Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > History > Theory & methods
Most academic philosophers and intellectual historians are familiar with the major historical figures and intellectual movements coming out of Scotland in the 18th Century. These scholars are also familiar with the works of Immanuel Kant and his influence on Western thought. But with the exception of discussion examining David Hume's influence on Kant's epistemology, metaphysics, and moral theory, little attention has been paid to the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers on Kant's philosophy. This volume aims to fill this perceived gap in the literature and provide a starting point for future discussions looking at the influence of Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers on Kant's philosophy.
This title, first published in 1969, is concerned with historic documents and their uses, and with a discussion of living standards among the peasants, as it is the author's belief that any worthwhile discussion is impossible without an understanding of the sources and their limitations. With its emphasis on the controversial and debateable, this book is admirable proof that a study of medieval history is not merely a matter of memorising facts.
This title was first published in 2001. A collection of previously published essays addressed to Leibniz's metaphysics, philosophy of science, theories of language and logic, philosophy of mind and theology.
This title was first published in 2001. Militarism connotes more than unadulterated aggression. It encapsulates a way of life and involves the inculcation of military values as an end in itself. This text examines the factors which have been held to account for the rise of militarism in particular social contexts, using case studies and comparative analysis of this perennial phenomenon.
Analyzing Shakespeare's views on theatre and magic and John Dee's concerns with philosophy and magic in the light of the Italian version of philosophia perennis (mainly Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno), this book offers a new perspective on the Italian-English cultural dialogue at the Renaissance and its contribution to intellectual history. In an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach, it investigates the structural commonalities of theatre and magic as contiguous to the foundational concepts of perennial philosophy, and explores the idea that the Italian thinkers informed not only natural philosophy and experimentation in England, but also Shakespeare's theatre. The first full length project to consider Shakespeare and John Dee in juxtaposition, this study brings textual and contextual evidence that Gonzalo, an honest old Counsellor in The Tempest, is a plausible theatrical representation of John Dee. At the same time, it places John Dee in the tradition of the philosophia perennis-accounting for what appears to the modern scholar the conflicting nature of his faith and his scientific mind, his powerful fantasy and his need for order and rigor-and clarifies Edward Kelly's role and creative participation in the scrying sessions, regarding him as co-author of the dramatic episodes reported in Dee's spiritual diaries. Finally, it connects the Enochian/Angelic language to the myth of the Adamic language at the core of Italian philosophy and brings evidence that the Enochian is an artificial language originated by applying creatively the analytical instruments of text hermeneutics used in the Cabala.
This book provides a critical history of the movement associated with the journal Annales, from its foundation in 1929 to the present. This movement has been the single most important force in the development of what is sometimes called the new history . Renowned cultural historian, Peter Burke, distinguishes between four main generations in the development of the Annales School. The first generation included Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who fought against the old historical establishment and founded the journal Annales to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. The second generation was dominated by Fernand Braudel, whose magnificent work on the Mediterranean has become a modern classic. The third generation, deeply associated with the cultural turn in historical scholarship, includes recently well-known historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby. This new edition brings us right up to the present, and contemplates the work of a fourth generation, including practitioners such as Roger Chartier, Serge Gruzinski and Jacques Revel. This new generation continued much of the cultural focus of the previous Annales historians, while diversifying further, and becoming increasingly reflexive , a move that owes much to the sociocultural theories of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu. Wide-ranging yet concise, this new edition of a classic work of analysis of one of the most important historical movements of the twentieth century will be welcomed by students of history and other social sciences and by the interested general reader.
This book, first published in 1957, is the study of 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who founded a special science to consider history and culture, based on the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and their Muslim followers. In no other field has the revolt of modern Western thought against traditional philosophy been so far-reaching in its consequences as in the field of history. Ibn Khaldun realized that history is more immediately related to action than political philosophy because it studies the actual state of man and society. He found that the ancients had not made history the object of an independent science, and thought it was important to fill this gap. A factual acquaintance with the conclusions of Ibn Khaldun's reflections on history is not the same as the full comprehension of their theoretical significance. When these fundamental questions are answered, it becomes possible to pose the specific question of the relation of Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of history, or his new science of culture, to other practical sciences and, particularly, to the art of history. After an exposition of the major trends of Islamic historiography, part of this book attempts to answer this question through the analysis of the method and intention of the sections of the 'History' where Ibn Khaldun himself examines the works of major Muslim historians, shows the necessity of the new science of culture, and distinguishes it from other practical sciences.
Popular presentations of history have recently been discovered as a new field of research, and even though interest in it has been growing noticeably very little has been published on this topic. This volume is one of the first to open up this new area of historical research, introducing some of the work that has emerged in Germany over the past few years. While mainly focusing on Germany (though not exclusively), the authors analyze different forms of popular historiographies and popular presentations of history since 1800 and the interrelation between popular and academic historiography, exploring in particular popular histories in different media and popular historiography as part of memory culture.
" A] timely and important contribution to the current scholarship on the Cold War and the critical reassessment of Cold War history within an interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational framework...The editors are to be commended for promoting a comparative perspective in the individual essays themselves and through the thoughtful selection of topics from East and West German perspectives." . Sabine Hake, University of Texas, Austin The Allied agreement after the Second World War did not only partition Germany, it divided the nation along the fault-lines of a new bipolar world order. This inner border made Germany a unique place to experience the Cold War, and the "German question" in this post-1945 variant remained inextricably entwined with the vicissitudes of the Cold War until its end. This volume explores how social and cultural practices in both German states between 1949 and 1989 were shaped by the existence of this inner border, putting them on opposing sides of the ideological divide between the Western and Eastern blocs, as well as stabilizing relations between them. This volume's interdisciplinary approach addresses important intersections between history, politics, and culture, offering an important new appraisal of the German experiences of the Cold War. Tobias Hochscherf is Professor of Audio-Visual Media at the University of Applied Sciences at Kiel, Germany. His research interests focus on European film and television cultures. He has published widely in academic journals and edited collections. Christoph Laucht is Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool. His research interests include the cultural history of the nuclear age, the transnational history of the Cold War and film and history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the impact of German emigre scientists on British nuclear culture. Andrew Plowman is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of a study on German autobiography and of numerous articles on contemporary German literature. His current research focuses on the cultural representation of the Bundeswehr.
This book pursues a strand in the history of thought - ranging from codified statutes to looser social expectations - that uses particulars, more specifically examples, to produce norms. Much intellectual history takes ancient Greece as a point of departure. But the practice of exemplarity is historically rooted firmly in ancient Roman rhetoric, oratory, literature, and law - genres that also secured its transmission. Their pragmatic approach results in a conceptualization of politics, social organization, philosophy, and law that is derived from the concrete. It is commonly supposed that, with the shift from pre-modern to modern ways of thinking - as modern knowledge came to privilege abstraction over exempla, the general over the particular - exemplarity lost its way. This book reveals the limits of this understanding. Tracing the role of exemplarity from Rome through to its influence on the fields of literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and law, it shows how Roman exemplarity has subsisted, not only as a figure of thought, but also as an alternative way to organize and to transmit knowledge.
Placing the works of Charles Dickens and Walter Benjamin in conversation with one another, Gillian Piggott argues that the two writers display a shared vision of modernity. Her analysis of their works shows that both writers demonstrate a decreased confidence in the capacity to experience truth or religious meaning in an increasingly materialist world and that both occupy similar positions towards urban modernity and its effect upon experience. Piggott juxtaposes her exploration of Benjamin's ideas on allegory and messianism with an examination of Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, arguing that both writers proffer a melancholy vision of a world devoid of space and time for religious experience, a state of affairs they associate with the onset of industrial capitalism. In Benjamin's The Arcades Project and Dickens's Sketches by Boz and Tale of Two Cities, among other works, the authors converge in their hugely influential treatments of the city as a site of perambulation, creativity, memory, and autobiography. At the same time, both authors relate to the vertiginous, mutable, fast-paced nature of city life as involving a concomitant change in the structure of experience, an alteration that can be understood as a reduction in the capacity to experience fully. Piggott's persuasive analyses enable a reading of Dickens as part of a European, particularly a German, tradition of thinkers and writers of industrialization and modernity. For both Dickens and Benjamin, truth appears only in moments of revelation, in fragments of modernity.
"This is an innovative, well structured and balanced collection of essays which presents a survey of theories and case studies underpinning the burgeoning field of memory studies. It addresses the 'big issues' including witnessing, trauma, memorials, the relation between personal and public memory, and generational transmission." . Peter Carrier, author of HOLOCAUST MONUMENTS AND NATIONAL MEMORY "This is an excellent collection of essays." . Peter Lawson, Open University, London Memory studies has become a rapidly growing area of scholarly as well as public interest. This volume brings together world experts to explore the current critical trends in this new academic field. It embraces work on diverse but interconnected phenomena, such as twenty-first century museums, shocking memorials in present-day Rwanda and the firsthand testimony of the victims of genocidal conflicts. The collection engages with pressing 'real world' issues, such as the furor around the recent 9/11 memorial, and what we really mean when we talk about 'trauma'. Richard Crownshaw is a Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths, University of London. Jane Kilby is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Sociology, Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Salford. Antony Rowland is Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Salford."
Renaissance Europe witnessed a surge of interest in new scientific ideas and theories. Whilst the study of this 'Scientific Revolution' has dramatically shifted our appreciation of many facets of the early-modern world, remarkably little attention has been paid to its influence upon one key area; that of economics. Through an interrogation of the relationship between economic and scientific developments in early-modern Western Europe, this book demonstrates how a new economic epistemology appeared that was to have profound consequences both at the time, and for subsequent generations. Dr Maifreda argues that the new attention shown by astronomers, physicians, aristocrats, men of letters, travellers and merchants for the functioning of economic life and markets, laid the ground for a radically new discourse that envisioned 'economics' as an independent field of scientific knowledge. By researching the historical context surrounding this new field of knowledge, he identifies three key factors that contributed to the cultural construction of economics. Firstly, Italian Humanism and Renaissance, which promoted new subjects, methods and quantitative analysis. Secondly, European overseas expansion, which revealed the existence of economic cultures previously unknown to Europeans. Thirdly factor identified is the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century crisis of traditional epistemologies, which increasingly valued empirical scientific knowledge over long-held beliefs. Based on a wide range of published and archival sources, the book illuminates new economic sensibilities within a range of established and more novel scientific disciplines (including astronomy, physics, ethnography, geology, and chemistry/alchemy). By tracing these developments within the wider social and cultural fields of everyday commercial life, the study offers a fascinating insight into the relationship between economic knowledge and science during the early-modern period.
Whilst terms such as Lebensraum are commonly associated with National-Socialist ideology of the 1930s and 40s, ideas of racial living space were in fact generated in the previous decades by an international geographic community of explorers and academics. Focusing on one of the most influential figures within this group, Sven Hedin, this is the first study that systematically connects the geographic community to the intellectual history of the development of National-Socialist ideology and genocidal practices. The book demonstrates how colonial, racial and nationalistic policies were often spearheaded by explorers and geographers such as Hedin. In Germany, Britain, France, and Russia their positions as publicly recognized authors and reputable academics made them highly influential with politicians. Whilst this influence was to become most visible within Hitler's Germany, the debates were not by any means restricted to or even originated in, Germany. Germany was the home of some of the most prominent geographers, but this scientific community had a tradition of international debate and exchange with especially British, French and Russian geographic societies and institutions. Many issues that were later discussed and championed by National-Socialist ideology were aired and debated in this international setting - raising important questions about the international character and impact of National-Socialism. Tracing the intellectual history of the international geographic community and its relationship to National-Socialism, this study provides an assessment of Hedin's close involvement with the Nazi elite as a culmination of decades of political and scientific work. In so doing the book uncovers a long ignored or overlooked important connection between exploration, geographers, and genocide.
William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98) was the outstanding statesman of the Victorian age. He was an MP for over sixty years, a long serving and exceptional Chancellor of the Exchequer and four times Prime Minister. As the leader of the Liberal party over three decades, he personified the values and policies of later Victorian Liberalism. Gladstone, however, was always more than just a politician. He was also a considerable scholar, a dedicated Churchman and had a range of interests and connections that made him, in many respects, the quintessential Victorian. Yet important aspects of Gladstone's life have received relatively little recent attention from historians. This study reappraises Gladstone by focusing on five themes: his reputation; his representation in visual and material culture; his personal life; his role as an official; and the ethical and political basis of his international policies. This collection of original, often multidisciplinary studies, provides new perspectives on Gladstone's public and private life. As such, it illustrates the many-sided nature of his career and the complexities of his personality.
This interdisciplinary collection considers public and popular history within a global framework, seeking to understand considerations of local, domestic histories and the ways they interact with broader discourses. Grounded in particular local and national situations, the book addresses the issues associated with popular history in a globalised cultural world, such as: how the study of popular history might work in the future; new ways in which the terms 'popular' and 'public' might inform one another and nuance scholarship; transnational, intercultural models of 'pastness'; cultural translatability; and the demand for high-quality work on new technologies and history. A wide range of international contributors consider a broad selection of locale and media, from American television and Canadian heritage to the representation of history in contemporary Chinese culture. They consider the way in which the study of public or popular texts invoke multiple historiographies, and demonstrate our need to think about public and popular aspects of the past in new, 'emerging' locales, such as China, Eastern Europe and South America. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Rethinking History.
George Buchanan (1506-82) was the most distinguished Scottish humanist of the sixteenth century with an unparalleled contemporary reputation as a Latin poet, playwright, historian and political theorist. However, while his contemporary importance as the scourge of Mary Queen of Scots and advocate of popular rebellion has long been recognised, this volume represents the first attempt to explore the subsequent influence of his ideas and his contested reputation as a political ideologue and cultural icon. Featuring a wide-ranging selection of essays by an international cast of established and younger scholars, the volume explores Buchanan's legacy as an historian and political theorist in Britain and Europe in the two centuries following his death, with particular emphasis on the reception of his remarkably radical views on popular sovereignty and political assassination. Divided into four parts, the volume covers the immediate impact and reception of his writings in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Britain; the wider Northern European context in which his thought was influential; the engagement with his political ideas in the course of the seventeenth-century British constitutional struggles; and the influence of his ideas as well as the changing nature of his reputation through the eighteenth century and beyond. The introduction to the volume not only reviews the material in the body of the collection, but also reflects on the use and abuse of Buchanan's ideas in the early modern period and the methodological issues of influence and reputation raised by the contributors. Such a reassessment of Buchanan and his legacy is long overdue and this volume will be welcomed by all scholars with an interest in the political and cultural history of early modern Britain and Europe.
Arguing for the importance of wit beyond its use as a literary device, Roger D. Lund outlines the process by which writers in Restoration and eighteenth-century England struggled to define an appropriate role for wit in the public sphere. He traces its unpredictable effects in works of philosophy, religious pamphlets, and legal writing and examines what happens when literary wit is deliberately used to undermine the judgment of individuals and to destabilize established institutions of church and state. Beginning with a discussion of wit's association with deception, Lund suggests that suspicion of wit and the imagination emerges in attacks on the Restoration stage, in the persecution of The Craftsman, and in criticism directed at Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and works by writers like the Earl of Shaftesbury, Thomas Woolston, and Thomas Paine. Anxieties about wit, Lund shows, were in part responsible for attempts to suppress new communal venues such as coffee houses and clubs and for the Church's condemnation of the seditious pamphlets made possible by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. Finally, the establishment's conviction that wit, ridicule, satire, and innuendo are subversive rhetorical forms is glaringly at play in attempts to use libel trials to translate the fear of wit as a metaphorical transgression of public decorum into an actual violation of the civil code.
Popularizing National Pasts is the first truly cross-national and comparative study of popular national histories, their representations, the meanings given to them and their uses, which expands outside the confines of Western Europe and the US. It draws a picture of popular histories which is European in the full sense of this term. One of its fortes is the inclusion of Eastern Europe. The cross-national angle of Popularizing National Pasts is apparent in the scope of its comparative project, as well as that of the longue duree it covers. Apart from essays on Britain, France, and Germany, the collection includes studies of popular histories in Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe, notably Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Armenia, Russia and the Ukraine, as well as considering the US and Argentina. Cross-national comparison is also a central concern of the thirteen case studies in the volume, which are, each, devoted to comparing between two, or more, national historical cultures. Thus temporality -both continuities and breaks- in popular notions of the past, its interpretations and consumption, is examined in the long continuum. The volume makes available to English readers, probably for the first time, the cutting edge of Eastern European scholarship on popular histories, nationalism and culture.
Under Stalin's totalitarian leadership of the USSR, Soviet national identities with historical narratives were constructed. These constructions envisaged how nationalities should see their imaginary common past, and millions of people defined themselves according to them. This book explains how and by whom these national histories were constructed and focuses on the crucial episode in the construction of national identities of Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan from 1936 and 1945. A unique comparative study of three different case studies, this book reveals different aims and methods of nation construction, despite the existence of one-party rule and a single overarching official ideology. The study is based on work in the often overlooked archives in the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan. By looking at different examples within the Soviet context, the author contributes to and often challenges current scholarship on Soviet nationality policies and Stalinist nation-building projects. He also brings a new viewpoint to the debate on whether the Soviet period was a project of developmentalist modernization or merely a renewed 'Russian empire'. The book concludes that the local agents in the countries concerned had a sincere belief in socialism-especially as a project of modernism and development-and, at the same time, were strongly attached to their national identities. Claiming that local communist party officials and historians played a leading role in the construction of national narratives, this book will be of interest to historians and political scientists interested in the history of the Soviet Union and contemporary Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Economic history is the most quantitative branch of history, reflecting the interests and profiting from the techniques and concepts of economics. This essay, first published in 1977, provides an extensive contribution to quantitative historiography by delivering a critical guide to the sources of the numerical data of the period 1700 to 1850. This title will be of interest to students of history, finance and economics.
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 field guide to oral history in Latin America addresses methodological, ethical, and interpretive issues arising from the region's unique milieu. With careful consideration of the challenges of working in Latin America - including those of language, culture, performance, translation, and political instability - David Carey Jr. provides guidance for those conducting oral history research in the postcolonial world. In regions such as Latin America, where nations that have been subjected to violent colonial and neocolonial forces continue to strive for just and peaceful societies, decolonizing research and analysis is imperative. Carey deploys case studies and examples in ways that will resonate with anyone who is interested in oral history.
This collection presents the first sustained examination of the nature and status of the idea of principles in early modern thought. Principles are almost ubiquitous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the term appears in famous book titles, such as Newton's Principia; the notion plays a central role in the thought of many leading philosophers, such as Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason; and many of the great discoveries of the period, such as the Law of Gravitational Attraction, were described as principles. Ranging from mathematics and law to chemistry, from natural and moral philosophy to natural theology, and covering some of the leading thinkers of the period, this volume presents ten compelling new essays that illustrate the centrality and importance of the idea of principles in early modern thought. It contains chapters by leading scholars in the field, including the Leibniz scholar Daniel Garber and the historian of chemistry William R. Newman, as well as exciting, emerging scholars, such as the Newton scholar Kirsten Walsh and a leading expert on experimental philosophy, Alberto Vanzo. The Idea of Principles in Early Modern Thought: Interdisciplinary Perspectives charts the terrain of one of the period's central concepts for the first time, and opens up new lines for further research.
Illuminating and comprehensive, this excellent volume addresses the problematic relationship between democratic institutions and the current critique of enlightenment and modernity. Since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, and across the range of practice from science to politics to art, various cultural shifts have unsettled assumptions that have been fundamental to the development of democratic institutions: assumptions concerning individual identity, the nature of political systems, and the viability of egalitarian ideals. Can democracy survive these changes to the value systems upon which it has been based for over two centuries? This study does not focus on the often repeated particulars of past or current events such as 9/11 or the genocide in Darfur, but instead examines the terms and conditions under which it would be possible to prevent such events in the future. |
You may like...
Raft of the Medusa - Five Voices on…
Jocelyne Doray, Julian Samuel
Paperback
R331
Discovery Miles 3 310
Using Digital Humanities in the…
Claire Battershill, Shawna Ross
Hardcover
R2,336
Discovery Miles 23 360
|