronological approach, each essay in this book addresses a theme that helps illuminate these concerns and highlights how beliefs - both religious and secular - have impinged and influenced the scientific world. By addressing such key issues such as the ongoing debate between Christian fundamentalists and followers of Darwin, and the rise of 'respectable atheism', fascinating insights are provided that help to chart the ever-shifting discourse of science and beliefs.
What is the reason for the American university's global preeminence? How did the American university succeed where the development of the German university, from which it took so much, stalled? In this closely-argued book, Meyer suggests that the key to the American university's success is its institutional design of self-government. Where other university systems are dependent on the patronage of state, church, or market, the American university is the first to achieve true autonomy, which it attained through an intricate system of engagements with societal actors and institutions that simultaneously act as amplifiers of its impact and as checks on the university's ever-present corrosive tendencies. Built on a searching analysis of the design thinking of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Adam Smith and closely tracing the learning process by which Americans adapted the German model, The Design of the University dismisses efforts to copy superficial features of the American university in order to achieve world-class rank. Calling attention to the design details of the university and the particulars of its institutional environment, this volume identifies the practices and choices that produced the gold standard for today's world class higher education.
The close relationship between religion, medicine and natural philosophy in the post-Reformation period has been documented and explored in a body of research since the 1990s; however, the direct and continued impact of Melanchthonian natural philosophy within the individual Lutheran principalities of northern Europe in general and Scandinavia in particular still has to be fully investigated and understood. This volume provides insight into how and why medicine and natural philosophy in a 'liberal' and Melanchthonian form could continue to blossom in Scandinavia despite a growing Lutheran uniformity promoted by the State. Inspired by research emanating from the Cambridge Unit for the History of Medicine, here a number of young scholars such as Adam Mosley, Morten Fink-Jensen, Signe Nipper Nielsen and Martin Kjellgren are joined with more established scholars such as Andrew Cunningham, Jens Glebe-Moller, Terhi Kiiskinen and Ole Peter Grell to create a volume which deals with not only the major issues but also the leading personalities of the period.
Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman draws on work by Kinji Imanishi, Frans de Waal, and other biologists to create an interdisciplinary, materialist notion of culture for ecocritical analysis. In this timely intervention, Feder examines the humanist idea of culture by taking a fresh look at the stories it explicitly tells about itself. These stories fall into the genre of the Bildungsroman, the tale of individual acculturation that participates in the myth of its complete separation from and opposition to nature which, Feder argues, is culture's own origin story. Moving from Voltaire's Candide to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and from Virginia Woolf's Orlando to Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, the book dramatizes humanism's own awareness of the fallacy of this foundational binary. In the final chapters, Feder examines the discourse of animality at work in this narrative as a humanist fantasy about empathy, one that paradoxically excludes other animals from the ethical community to justify the continued domination of both human and nonhuman others.
These essays all-in various ways-address the relationship between adaptation, "true events," and cultural memory. They ask (and frequently answer) the question: how do we script stories about real events that are often still fresh in our memories and may involve living people? True Event Adaptation: Scripting Real Lives contains essays from scholars committed to interrogating historical and current hard-hitting events, traumas, and truths through various media. Each essay goes beyond general discussion of adaptation and media to engage with the specifics of adapting true life events-addressing pertinent and controversial questions around scriptwriting, representation, ethics, memory, forms of history, and methodological interventions. Written for readers interested in how memory works on culture as well as screenwriting choices, the collection offers new perspectives on historical media and commercial media that is currently being produced, as well as on media created by the book's contributors themselves.
In its retrieval and (re)construction, the past has become interwoven with the images and structure of cinema. Not only have mass media-especially film and television-shaped the content of memories and histories, but they have also shaped their very form. Combining historicization with close readings of German director Ernst Lubitsch's historical films, this book focuses on an early turning point in this development, exploring how the medium of film shaped modern historical experience and understanding-how it moved embodied audiences through moving images.
This is the first of three volumes which together contain the complete range of Lord Rutherford's scientific papers, incorporating in addition addresses, general lectures, letters to editors, accounts of his scientific work and personal recollections by friends and colleagues. Volume one, first published in 1962, includes early papers written in New Zealand, at the Cavendish Laboratory and during the Montreal period (1894-1906), as well as an introduction to Rutherford's early work by Sir Edward Appleton, and some reminiscences of his time in Canada by Professors H.L. Bronson and Otto Hahn. In each volume can be found photographs of Rutherford and his collaborators, multiple graphs, tables, diagrams and charts, and also pictures of the original apparatus which is of historic interest.
Aristotle in Coimbra is the first book to cover the history of both the College of Arts in Coimbra and its most remarkable cultural product, the Cursus Conimbricensis, examining early Jesuit pedagogy as performed in one of the most important colleges run by the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century. The first complete philosophical textbook published by a Jesuit college, the Cursus Conimbricensis (1592-1606) was created by some of the most renowned early Jesuit philosophers and comprised seven volumes of commentaries and disputations on Aristotle's writings, which had formed the foundation of the university philosophy curriculum since the Middle Ages. In Aristotle in Coimbra, Cristiano Casalini demonstrates the connection between educational practices in a sixteenth-century college and the structure of a scholastic philosophical commentary, providing insight into this particular form of late-scholastic Aristotelianism through historiographical discourse. This book provides both a narrative of the historical background behind the publication of the Cursus and an analysis of the major philosophical and educational issues addressed by its seven volumes. It is valuable reading for all those interested in intellectual history, the history of education and the history of philosophy.
Through close analysis of texts, cultural and civic communities, and intellectual history, the papers in this collection, for the first time, propose a dynamic relationship between rhetoric and medicine as discourses and disciplines of cure in early modern Europe. Although the range of theoretical approaches and methodologies represented here is diverse, the essays collectively explore the theories and practices, innovations and interventions, that underwrite the shared concerns of medicine, moral philosophy, and rhetoric: care and consolation, reading, policy, and rectitude, signinference, selfhood, and autonomy-all developed and refined at the intersection of areas of inquiry usually thought distinct. From Italy to England, from the sixteenth through to the mid-eighteenth century, early modern moral philosophers and essayists, rhetoricians and physicians investigated the passions and persuasion, vulnerability and volubility, theoretical intervention and practical therapy in the dramas, narratives, and disciplines of public and private cure. The essays are relevant to a wide range of readers, including cultural, literary, and intellectual historians, historians of medicine and philosophy, and scholars of rhetoric.
Premised on the belief that a social and an ecological agenda are compatible, this collection offers readings in the ecology of left and radical writing from the Romantic period to the present. While early ecocriticism tended to elide the bitter divisions within and between societies, recent practitioners of ecofeminism, environmental justice, and social ecology have argued that the social, the economic and the environmental have to be seen as part of the same process. Taking up this challenge, the contributors trace the origins of an environmental sensibility and of the modern left to their roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, charting the ways in which the literary imagination responds to the political, industrial and agrarian revolutions. Topics include Samuel Taylor Coleridge's credentials as a green writer, the interaction between John Ruskin's religious and political ideas and his changing view of nature, William Morris and the Garden City movement, H. G. Wells and the Fabians, the devastated landscapes in the poetry and fiction of the First World War, and the leftist pastoral poetry of the 1930s. In historicizing and connecting environmentally sensitive literature with socialist thought, these essays explore the interactive vision of nature and society in the work of writers ranging from William Wordsworth and John Clare to John Berger and John Burnside.
In the first book-length study explicitly to connect the postcolonial trope of hybridity to Renaissance literature, Gary Schmidt examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English authors, artists, explorers and statesmen exercised a concerted effort to frame questions of cultural and artistic heterogeneity. This book is unique in its exploration of how 'hybrid' literary genres emerge at particular historical moments as vehicles for negotiating other kinds of hybridity, including but not limited to cultural and political hybridity. In particular, Schmidt addresses three distinct manifestations of 'hybridity' in English literature and iconography during this period. The first category comprises literal hybrid creatures such as satyrs, centaurs, giants, and changelings; the second is cultural hybrids reflecting the mixed status of the nation; and the third is generic hybrids such as the Shakespearean 'problem play,' the volatile verse satires of Nashe, Hall and Marston, and the tragicomedies of Beaumont and Fletcher. In Renaissance Hybrids, Schmidt demonstrates 'postmodern' considerations not to be unique to our own critical milieu. Rather, they can fruitfully elucidate cultural and literary developments in the English Renaissance, forging a valuable link in the history of ideas and practices, and revealing a new dimension in the relation of early modern studies to the concerns of the present.
At a crucial moment in the history of relations of East and West, Orient and Occident, Christianity and Islam, Orientalism provides a timely account of the subject and the debate. In the 1960s and 1970s a powerful assault was launched on 'orientalism', led by Edward Said. The debate ranged far beyond the traditional limits of 'dry-as-dust' orientalism, involving questions concerning the nature of identity, the nature of imperialism, Islamophobia, myth, Arabism, racialism, intercultural relations and feminism. Charting the history of the vigorous debate about the nature of orientalism, this timely account revisits the arguments and surveys the case studies inspired by that debate.
The cultural milieu in the "Age of Goethe" of eighteenth-century Germany is given fresh context in this art historical study of the noted writers' patroness: Anna Amalia, Duchess of Weimar-Sachsen-Eisenach. An important noblewoman and patron of the arts, Anna Amalia transformed her court into one of the most intellectually and culturally brilliant in Europe; this book reveals the full scope of her impact on the history of art of this time and place. More than just biography or a patronage study, this book closely examines the art produced by German-speaking artists and the figure of Anna Amalia herself. Her portraits demonstrate the importance of social networks that enabled her to construct scholarly, intellectual identities not only for herself, but for the region she represented. By investigating ways in which the duchess navigated within male-dominated institutions as a means of advancing her own self-cultivation - or Bildung - this book demonstrates the role accorded to women in the public sphere, cultural politics, and historical memory. Cumulatively, Christina K. Lindeman traces how Anna Amalia, a woman from a small German principality, was represented as an active participant in enlightened discourses. The author presents a novel and original argument concerned with how a powerful woman used art to shape her identity, how that identity changed over time, and how people around her shaped it - an approach that elucidates the power of portraiture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.
With a few exceptions, historiography has paid little attention to the impact of French economic thought during the American Revolution, focusing instead on the Revolution's links with Britain. This book outlines how, from the mid-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century, the political and social dimension of French economic thought, and particularly of Physiocracy, spurred American Republicans to a radical shaping of American agrarian ideology. Such a perspective allows for a reconsideration of several questions that lie at the heart of contemporary historiographic debate: the connection between politics and economics; the meaning of republicanism; the foundations of representation; the role of Europe in the Atlantic world; and the interaction between national histories and global context. In particular, the research methodology adopted here makes it possible to reconstruct how American national identity, conceived as an expression of society in economic terms, emerged through a cosmopolitan way of thinking focused on the uniqueness of the new state.
The first volume to explore comprehensively the intersection of feminism, politics, and philosophy, Women in Political Theory sheds light on the contributions of women philosophers and theorists to contemporary political thought. With close attention to the work of five central thinkers-Sarah Grimke, Anna Julia Cooper, Jane Addams, Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt-this book not only offers sustained analyses of the thought of these leading figures, but also examines their relationship with established political theorists of the past, such as Locke, Machiavelli, and the ancients. Demonstrating that each of the figures covered was indeed a political theorist of her time, whilst highlighting the strength of her thought and the reasons for which it has not been accorded the attention that it merits, Women in Political Theory offers a fascinating overview of the political thought of five theorists whose work is central to an understanding of modern thought. As such, it will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, philosophy, political and social theory, feminist thought, and gender studies.
The connections between death, contemplation and the contemplative life have been a recurrent theme in the canons of both western and eastern philosophical thought. This book examines the classical sources of this philosophical literature, in particular Plato's Phaedo and the Katha Upanishad and then proceeds to a sustained analysis and critical assessment of the sources and standpoints of a single thinker, Arthur Schopenhauer, whose work comprehensively pursues this problem. Going beyond the well examined western influences on Schopenhauer, Singh offers an in-depth account of Schopenhauer's references to eastern thought and a comprehensive examination of his eastern sources, particularly Vedanta and Buddhism. The book traces the pivotal issue of death through the whole range of Schopenhauer's writings uncovering the deeper connotations of his crucial notion of the will-to-live.
Examining the political theory of anarchism from a philosophical and historical perspective, Paul McLaughlin relates anarchism to the fundamental ethical and political problem of authority. The book pays particular attention to the authority of the state and the anarchist rejection of all traditional claims made for the legitimacy of state authority, the author both explaining and defending the central tenets of the anarchist critique of the state. The founding works of anarchist thought, by Godwin, Proudhon and Stirner, are explored and anarchism is examined in its historical context, including the influence of such events as the Enlightenment and the French Revolution on anarchist thought. Finally, the major theoretical developments of anarchism from the late-nineteenth century to the present are summarized and evaluated. This book is both a highly readable account of the development of anarchist thinking and a lucid and well-reasoned defence of the anarchist philosophy.
The philosophy of history is an area of interest not only to philosophers, but to historians and to social scientists. It has been of central importance in continental European philosophy since the late 18th century, and for the past half-century has had a significant place in Anglo-American philosophy. Interest in the philosophy of history continues to grow. This volume offers both an introduction to contemporary discussion in the philosophy of history, and a 'reassessment' of some of the major movements in the philosophy of history since the beginning of the 20th century. Including the work of leading international scholars in the field, the book presents a wide range of perspectives from different schools in philosophy, and in political and social theory, history, and the history of ideas. Traditional questions raised in the philosophy of history are explored with fresh insight - the nature of history; historical understanding; historical objectivity; the nature of the past; the psychological factors in historical explanation; the human significance of history - alongside issues which are less frequently examined including: the role of science and mathematics in history, history as a social science, and history as an art form. As history itself remains disputed ground, it is important to consider what clues history can provide for our response to issues of contemporary concern such as political realignments and economic globalisation; this volume offers important insights from leading scholars in the philosophy of history.
Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. From the field of natural philosophy, involving the science of sounds and acoustics, to the realm of imagination, involving resounding music and art, the branches of modern culture that were involved in the intellectual tradition of the science of music proved to be variously appealing to men of letters. Among these, a particularly rich field of investigation was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Focussing on the world of sensation - trying to describe how the human mind could develop ideas and emotions by its means - philosophers and physicians often took their cases from art's products, be it music (sounds), painting (colours) or poetry (words as signs of sound conveying a meaning), thus looking at art from a particular point of view: that of the perceiving mind. The relationship between music and the philosophies of mind is presented here as a significant part of the construction of a Science of Man: a huge and impressive 'project' involving both the study of man's nature, to which - in David Hume's words - 'all sciences have a relation', and the creation of an ideal of what Man should be. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: a complex and articulated vision of the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'; or Musikwissenschaft.
Paying special attention to Sidney's Arcadia, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's romances, this study engages in sustained examination of chiasmus in early modern English literature. The author's approach leads to the recovery of hidden designs which are shown to animate important works of literature; along the way Engel offers fresh and more comprehensive interpretations of seemingly shopworn conventions such as memento mori conceits, echo poems, and the staging of deus ex machina. The study, grounded in the philosophy of symbolic forms (following Ernst Cassirer), will be a valuable resource for readers interested in intellectual history and symbol theory, classical mythology and Renaissance iconography. Chiastic Designs affords a glimpse into the transformative power of allegory during the English Renaissance by addressing patterns that were part and parcel of early modern "mnemonic culture." |
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