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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > History of ideas, intellectual history
The name of Hippocrates has been invoked as an inspiration of medicine since antiquity, and medical practitioners have turned to Hippocrates for ethical and social standards. While most modern commentators accept that medicine has sometimes fallen short of Hippocratic ideals, these ideals are usually portrayed as having a timeless appeal, departure from which is viewed as an aberration that only a return to Hippocratic values will correct. Recent historical work has begun to question such an image of Hippocrates and his medicine. Instead of examining Hippocratic ideals and values as an unchanging legacy passed to us from antiquity, historians have increasingly come to explore the many different ways in which Hippocrates and his medicine have been constructed and reconstructed over time. Thus scholars have tended to abandon attempts to extract a real Hippocrates from the mass of conflicting opinions about him. Rather, they tend to ask why he was portrayed in particular ways, by particular groups, at particular times. This volume explores the multiple uses, constructions, and meanings of Hippocrates and Hippocratic medicine since the Renaissance, and elucidates the cultural and social circumstances that shaped their development. Recent research has suggested that whilst the process of constructing and reconstructing Hippocrates began during antiquity, it was during the sixteenth century that the modern picture emerged. Many scholastic endeavours today, it is claimed, are attempts to answer Hippocratic questions first posed in the sixteenth century. This book provides an opportunity to begin to evaluate such claims, and to explore their relevance in areas beyond those of classical scholarship.
In 1829 Robert Southey published a book of his imaginary conversations with the original Utopian: Sir Thomas More; or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society. The product of almost two decades of social and political engagement, Colloquies is Southey's most important late prose work, and a key text of late 'Lake School' Romanticism. It is Southey's own Espriella's Letters (1807) reimagined as a dialogue of tory and radical selves; Coleridge's Church and State (1830) cast in historical dramatic form. Over a series of wide-ranging conversations between the Ghost of More and his own Spanish alter-ego, 'Montesinos', Southey develops a richly detailed panorama of British history since the 1530s - from the Reformation to Catholic Emancipation. Exploring issues of religious toleration, urban poverty, and constitutional reform, and mixing the genres of dialogue, commonplace book, and picturesque guide, the Colloquies became a source of challenge and inspiration for important Victorian writers including Macaulay, Ruskin, Pugin and Carlyle.
Controversially turning away from the current debates which surround "social theory", this book offers historical analysis of the "profound burden" of sociology and its implications today. The author provides detailed studies of a number of contemporary theories, ranging from historical materialism, phenomenology, structuralism and world system theory. He contends that the rightful heir of the sociological tradition is the dynamic sociology of knowledge, in particular the figuration research programme of Norbert Elias. In its sociological analysis of philosophy, the book ranges from analyses of the Hegelian Apogee to Marx's Theory of Knowledge, combined with an examination of the current condition of sociology. "The Sociological Revolution" might be of interest to students across a number of disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, the history of ideas and cultural studies.
Can anyone really own a culture? This magnificent account argues that the story of global civilisations is one of mixing, sharing, and borrowing. It shows how art forms have crisscrossed continents over centuries to produce masterpieces. From Nefertiti's lost city and the Islamic Golden Age to twentieth century Nigerian theatre and Modernist poetry, Martin Puchner explores how contact between different peoples has driven artistic innovation in every era - whilst cultural policing and purism have more often undermined the very societies they tried to protect. Travelling through Classical Greece, Ashoka's India, Tang dynasty China, and many other epochs, this triumphal new history reveals the crossing points which have not only inspired the humanities, but which have made us human.
This is a guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated erotic novel, The Story of the Eye. Benjamin Noys introduces Bataille as a writer out of step with the dominant intellectual trends of his day - surrealism and existentialism - and shows that it was his very marginality that accounted in large part for his subsequent importance for the post-structuralists and the counterculture, in Europe and in the United States. Treating Bataille's work as a whole rather than focusing, as other studies have done, on aspects of his work (i.e. as social theory or philosophy), Noys' study is intended to be sensitive to the needs of students new to Bataille's work while at the same time drawing on the latest research on Bataille to offer new interpretations of Bataille's oeuvre for more experienced readers. This is the first clear, introductory reading of Bataille in English - challenging current reductive readings, and stressing the range of disciplines affected by Bataille's work, at a time when interest in Bataille is growing.
The primary purpose of Metaphor and History is to explain the sources and contexts of the Western idea of social development. Nisbet explores the concept of social change across the whole range of Western culture, from ancient Greece to the present day. He does not see the idea of social development as a nineteenth century phenomenon or a by-product of the idea of biological evolution.Instead, Nisbet finds the metaphor of organic growth and the analogy of the life cycle--among the oldest in the history of human thought--embedded in the pronouncements of sages, historians, and social scientists from Heraclitus and Aristotle to Comte, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, Berdyaev, and Sorokin. He relates the classic Greek metaphor of growth, applied to society; the Christian epic, with its substance in the fusion of Hebrew and Greek ideas; and ideas of progress, natural history, evolution, and sociological functionalism.This book may be considered the "biography of a metaphor" of social development, one that has persisted through two and a half millennia of Western European history. A sociologist's view of history, this is a work at once of synthesis and of exploration of the premises and foundations of social evolution and social change.
First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.
In the secular, contemporary world, many people question the relevance of religion. Many also wonder whether religiously-informed speech and beliefs should be tolerated in the public square, and whether religions hinder freedom. In this volume, Wendell Bird reminds us that our basic freedoms are the important legacies of religious speech arising from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Bird demonstrates that religious speech, rather than secular or irreligious speech based on other belief systems, historically made the demands and justifications for at least six critical freedoms: speech and press, rights for the criminally accused, higher education, emancipation from slavery, and freedom from discrimination. Bringing an historically-informed approach to the development of some of the most important freedoms in the Anglo-American world, this volume provides a new framework for our understanding of the origins of crucial freedoms. It also serves as a powerful reminder of an aspect of history that is steadily being forgotten or overlooked-that many of our basic freedoms are the historical legacies of religious speech arising from Judeo-Christian faiths.
The history of the Dominicans in the British Isles is a rich and fascinating one. Eight centuries have passed since the Friars Preachers landed on England's shores. Yet no book charting the history of the English Province has appeared for close on a hundred years. Richard Finn now sets right this neglect. He guides the reader engagingly and authoritatively through the medieval, early modern and contemporary periods: from the arrival of the first Black Friars - and the Province's 1221 foundation by Gilbert de Fresnay - to Dominican missions to the Caribbean and Southern Africa and seismic changes in church and society after Vatican II. He discusses the Province's medieval resilience and sudden Reformation collapse; attempts in the 1650s to restore it; its Babylonian Exile in the Low Countries; its virtual disappearance in the nineteenth century; and its unlikely modern revival. This is an essential work for medievalists, theologians and historians alike.
Irish land in the 1880s was a site of ideological conflict, with resonances for liberal politics far beyond Ireland itself. The Irish Land War, internationalised partly through the influence of Henry George, the American social reformer and political economist, came at a decisive juncture in Anglo-American political thought, and provided many radicals across the North Atlantic with a vision of a more just and morally coherent political economy. Looking at the discourses and practices of these agrarian radicals, alongside developments in liberal political thought, Andrew Phemister shows how they utilised the land question to articulate a natural and universal right to life that highlighted the contradictions between liberty and property. In response to this popular agrarian movement, liberal thinkers discarded many older individualistic assumptions, and their radical democratic implications, in the name of protecting social order, property, and economic progress. Land and Liberalism thus vividly demonstrates the centrality of Henry George and the Irish Land War to the transformation of liberal thought.
The writings of republican historian and political pamphleteer Catharine Macaulay (1731-91) played a central role in debates about political reform in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. A critical reader of Hume's bestselling History of England, she broke new ground in historiography by defending the regicide of Charles I and became an inspiration for many luminaries of the American and French revolutions. While her historical and political works engaged with thinkers from Hobbes and Locke to Bolingbroke and Burke, she also wrote about religion, philosophy, education and animal rights. Influencing Wollstonecraft and proto-feminism, she argued that there were no moral differences between men and women and that boys and girls should receive the same education. This book is the first scholarly edition of Catharine Macaulay's published writings and includes all her known pamphlets along with extensive selections from her longer historical and political works.
According to Carl Becker "if the framers of the Constitution could
come back to earth and see what the federal government is doing
to-day, they would all agree that this monstrous thing was no child
of theirs; for to-day the federal government exercises as a matter
of course powers which they never dreamed of." This prescient
statement rings as true today as it did when Becker wrote An
Experiment in Democracy nearly eighty years ago. This American
classic is an engaging, gracefully rendered piece of historical
literature as well as a non-ideological meditation on the "meaning
of America."
Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558—1689 explores an issue that is key to early modern political, religious and cultural history. Traditionally regarded as a period of expanding and extended liberalism, as superstition and received truth were overthrown, this book argues conversely that one set of intolerant orthodoxies was replaced by another. It examines what toleration means now and meant then, within a European context. Introduced with a survey of the theory, including the writings of Locke and Hobbes, the book then studies the Stuarts, the Puritan Revolution and the Restoration. This is a crucial addition to the study of early modern Britain, religious and political history.
This fourth book in the series continues the tradition of the
popular earlier volumes by offering lively and entertaining
information about some of contemporary psychology's most
illustrious ancestors. The 21 chapters, many of them written by
today's most visible and eminent authors, concentrate on the lives
and achievements of major psychologists from a variety of areas.
These essays chart major contributions to recent historiography. Carefully selected for their accessibility and accompanied by headnotes and study questions, the essays offer a clear and engaging introduction for the non-specialist. The introduction describes the emergence of gender as a subject of historical investigation and in ten essays, historians explore the meanings and significance of gender in American history since 1890. The volume shows how the interpretation of gender expands and revises our understanding of significant issues in twentieth-century history, such as work, labour protest, sexuality, consumption and social welfare. It offers new perspectives on visual representations and explores the politics of historical subjects and the politics of our own historical revisions.
In Uncanny Rest Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation. Focusing on his personal day-to-day experiences of the "shelter-in-place" period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Moreiras engages with the limits and possibilities of critical thought in the realm of the infrapolitical-the conditions of existence that exceed average understandings of politics and philosophy. In each dated entry he works through the process of formulating a life's worth of thought and writing while attempting to locate the nature of thought once the coordinates of everyday life have changed. Offering nothing less than a phenomenology of thinking, Moreiras shows how thought happens in and out of a life, at a certain crossroads where memories collide, where conversations with interlocutors both living and dead evolve and thinking during a suspended state becomes provisional and uncertain.
Based mainly on unknown Russian archival sources which have previously been unobtainable, this book analyses the Bolshevik concepts of the Chinese revolution and their reception in China. Issues include the role of the three Bolshevik leaders, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky in trying to lead the Chinese Communists to victory, the real nature of the Trotsky-Stalin split in the Comintern, and a dramatic history of the Chinese Oppositionist movement in Soviet Russia. |
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