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Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists,
while major newspapers present breathless accounts of new
archaeological findings and speculation about what those findings
might tell us about ourselves. We are obsessed with
prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different
from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating
history of prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos moves from Rousseau’s
“state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German
barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a
matriarchal paradise where women ruled. Yet as he shows, such ideas
became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of
repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Accounts of
prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed
than about the deep past, Geroulanos argues—and if we hope to
start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside
the search for how it all started.
The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas
establishes a new and comprehensive way of working in the history
and sociology of ideas, in order to obviate several longstanding
gaps that have prevented a fruitful interdisciplinary and
international dialogues. Pushing global intellectual history
forward, it uses methodological innovations in the history of
concepts, gender history, imperial history, and history of
normativity, many of which have emerged out of intellectual history
in recent years, and it especially foregrounds the role of field
theory for delimiting objects of study but also in studying
transnational history and migration of persons and ideas. The
chapters also explore how intellectual history crosses the study of
particular domains: law, politics, economy, science, life sciences,
social and human sciences, book history, literature, and emotions.
A widely celebrated intellectual historian of twentieth-century
Europe, Anson Rabinbach is one of the most important scholars of
National Socialism working over the last forty years. This volume
collects, for the first time, his pathbreaking work on Nazi
culture, antifascism, and the after-effects of Nazism on postwar
German and European culture. Historically detailed and
theoretically sophisticated, his essays span the aesthetics of
production, messianic and popular claims, the ethos that Nazism
demanded of its adherents, the brilliant and sometimes successful
efforts of antifascist intellectuals to counter Hitler's rise, the
most significant concepts to emerge out of the 1930s and 1940s for
understanding European authoritarianism, the major controversies
around Nazism that took place after the regime's demise, the
philosophical claims of postwar philosophers, sociologists and
psychoanalysts-from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt and from
Alexander Kluge to Klaus Theweleit-and the role of Auschwitz in
European history.
A widely celebrated intellectual historian of twentieth-century
Europe, Anson Rabinbach is one of the most important scholars of
National Socialism working over the last forty years. This volume
collects, for the first time, his pathbreaking work on Nazi
culture, antifascism, and the after-effects of Nazism on postwar
German and European culture. Historically detailed and
theoretically sophisticated, his essays span the aesthetics of
production, messianic and popular claims, the ethos that Nazism
demanded of its adherents, the brilliant and sometimes successful
efforts of antifascist intellectuals to counter Hitler's rise, the
most significant concepts to emerge out of the 1930s and 1940s for
understanding European authoritarianism, the major controversies
around Nazism that took place after the regime's demise, the
philosophical claims of postwar philosophers, sociologists and
psychoanalysts-from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt and from
Alexander Kluge to Klaus Theweleit-and the role of Auschwitz in
European history.
This book returns to a time and place when the concept of
transparency was met with deep suspicion. It offers a panorama of
postwar French thought where attempts to show the perils of
transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major
conceptual inventions, many of which we now take for granted.
Between 1945 and 1985, academics, artists, revolutionaries, and
state functionaries spoke of transparency in pejorative terms.
Associating it with the prying eyes of totalitarian governments,
they undertook a critical project against it—in education,
policing, social psychology, economic policy, and the management of
information. Focusing on Sartre, Lacan, Canguilhem, Lévi-Strauss,
Leroi-Gourhan, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Transparency in
Postwar France explores the work of ethicists, who proposed that
individuals are transparent neither to each other nor to
themselves, and philosophers, who clamored for new epistemological
foundations. These decades saw the emergence of the colonial and
phenomenological "other," the transformation of ideas of normality,
and the effort to overcome Enlightenment-era humanisms and violence
in the name of freedom. These thinkers' innovations remain
centerpieces for any resistance to contemporary illusions that
tolerate or enable power and social coercion.
French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the
twentieth century. In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi
and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Kojeve, Levinas,
Heidegger, Koyre, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that
man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God"
without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating
the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to
a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for
existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became
dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being,
language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be
paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate
postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments
argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism
as insufficient and ultimately violent.
This book returns to a time and place when the concept of
transparency was met with deep suspicion. It offers a panorama of
postwar French thought where attempts to show the perils of
transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major
conceptual inventions, many of which we now take for granted.
Between 1945 and 1985, academics, artists, revolutionaries, and
state functionaries spoke of transparency in pejorative terms.
Associating it with the prying eyes of totalitarian governments,
they undertook a critical project against it-in education,
policing, social psychology, economic policy, and the management of
information. Focusing on Sartre, Lacan, Canguilhem, Levi-Strauss,
Leroi-Gourhan, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Transparency in
Postwar France explores the work of ethicists, who proposed that
individuals are transparent neither to each other nor to
themselves, and philosophers, who clamored for new epistemological
foundations. These decades saw the emergence of the colonial and
phenomenological "other," the transformation of ideas of normality,
and the effort to overcome Enlightenment-era humanisms and violence
in the name of freedom. These thinkers' innovations remain
centerpieces for any resistance to contemporary illusions that
tolerate or enable power and social coercion.
A groundbreaking account of the origins and history of the idea of
fetishism. In recent decades, William Pietz's innovative history of
the idea of the fetish has become a cult classic. Gathered here,
for the first time, is his complete series of essays on fetishism,
supplemented by three texts on Marx, blood sacrifice, and the money
value of human life. Tracing the idea of the fetish from its
origins in the Portuguese colonization of West Africa to its place
in Enlightenment thought and beyond, Pietz reveals the violent
emergence of a foundational concept for modern theories of value,
belief, desire, and difference. This book cements Pietz's legacy of
engaging questions about material culture, object agency, merchant
capitalism, and spiritual power, and introduces a powerful theorist
to a new generation of thinkers.
What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the
ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the
concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of
its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings.
Using global intellectual history as a bridge between approaches,
periods, and areas, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a
comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to
reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or
renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and
the images and ideas on which it rests. The essays in The
Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been
supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and
intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary
approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging
from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a
discussion of the continuing power of Lenin's corpse, from an
analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an
exploration of the imagery of "the people" in the Age of
Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific
historical regimes and conflicts, the book's contributors examine
intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and
medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship,
religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that
support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its
representations.
French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the
twentieth century. In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi
and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Kojeve, Levinas,
Heidegger, Koyre, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that
man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God"
without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating
the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to
a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for
existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became
dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being,
language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be
paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate
postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments
argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism
as insufficient and ultimately violent.
At the time of his death in 1995, Georges Canguilhem was a highly
respected historian of science and medicine, whose engagement with
questions of normality, the ideologization of scientific thought,
and the conceptual history of biology had marked the thought of
philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Pierre
Bourdieu, and Gilles Deleuze. This collection of short, incisive,
and highly accessible essays on the major concepts of modern
medicine shows Canguilhem at the peak of his use of historical
practice for philosophical engagement. In order to elaborate a
philosophy of medicine, Canguilhem examines paramount problems such
as the definition and uses of health, the decline of the
Hippocratic understanding of nature, the experience of disease, the
limits of psychology in medicine, myths and realities of
therapeutic practices, the difference between cure and healing, the
organism’s self-regulation, and medical metaphors linking the
organism to society. Writings on Medicine is at once an excellent
introduction to Canguilhem’s work and a forceful, insightful, and
accessible engagement with elemental concepts in medicine. The book
is certain to leave its imprint on anthropology, history,
philosophy, bioethics, and the social studies of medicine.
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Knowledge of Life (Paperback)
Georges Canguilhem; Translated by Stefanos Geroulanos, Daniela Ginsburg; Introduction by Paola Marrati, Todd Meyers
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R841
Discovery Miles 8 410
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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As the work of thinkers like Michel Foucault, FranAois Jacob, Louis
Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem
exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and
French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that
spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a
series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and
clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and
biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do
transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of
life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and
experimental practices and how re they themselves transformed? How
does knowledge "undo the experience of life so as to help man
remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him?"
Knowledge of Life is Georges Canguilhem's effort to explain how the
movements of knowledge and life each come to rest on the other.
Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution, and still
pertinent today, Knowledge of Life tackles the history of cell
theory, the conceptual moves towards and away from mechanical
understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, the
nature of normality in science and its objects.
Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more
than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities
interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes
they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan
Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley bring together
essays that challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the
nexus of two concepts-- "power" and "time"--as they manifest in a
wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics,
technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how
"temporal regimes" are constituted through the shaping of power in
historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen
essays on a wide variety of subjects: human rights; sovereignty;
Islamic, European, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism;
revolution; the Supreme Court; and even the Manson Family. Power
and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of
some of the world's most respected and innovative contemporary
historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of
history.
Best known for his pioneering work in theories of self-organization
and complexity, the biophysicist and philosopher Henri Atlan has
during the past thirty years been a major voice in contemporary
European philosophical and bioethical debates. In a massive oeuvre
that ranges from biology and neural network theory to Spinoza's
thought and the history of philosophy, and from artificial
intelligence and information theory to Jewish mysticism and
contemporary medical ethics, Atlan has come to offer an
exceptionally powerful philosophical argumentation that is as
hostile to scientism as it is attentive to biology's conceptual and
experimental rigor, as careful with concepts of rationality as it
is committed to rethinking the human place in a radically
determined yet forever changing world. This is the first volume to
bring together the major strands of Atlan's work for an
English-language audience. It is an indispensable compendium for
those seeking to clarify the joint stakes and shared import of
philosophy and science for questions of life and the living-today
and tomorrow.
Best known for his pioneering work in theories of self-organization
and complexity, the biophysicist and philosopher Henri Atlan has
during the past thirty years been a major voice in contemporary
European philosophical and bioethical debates. In a massive oeuvre
that ranges from biology and neural network theory to Spinoza's
thought and the history of philosophy, and from artificial
intelligence and information theory to Jewish mysticism and
contemporary medical ethics, Atlan has come to offer an
exceptionally powerful philosophical argumentation that is as
hostile to scientism as it is attentive to biology's conceptual and
experimental rigor, as careful with concepts of rationality as it
is committed to rethinking the human place in a radically
determined yet forever changing world. This is the first volume to
bring together the major strands of Atlan's work for an
English-language audience. It is an indispensable compendium for
those seeking to clarify the joint stakes and shared import of
philosophy and science for questions of life and the living-today
and tomorrow.
The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they
were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such
disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die
but allow another to recover? In The Human Body in the Age of
Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a
fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize
the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the
harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought
conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and
the wildly divergence between patients. Geroulanos and Meyers
carefully trace how this emerging constellation of concepts became
essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility,
and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as
anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.
Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and
intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is
an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world
the Great War ushered in.
A groundbreaking account of the origins and history of the idea of
fetishism. In recent decades, William Pietz's innovative history of
the idea of the fetish has become a cult classic. Gathered here,
for the first time, is his complete series of essays on fetishism,
supplemented by three texts on Marx, blood sacrifice, and the money
value of human life. Tracing the idea of the fetish from its
origins in the Portuguese colonization of West Africa to its place
in Enlightenment thought and beyond, Pietz reveals the violent
emergence of a foundational concept for modern theories of value,
belief, desire, and difference. This book cements Pietz's legacy of
engaging questions about material culture, object agency, merchant
capitalism, and spiritual power, and introduces a powerful theorist
to a new generation of thinkers.
The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they
were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such
disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die
but allow another to recover? In The Human Body in the Age of
Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a
fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize
the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the
harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought
conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and
the wildly divergence between patients. Geroulanos and Meyers
carefully trace how this emerging constellation of concepts became
essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility,
and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as
anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.
Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and
intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is
an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world
the Great War ushered in.
What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the
ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the
concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of
its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings.
Using global intellectual history as a bridge between approaches,
periods, and areas, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a
comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to
reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or
renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and
the images and ideas on which it rests. The essays in The
Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been
supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and
intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary
approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging
from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a
discussion of the continuing power of Lenin's corpse, from an
analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an
exploration of the imagery of "the people" in the Age of
Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific
historical regimes and conflicts, the book's contributors examine
intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and
medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship,
religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that
support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its
representations.
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