A study of the historical development of philosophy both requires and stimulates intellectual detachment. The person who limits himself to the present can easily fall a prey to passing fashions; he becomes a slave of the latest -ism. Intellectually rootless and inexperienced, he succombs to something that may exercise considerable attraction at this particular moment, but that soon withers and passes. For example, Ernst Haeckel's theories once exercised an enormous fascination on all sorts of people; they were even hailed as the definitive word in philosophy. Nowadays they are more likely to cause amusement than anything else. The same may be said of Nietzsche's philosophy, or materialism, or vitalism, or idealism.

This book introduces a new perspective on Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), a work widely regarded as the 'first great opera', by exploring the influence of the Mantuan Accademia deglia Invaghiti, the group which hosted the opera's performance, and to which the libretto author, Alessandro Striggio the Younger, belonged. Arguing that the Invaghiti played a key role in shaping the development of Orfeo, the author explores the philosophical underpinnings of the Invaghiti and Italian academies of the era. Drawing on new primary sources, he shows how the Invaghiti's ideas about literature, dramaturgy, music, gender, and aesthetics were engaged and contested in the creation and staging of Orfeo. Relevant to researchers of music history, performance, and Renaissance and Baroque Italy, this study sheds new light on Monteverdi's opera as an intellectual and philosophical work.

The essays in this anthology represent, in the broadest sense, an interpretive perspective of inquiry that has flourished in oral history for the past 15 years. This perspective considers oral history interviews as subjective, socially constructed and emergent events; that is, understanding, interpretation, and meaning of lived experience are interactively constructed. The impetus for this volume was the editor's fascination with the multifaceted complexity of the oral history interview method coupled with the belief that, despite many books that address methodological issues, no single work takes as its focus those complex, interactive processes which constitute the oral history interview. The editors' purpose in developing this anthology, therefore, was to provide a variety of essays which taken together address the possibilities and constraints inherent in oral history interviewing.

Of all the topics in the history of philosophy, the history of different forms of thinking and contemplation is one of the most important, and yet is also relatively overlooked. What is it to think philosophically? How did different forms of thinking-reflection, contemplation, critique and analysis-emerge in different epochs? This collection offers a rich and diverse philosophical exploration of the history of contemplation, from the classical period to the twenty-first century. It covers canonical figures including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, as well as debates in less well-known areas such as classical Indian and Islamic thought and the role of speculation in twentieth-century Russian philosophy. Comprising twenty-two chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into five parts: * Flourishing and Thinking from Homer to Hume * The Thinking of Thinking from Augustine to Goedel * Images and Thinking from Plotinus to Unger * Bodies of Thought and Habits of Thinking from Plato to Irigaray * The Efficacy of Thinking from Sextus to Bataille Thought: A Philosophical History is the first comprehensive investigation of the history of philosophical thought and contemplation. As such, it is a landmark publication for anyone researching and teaching the history of philosophy, and a valuable resource for those studying the subject in related fields such as literature, religion, sociology and the history of ideas.

The study of eighteenth century history has been transformed by the writings of John Brewer, and most recently, with The Sinews of Power, he challenged the central concepts of British history. Brewer argues that the power of the British state increased dramatically when it was forced to pay the costs of war in defence of her growing empire. In An Imperial State at War, edited by Lawrence Stone (himself no stranger to controversy), the leading historians of the eighteenth century put the Brewer thesis under the spotlight. Like the Sinews of Power itself, this is a major advance in the study of Britain's first empire.

The Presented Past is concerned with the differences between the comparatively static, well-understood way in which the past is presented in schools, museums and at historic sites compared to the approaches currently being explored in contemporary archaeology. It challenges the all-too-frequent representation of the past as something finished, understood and objective, rather than something that is `constructed' and therefore open to co-existing interpretations and constant re-interpretation. Central to the book is the belief that the presentation of the past in school curricula and in museum and site interpretations will benefit from a greater use of non-documentary sources derived from archaeological study and oral histories. The book suggests that a view of the past incorporating a larger body of evidence and a wider variety of understanding will help to invigorate the way history is taught. The Presented Past will be of interest to teachers, archaeologists, cultural resource managers, in fact anyone who is concerned with how the past is presented.

Pictures are often admired for their aesthetic merits but they are rarely treated as if they had as much to offer as the written word. They are often overlooked as objects of analysis themselves, and tend to be seen simply as adjuncts to the text. Images, however, are not passive, and have a direct impact that engages attention in ways independent of any specific text. Advertising, entertainment and propaganda have realised the extent of this power to shape ideas, but the scientific community has hitherto neglected the ways in which visual material conditions the ways in which we think. With subjects including prehistoric artworks, excavation illustrations, artists' impressions of ancient sites and peoples and contemporary landscapes, photographs and drawings, this study explores how pictures shape our perceptions and our expectations of the past. This volume is not concerned with the accuracy of pictures from the past or directly about the past itself, but is interested instead in why certain subjects are selected, why they are depicted the way they are, and what effects such images have on our idea of the past. This collection constitutes a ground-breaking study in historiography which radically reassesses the ways that history can be written.

Religious imaginary is a way of conceiving and structuring the world within the conceptual and imaginative traditions of the religious. Using religious imaginary as a reference, this book analyses temporal ideologies and expressions of historicity in South Asia in the early modern, pre-colonial and early colonial period. Chapters explore the multiple understandings of time and the past that informed the historical imagination in various kinds of literary representations, including historiographical and literary texts, hagiography, and religious canonical literature. The book addresses the contributing forces and comparative implications of the formation of religious and communitarian sensibilities as expressed through the imagination of the past, and suggests how these relate to each other within and across traditions in South Asia. By bringing diverse materials together, this book presents new commonalities and distinctions that inform a larger understanding of how religion and other cultural formations impinge on the concept of temporality, and the representation of it as history.

There have been serious debates between historians, novelists and filmmakers as to how best present historical narratives. When writers and filmmakers talk of using historical research with integrity, what exactly do they mean? Integrity and Historical Research examines this question in detail. The first chapter discusses the concept of integrity. The chapters that follow reflect on this philosophical treatment in the light of fiction and film that deals with history in a number of ways. How should writers and filmmakers use lives? Can, and may, people who are now dead and who may have lived long ago, be defamed?

The authors include academics, historians, social historians, medievalists, oral historians, literary theorists, historical novelists and script writers. They examine the theoretical influences and practical choices that involve and concern writers and filmmakers who rely on historical research. The desire to be accurate may often conflict with the need to produce a work that goes beyond the mere depiction of events in order to excite the interest of readers and to hold that interest. At the same time there is a developing emphasis on historians, to write well in clear, accessible prose, which may involve using the novelists techniques. How much license may be given to writers of fiction and filmmakers in their depiction of historical characters and events? This book begins to answer this question, while inviting further discussion.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is widely recognized as one of the greatest scientific thinkers in history. Intriguingly, when offered a place in the Medici court in 1610, he requested the title of "Philosopher and Chief Mathematician." Reading Nature's Book: Galileo and the Birth of Modern Philosophy is the first book-length study written with undergraduates in mind that examines the philosophical implications (both theoretical and historical) of Galileo's scientific discoveries, including many matters that were later taken up by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers. This close analysis of Galileo's philosophical insights demonstrates the prominent place his thought should have in the history of early modern philosophy. Reading Nature's Book provides contextual material for college and university students enrolled in modern philosophy courses, introducing them to ideas and concepts that dominated philosophical discussion during the era. Furthermore, students and scholars interested in the history of philosophy of science will also benefit from a decidedly philosophical approach to such a leading scientific figure. Many of the topics explored by Galileo continue to be of philosophical interest today, including scientific methodology and the relation between science and religion.

Modern historiography embraces the notion that time is irreversible, implying that the past should be imagined as something 'absent' or 'distant.' Victims of historical injustice, however, in contrast, often claim that the past got 'stuck' in the present and that it retains a haunting presence. History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence is centered around the provocative thesis that the way one deals with historical injustice and the ethics of history is strongly dependent on the way one conceives of historical time; that the concept of time traditionally used by historians is structurally more compatible with the perpetrators' than the victims' point of view. Demonstrating that the claim of victims about the continuing presence of the past should be taken seriously, instead of being treated as merely metaphorical, Berber Bevernage argues that a genuine understanding of the 'irrevocable' past demands a radical break with modern historical discourse and the concept of time. By embedding a profound philosophical reflection on the themes of historical time and historical discourse in a concrete series of case studies, this project transcends the traditional divide between 'empirical' historiography on the one hand and the so called 'theoretical' approaches to history on the other. It also breaks with the conventional 'analytical' philosophy of history that has been dominant during the last decades, raising a series of long-neglected 'big questions' about the historical condition - questions about historical time, the unity of history, and the ontological status of present and past -programmatically pleading for a new historical ethics.

The early modern period used to be known as the Age of Discovery. More recently, it has been troped as an age of invention. But was the invention/discovery binary itself invented, or discovered? This volume investigates the possibility that it was invented, through a range of early modern knowledge practices, centered on the emergence of modern natural science. From Bacon to Galileo, from stagecraft to math, from martyrology to romance, contributors to this interdisciplinary collection examine the period's generation of discovery as an absolute and ostensibly neutral standard of knowledge-production. They further investigate the hermeneutic implications for the epistemological authority that tends, in modernity, still to be based on that standard. The Invention of Discovery, 1500-1700 is a set of attempts to think back behind discovery, considered as a decisive trope for modern knowledge.

In this wide-ranging study of French intellectuals who represented the Spanish Civil War as it was happening and in its immediate aftermath, Martin Hurcombe explores the ways in which these individuals addressed national anxieties and shaped the French political landscape. Bringing together reportage, essays, and fiction by French supporters of Franco's Nationalists and of the Spanish Republic, Hurcombe shows the multifaceted ways in which that conflict impacted upon French political culture. He argues that French cultural representations of the war often articulated a utopian image of the Nationalists or of the Spanish Republic that served as models behind which the radical right or the radical left in France might mobilise. His book will be of interest not only to scholars of French literature and culture but also to those interested in how events unfolding in Spain found an echo in the political landscapes of other countries.

The Unheard Voice of Law in Bartolome de las Casas's Brevisima relacion de la destruicion de las Indias reinterprets Las Casas's controversial treatise as a legal document, whose legal character is linked to civil and ecclesial genres of the Early Modern and late Renaissance juridical tradition. Bartolome de las Casas proclaimed: "I have labored to inquire about, study, and discern the law; I have plumbed the depths and have reached the headwaters." The Unheard Voice also plumbs the depths of Las Casas's voice of law in his widely read and highly controversial Brevisima relacion-a legal document published and debated since the 16th century. This original reinterpretation of his Very Brief Account uncovers the juridical approach voiced in his defense of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Unheard Voice innovatively asserts that the Brevisima relacion's legal character is intimately linked to civil and ecclesial genres of the late Renaissance juridical tradition. This paradigm-shifting book contextualizes the formation of Las Casas's juridical voice in canon law and theology-initially as a secular cleric, subsequently as a Dominican friar, and finally as a diocesan bishop-and demonstrates how his experienced juridical voice fought for justice in trans-Atlantic debates about Indigenous peoples' level of humanity, religious freedom, enslavement, and conquest. Reaching the headwaters of Las Casas's hitherto unheard juridical voice of law in the Brevisima relacion provides readers with a previously unheard interpretation-an appealing voice for readers and students of this powerful Early Modern text that still resonates today. The Unheard Voice of Law is a valuable companion text for many in the disciplines of literature, history, theology, law, and philosophy who read Bartolome de las Casas's Very Brief Account and study his life, labor, and legacy.

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.

Using a unique "old-new" treatment, this book presents new perspectives on several important topics in Southeast Asian history and historiography. Based on original, primary research, it reinterprets and revises several long-held conventional views in the field, covering the period from the "classical" age to the twentieth century. Chapters share the approach to Southeast Asian history and historiography: namely, giving "agency" to Southeast Asia in all research, analysis, writing, and interpretation. The book honours John K. Whitmore, a senior historian in the field of Southeast Asian history today, by demonstrating the scope and breadth of the scholar's influence on two generations of historians trained in the West. In addition to providing new information and insights on the field of Southeast Asia, this book stimulates new debate on conventional ideas, evidence, and approaches to its teaching, research, and understanding. It addresses, and in many cases, revises specific, critically important topics in Southeast Asian history on which much conventional knowledge of Southeast Asia has long been based. It is of interest to scholars of Southeast Asian Studies, as well as Asian History.

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. The anthology opens with chapters on the fundamentals of oral history and its place in the classroom, but its heart lies in nearly two dozen insightful personal essays by educators who have successfully incorporated oral history into their own teaching. Filled with step by step descriptions and positive student feedback, these chapters offers practical suggestions on creating curricula, engaging students, gathering community support, and meeting educational standards. Lanman and Wendling open each chapter with thoughtful questions that guide readers, whether unfamiliar with oral history or seeking to refine their approach, in applying the examples to their own classrooms. The bibliography of further resources at the anthology's close provides interested educators with all the information necessary to transform their lessons and show their students' history's power as a living force within their own lives and communities.

The mastery of nature was viewed by eighteenth-century historians as an important measure of the progress of civilization. Modern scholarship has hitherto taken insufficient notice of this important idea. This book discusses the topic in connection with the mainstream religious, political, and philosophical elements of Enlightenment culture. It considers works by Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Herder, Vico, Raynal, Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and a wide range of lesser- and better-known figures. It also discusses many classical, medieval, and early modern sources which influenced Enlightenment historiography, as well as eighteenth-century attitudes toward nature in general.

A critical examination of post-colonial Indian history-writing. In the years preceding formal Independence from British colonial rule, Indians found themselves responding to the panorama of sin and suffering that constituted the modern present in a variety of imaginative ways. This book is a critical analysis of the uses made of India's often millennial past by nationalist ideologues who sought a specific solution to India's predicament on its way to becoming a post-colonial state. From independence to the present, it considers the competing visions of India's liberation from her apocalyptical present to be found in the thinking of Gandhi, V. D. Savarkar, Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar as well as V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. It examines some of the archetypal elements in historical consciousness that find their echo in often brutal unhistorical ways in everyday life. This book is a valuable resource for researchers interested in South Asian History, Historiography or Theory of History, Cultural Studies, English Literature, Post Colonial Writing and Literary Criticism.

Using empirical research to explore medieval writers' imaginings of time, this study presents a new morphology by which to study narratives of time in fifteenth-century literary culture, focusing on poems of John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve. Karen Smyth begins with an overview of medieval time-keeping devices and considers collective and individual attitudes and perceptions of time. She then examines a range of Middle English authors' appropriations and innovations in relation to such perceptions, identifying competitions of tradition and innovation, allowing for an interrogation of commonly accepted medieval theories of time. An empirically based morphology emerges and is used to examine narratives of time in Lydgate and Hoccleve's work. Through a series of close readings of selected short poems and Lydgate's Troy Book, Fall of Princes, and Siege of Thebes and of Hoccleve's Regiments of Princes and Series, Karen Smyth looks at expressions of time and examples of the authors' negotiation of time consciousness, illustrating how both poets manipulate a range of cultural narratives of time in order to create multiple and sometimes competing temporalities within a single poem. Smyth simultaneously draws attention to Lydgate's and Hoccleve's underestimated artistic skills and lays out a means to re-evaluate medieval cultural attitudes towards time.

Engaging with the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseus Elytis within the framework of international modernism, Marinos Pourgouris places the poet's work in the context of other modernist and surrealist writers in Europe. At the same time, Pourgouris puts forward a redefinition of European Modernism that makes the Mediterranean, and Greece in particular, the discursive contact zone and incorporates neglected elements such as national identity and geography. Beginning with an examination of Greek Modernism, Pourgouris's study places Elytis in conversation with Albert Camus; analyzes the influence of Charles Baudelaire, Gaston Bachelard, and Sigmund Freud on Elytis's theory of analogies; traces the symbol of the sun in Elytis's poetry by way of the philosophies of Heraclitus and Plotinus; examines the influence of Le Corbusier on Elytis's theory of architectural poetics; and takes up the subject of Elytis's application of his theory of Solar Metaphysics to poetic form in the context of works by Freud, C. G. Jung, and Michel Foucault. Informed by extensive research in the United States and Europe, Pourgouris's study makes a compelling contribution to the comparative study of Greek modernism, the Mediterranean, and the work of Odysseus Elytis.

Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas explores how women in England participated in the considerable intellectual and cultural diversity which characterised the 'late' early modern period, from the mid-seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century. This collection looks particularly at early modern women philosophers, playwrights and novelists, and considers how they engaged with ideas and debates over philosophical and scientific ideas, as well as literary innovations. This volume extends our understanding of the philosophical ideas and literary innovations of the early modern period and presents an exciting collection of women writers vigorously engaged with the intellectual debates that were occurring in the rapidly changing post-Restoration society.

It is time to re-examine the French Revolution as a political resource. The historiography has so far ignored the question of popular sovereignty and emancipation; instead the Revolution has been vilified as a matrix of totalitarianisms by the liberals and as an ethnocentric phenomenon by postcolonial studies. This book examines why. More so than historians, it is philosophers that have played the leading role in the portrayal of this major event in French political history. The philosophical quarrels of the 1960s placed the French Revolution at the heart of their debates. The most well-documented among these is the conflict between Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Levi-Strauss and subsequently, Michel Foucault. Do we need an ethics of the history of the French Revolution? Ranciere, Derrida, Balibar, Lefort, Robin, and Loraux can help answer this question, in an epistemological approach to history. These successive explorations allow us to move away from a myth of identity and to rediscover a real Revolution, capable of offering Enlightenment and political utility and interrogating what democracy and emancipation mean for us today.

The chapters in this volume celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the seminal work "British Politics in the Age of Anne" by looking at how Holmes's writing has influenced later historians in various fields, including ones not directly addresses by Holmes, such as gender, jacobite and urban history. This volume celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the seminal work "British Politics in the Age of Anne" by Geoffrey HolmesDemonstrates how Holmes's writing has influenced later generations of historians in various fieldsInvestigates how this 1967 book was established as a masterpiece of historical research and writing and how it quickly became the accepted interpretation of the politics of the early eighteenth century, replacing previous work based on the methodology of Sir Lewis NamierThis new book also shows how topics which Holmes's only touched upon, such as gender, jacobite and urban history, have also been greatly influenced by his workAlso available to buy as part of the Parliamentary History journal package: www.blackwellpublishing.com/parh

This volume sets out to examine the ways in which an equality between the sexes is constructed, conceptualised, imagined or realised in early modern France, a period and a country which produced some of the earliest theorisations on equality. In so doing, it aims to contribute towards the development of the history of equality as an intellectual category within the history of political thought, and to situate "the woman question" within that history. The eleven chapters in the volume span the fields of political theory, philosophy, literature, history and history of ideas, bringing together literary scholars, historians, philosophers and scholars of political thought, and examining an extensive range of primary sources. Whilst most of the chapters focus on the conceptualisation of a moral, metaphysical or intellectual equality between the sexes, space is also given to concrete examples of a de facto gender equality in operation. The volume is aimed at scholars and graduate students of political thought, history of philosophy, women's history and gender studies alike. It aims to throw light on the history of Western ideas of equality and difference, questions which continue to preoccupy cultural historians, philosophers, political theorists and feminist critics.