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.

The notion of 'history' has always been one strenuously debated by both academics and the wider population. This deeply provocative re-thinking of our engagement with the past by one of the world's leading post-modern historians takes that debate one step further. Alun Munslow re-assesses history in the light of post-modernism and other intellectual challenges which have questioned the primacy of the modernist epistemology of empiricism. In an original and stimulating vision of history that will intrigue all those seriously interested in the subject, Munslow argues that history is not only about the sources, but a literary construction. Munslow concludes that history, as a cultural narrative about the past can never tell us what the past really means. This far reaching conclusion is based on the radical idea that the content of history is defined as much by the nature of the language used to represent and interpret that content as it is by research into the sources. This suggests that history does not produce the most likely meaning of the past but rather can only generate alternative meanings. The lead volume in a major new series on historical thinking and practice, this is an accessible yet absorbing study that breaks new ground in discussing the stage history is at now, and perhaps most engagingly, the direction it will take in the future.

This is the third and final volume of collected papers of A.W. Bob Coats. Coats began to collect material for this volume in the years following the publication of the second volume in 1993, but sadly died in 2007, before the work was completed. The volume has now been completed under the editorship of Roger Backhouse and Bruce Caldwell. Along with his articles, the compilation of the volume also reflects Coats' interest in and commitment to book reviews, a selection of which have been chosen for inclusion. The book also includes a comprehensive bibliography. In addition to a preface by Backhouse and Caldwell, the volume also reproduces the obituary that was published in History of Political Economy, a memoir published in 1996, and an interview with Grant Fleming, published the previous year. Together, the introductory materials, articles and reviews serve as a fitting tribute to the body of work of Bob Coats.

There can be no doubt that most of the thinkers who are usually associated with the existentialist tradition, whatever their actual doctrines, were in one way or another influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard. This influence is so great that it can be fairly stated that the existentialist movement was largely responsible for the major advance in Kierkegaard's international reception that took place in the twentieth century. In Kierkegaard's writings one can find a rich array of concepts such as anxiety, despair, freedom, sin, the crowd, and sickness that all came to be standard motifs in existentialist literature. Sartre played an important role in canonizing Kierkegaard as one of the forerunners of existentialism. However, recent scholarship has been attentive to his ideological use of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Sartre seemed to be exploiting Kierkegaard for his own purposes and suspicions of misrepresentation and distortions have led recent commentators to go back and reexamine the complex relation between Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinkers. The articles in the present volume feature figures from the French, German, Spanish and Russian traditions of existentialism. They examine the rich and varied use of Kierkegaard by these later thinkers, and, most importantly, they critically analyze his purported role in this famous intellectual movement.

This collection of essays investigates histories in the ancient world and the extent to which the producers and consumers of those histories believed them to be true. Ancient Greek historiographers repeatedly stressed the importance of truth to history; yet they also purported to believe in myth, distorted facts for nationalistic or moralizing purposes, and omitted events that modern audiences might consider crucial to a truthful account of the past. Truth and History in the Ancient World explores a pluralistic concept of truth - one in which different versions of the same historical event can all be true - or different kinds of truths and modes of belief are contingent on culture. Beginning with comparisons between historiography and aspects of belief in Greek tragedy, chapters include discussions of historiography through the works of Herodotus, Xenophon, and Ktesias, as well as Hellenistic and later historiography, material culture in Vitruvius, and Lucian's satire. Rather than investigate whether historiography incorporates elements of poetic, rhetorical, or narrative techniques to shape historical accounts, or whether cultural memory is flexible or manipulated, this volume examines pluralities of truth and belief within the ancient world - and consequences for our understanding of culture, ancient or otherwise.

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 I covers the reception of Kierkegaard in Northern and Western Europe. The articles on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland can be said to trace Kierkegaard's influence in its more or less native Nordic Protestant context. Since the authors in these countries (with the exception of Finland) were not dependent on translations or other intermediaries, this represents the earliest tradition of Kierkegaard reception. The early German translations of his works opened the door for the next phase of the reception which expanded beyond the borders of the Nordic countries. The articles in the section on Western Europe trace his influence in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Flanders, Germany and Austria, and France. All of these countries and linguistic groups have their own extensive tradition of Kierkegaard reception.

The long period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century supplied numerous sources for Kierkegaard's thought in any number of different fields. The present, rather heterogeneous volume covers the long period from the birth of Savonarola in 1452 through the beginning of the nineteenth century and into Kierkegaard's own time. The Danish thinker read authors representing vastly different traditions and time periods. Moreover, he also read a diverse range of genres. His interests concerned not just philosophy, theology and literature but also drama and music. The present volume consists of three tomes that are intended to cover Kierkegaard's sources in these different fields of thought. Tome III covers the sources that are relevant for literature, drama and music. Kierkegaard was well read in the European literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He was captivated by the figure of Cervantes' Don Quixote, who is used as a model for humor and irony. He also enjoyed French literature, represented here by articles on Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Merimee. French dramatists were popular on the Danish stage, and Kierkegaard demonstrated an interest in, among others, Moliere and Scribe. Although he never possessed strong English skills, this did not prevent him from familiarizing himself with English literature, primarily with the help of German translations. While there is an established body of secondary material on Kierkegaard's relation to Shakespeare, little has been said about his use of the Irish dramatist Sheridan. It is obvious from, among other things, The Concept of Irony that Kierkegaard knew in detail the works of some of the main writers of the German Romantic movement. However, his use of the leading figures of the British Romantic movement, Byron and Shelley, remains largely unexplored terrain. The classic Danish authors of the eighteenth century, Holberg, Wessel and Ewald, were influential figures who prepared the way for the Golden Age of Danish poetry. Kierkegaard constantly refers to their dramatic characters, whom he often employs to illustrate a philosophical idea with a pregnant example or turn of phrase. Finally, while Kierkegaard is not an obvious name in musicology, his analysis of Mozart's Don Giovanni shows that he had a keen interest in music on many different levels.

The period of Kierkegaard's life corresponds to Denmark's "Golden Age," which is conventionally used to refer to the period covering roughly the first half of the nineteenth century, when Denmark's most important writers, philosophers, theologians, poets, actors and artists flourished. Kierkegaard was often in dialogue with his fellow Danes on key issues of the day. His authorship would be unthinkable without reference to the Danish State Church, the Royal Theater, the University of Copenhagen or the various Danish newspapers and journals, such as The Corsair, FA|drelandet, and KjAbenhavns flyvende Post, which played an undeniable role in shaping his development. The present volume features articles that employ source-work research in order to explore the individual Danish sources of Kierkegaard's thought. The volume is divided into three tomes in order to cover the different fields of influence. Tome II is dedicated to the host of Danish theologians who played a greater or lesser role in shaping Kierkegaard's thought. In his day there were a number of competing theological trends both within the church and at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, and not least of all in the blossoming free church movements. These included rationalism, Grundtvigianism and Hegelianism. In this quite dynamic period in Danish ecclesial history, Kierkegaard was also exercised by a number of leading personalities in the church as they attempted to come to terms with key issues such as baptism, civil marriage, the revision of the traditional psalm book, and the relation of church and state.

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.

The articles in this volume employ source-work research to trace Kierkegaard's understanding and use of authors from the Greek tradition. A series of figures of varying importance in Kierkegaard's authorship are treated, ranging from early Greek poets to late Classical philosophical schools. In general it can be said that the Greeks collectively constitute one of the single most important body of sources for Kierkegaard's thought. He studied Greek from an early age and was profoundly inspired by what might be called the Greek spirit. Although he is generally considered a Christian thinker, he was nonetheless consistently drawn back to the Greeks for ideas and impulses on any number of topics. He frequently contrasts ancient Greek philosophy, with its emphasis on the lived experience of the individual in daily life, with the abstract German philosophy that was in vogue during his own time. It has been argued that he modeled his work on that of the ancient Greek thinkers specifically in order to contrast his own activity with that of his contemporaries.

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.

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 essays in this volume cover the whole of the period in which Rome dominated the Mediterranean world. The belief shared by all the contributors is that the Roman empire is best understood from the standpoint of the Mediterranean world looking in to Rome, rather than from Rome looking out. The papers focus on the development of political institutions in Rome itself and in her empire, and on the nature of the relationship between Rome and her provincial subjects. They also discuss historiographical approaches to different kinds of source material, literary and documentary - including the major Roman historians, the evidence for the pre-Roman near east, and the Christian writers of later antiquity. This volume reflects the immense complexity of the political and cultural history of the ancient Mediterranean, from the late Republic to the age of Augustine.

Bringing to bear his expertise in the early modern emblem tradition, William E. Engel traces a series of self-reflective organizational schemes associated with baroque artifice in the work of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, this is the first book to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their decisions about compositional practice, especially as it relates to public performance and the exigencies of publication. Engel's discussion of the narrative structure and emblematic aspects of Melville's Piazza Tales and Poe's "The Raven" serve as case studies that demonstrate the authors' debt to the past. Focusing principally on the overlapping rhetorical and iconic assumptions of the Art of Memory and its relation to chiasmus, Engel avoids engaging in a simple account of what these authors read and incorporated into their own writings. Instead, through an examination of their predisposition toward an earlier model of pattern recognition, he offers fresh insight into the writers' understandings of mourning and loss, their use of allegory, and what they gained from their use of pseudonyms.

Drawing on philosophical, neurological and cultural answers to the question of what constitutes a body, this book explores the interaction between mechanistic beliefs about human bodies and the successive technologies that have established and illustrated these beliefs. At the same time, it draws upon newer perspectives on technology and embodied human thought in order to highlight the limitations and inadequacies of such beliefs and suggest alternative perspectives. In so doing, it provides a position from which widely held assumptions about our relationship with technology can be understood and questioned, by both showing how these presuppositions have emerged and developed, and examining the extent to which they are dependent upon our grasp of specific technologies. Illustrated with examples from the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, as well as the industrial age and the recent eras of informatics, gene science and nanotechnology, Embodiment and Mechanisation highlights the ways in which technological changes have led to shifts in the definition of machine and body, investigating their shared underlying belief that all matter can be reduced to a common substance. From clockwork and cadavers to engines and energy, this volume reveals our long-standing fascination with and enduring commitment to the idea that bodies are machines and that machines are in some sense bodies. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in the sociology of science and technology, embodiment, cultural studies and the history of ideas.

'In a word, I shall endeavour to show how our music, having been originally a shell-fish, with its restrictive skeleton on the outside and no soul within, has been developed by the inevitable laws of evolution, through natural selection and the survival of the fittest, into something human, even divine, with the strong, logical skeleton of its science inside, the fair flesh of God-given beauty outside, and the whole, like man himself, animated by a celestial, eternal spirit....' W.J. Henderson, The Story of Music (1889) Critical writing about music and music history in nineteenth-century Britain was permeated with metaphor and analogy. Music and Metaphor examines how over-arching theories of music history were affected by reference to various figurative linguistic templates adopted from other disciplines such as art, religion, politics and science. Each section of the book discusses a wide range of musicological writings and their correspondence with the language used to convey contemporary ideas such as the sublime, the ancient and modern debate, and, in particular, the theory of evolution. Bennett Zon reveals that through their application of metaphorical frameworks taken from art, religion and science, these writers and their work shed light on nineteenth-century perceptions of music history and illuminate the ways in which these disciplines affected notions of musical development.

Now in its second edition, Digital Contagions is the first book to offer a comprehensive and critical analysis of the culture and history of the computer virus. At a time when our networks arguably feel more insecure than ever, the book provides an overview of how our fears about networks are part of a more complex story of the development of digital culture. It writes a media archaeology of computer and network accidents that are endemic to the computational media ecology. Viruses, worms, and other software objects are not seen merely from the perspective of anti-virus research or practical security concerns, but as cultural and historical expressions that traverse a non-linear field from fiction to technical media, from net art to politics of software. Mapping the anomalies of network culture from the angles of security concerns, the biopolitics of computer systems, and the aspirations for artificial life in software, this second edition also pays attention to the emergence of recent issues of cybersecurity and new forms of digital insecurity. A new preface by Sean Cubitt is also provided.

In his provocative and timely study of posthumanism, Dongshin Yi adopts an imaginary/imaginative approach to exploring the transformative power of the cyborg, a strategy that introduces balance to the current discourses dominated by the practicalities of technoscience and the dictates of anthropocentrism. Proposing the term "cyborgothic" to characterize a new genre that may emerge from gothic literature and science fiction, Yi introduces mothering as an aesthetic and ethical practice that can enable a posthumanist relationship between human and non-human beings. Yi examines the cyborg's literary manifestations in novels, including The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, Dracula, Arrowsmith, and He, She and It, alongside philosophical and critical texts such as Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism and System of Logic, William James's essays on pragmatism, ethical treaties on otherness and things, feminist writings on motherhood, and recent studies of posthumanism. Arguing humans imagine the cyborg in ways that are seriously limited by fear of the unknown and current understandings of science and technology, Yi identifies in gothic literature a practice of the beautiful that extends the operation of sensibility, heightened by gothic manifestations or situations, to surrounding objects and people so that new feelings flow in and attenuate fear. In science fiction, which demonstrates how society has accommodated science, Yi locates ethical corrections to the anthropocentric trajectory that such accommodation has taken. Thus, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic imagines a new literary genre that helps envision a cyborg-friendly, non-anthropocentric posthuman society. Encoded with gothic literature's aesthetic embrace of fear and science fiction's ethical criticism of anthropocentrism, the cyborgothic retains the prospective nature of these genres and develops mothering as an aesthetico-ethical practice that both humans and cyborgs should perform.

Kierkegaard has long been known as a philosopher and theologian, but his contributions to psychology, anthropology and sociology have also made an important impact on these fields. In many of the works of his complex authorship, Kierkegaard presents his intriguing and unique vision of the nature and mental life of human beings individually and collectively. The articles featured in the present volume explore the reception of Kierkegaard's thought in the social sciences. Of these fields Kierkegaard is perhaps best known in psychology, where The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death have been the two most influential texts. With regard to the field of sociology, social criticism, or social theory, Kierkegaard's Literary Review of Two Ages has also been regarded as offering valuable insights about some important dynamics of modern society..

Like anywhere else, the present-day Islamic world too is grappling with modernity and postmodernity, secularisation and globalisation. Muslims are raising questions about religious representations and authority. This has given rise to the emergence of alternative Islamic discourses which challenge binary oppositions and dichotomies of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, continuity and change, state and civil society. It also leads to a dispersal of authority, a collapse of existing hierarchical structures and gender roles. This book further argues that the centre of gravity of many of these alternative Islamic discourses is shifting from the Arabic-speaking 'heartland' towards the geographical peripheries of the Muslim world and expatriate Muslims in North America and Europe. At the same time, in view of recent seismic shifts in the political constellation of the Middle East, the trends discussed in this book hold important clues for the possible direction of future developments in that volatile part of the Muslim world.

These essays throw new light on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds examine the agency of early modern poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, natural philosophers and artists in remaking their culture and reforming ideas about human understanding. Analyzing the ways in which the works of such diverse writers as Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Cavendish, Boyle, Pope and Behn related to contemporary epistemological debates, these essays move us toward a better understanding of interactions between the sciences and the humanities during a seminal phase in the emergence of modern Western thought.

Are Jane Austen and Charles Darwin the two great English empiricists of the nineteenth century? Peter W. Graham poses this question as he brings these two icons of nineteenth-century British culture into intellectual conversation in his provocative new book. Graham shows that while the one is generally termed a naturalist (Darwin's preferred term for himself) and the other a novelist, these characterizations are at least partially interchangeable, as each author possessed skills that would serve well in either arena. Both Austen and Darwin are naturalists who look with a sharp, cold eye at the concrete particulars of the world around them. Both are in certain senses novelists who weave densely particularized and convincingly grounded narratives that convey their personal observations and perceptions to wide readerships. When taken seriously, the words and works of Austen and Darwin encourage their readers to look closely at the social and natural worlds around them and form opinions based on individual judgment rather than on transmitted opinion. Graham's four interlocked essays begin by situating Austen and Darwin in the English empirical tradition and focusing on the uncanny similarities in the two writers' respective circumstances and preoccupations. Both Austen and Darwin were fascinated by sibling relations. Both were acute observers and analysts of courtship rituals. Both understood constant change as the way of the world, whether the microcosm under consideration is geological, biological, social, or literary. Both grasped the importance of scale in making observations. Both discerned the connection between minute, particular causes and vast, general effects. Employing the trenchant analytical talents associated with his subjects and informed by a wealth of historical and biographical detail and the best of recent work by historians of science, Graham has given us a new entree into Austen's and Darwin's writings.