The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of (...) the Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

This paper discusses exile and emigration as factors in the encounters of art, philosophy, cultural criticism, and political power in Soviet Russia under Stalin. While by now we possess considerable knowledge about emigration and exile from Eastern and Central Europe to the West in the 1920s and 1930s, we have tended to under-research and under-conceptualize the alternative destination. Seemingly less glamorous and lastingly tainted by the open glorification or silent acquiescence to Stalin and the purges, Moscow as a place (...) of emigration and exile of left East-Central European intellectuals in the 1930s presents a uniquely important trajectory, the study of which contributes to enriching and refining our understanding not just of the history of international communism, but also – and perhaps more importantly – of the formation of the intellectual and political elites that were to shape life in the Eastern Bloc after 1945. (shrink)

This book is a comparative study in the history of ideas. It is an innovative examination of the intellectual background, affiliations and contexts of two major twentieth-century thinkers and an historical interpretation of their work in aesthetics, cultural theory, literary history, and philosophy. Unlike all existing texts on Lukacs and Bakhtin, this book offers a comparison of their writings at different stages of their intellectual development and in the broad context of the ideas of their time. (...) The book introduces unknown archival material and discusses hitherto disregarded or overlooked texts by Lukacs and Bakhtin. It puts forward new readings of best-known work on Dostoevsky, Rabelais, and Goethe and treats in an original way the question of the coherence of Bakhtin's ouevre. The book offers valuable insight into the sources of Bakhtin's terminological repertoire and through examination of Bakhtin's and Lukacs's intellectual affiliations--of the limits and substance of their originality as thinkers. Lukacs and Bakhtin emerge from the book as thinkers, whose intellectual careers followed strikingly similar paths. They both were confronted with similar agendas and questions posed for them by their time. Bakhtin however, had to find answers not only for this common agenda but also to the answers that Lukacs himself had already provided. (shrink)

Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism brings together ten innovative contributions by outstanding scholars working across a wide array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Interdisciplinary in its methodology and compass, with a strong comparative European dimension, the volume examines discourses ranging from literature, historiography, music and opera to anthropology and political philosophy. It makes an original contribution to the study of 18th-century ideas of universal peace, progress and wealth as the foundation of future debates on cosmopolitanism. At the same time, it (...) analyses examples of counter-reaction to these ideas and discusses the relevance of the Enlightenment for subsequent polemics on cosmopolitanism, including 21st-century debates in sociology, politics and legal theory. (shrink)

This review essay seeks to direct attention to intellectual history as a new and flourishing subfield in the historiography of post-1945 Germany. The essay probes and critically interrogates some of the basic arguments of Dirk Moses' prize-winning monograph German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. It does so by engaging with a series of German-language monographs on key intellectuals of the postwar period or groups of intellectuals that have appeared during the last few years. The essay also (...) includes two books that focus on intellectual transfers from and to the United States and hence transcend the purely national framework. The essay highlights some broader themes such as West German intellectuals' confrontation with the Nazi past and with the memory of Germany's failed experiment with democracy during the interwar Weimar Republic. It also discusses the significance of the West German student movement in the 1960s for West German intellectual history. The essay concludes with some broader reflections on writing intellectual history of the postwar period, and it points to some avenues for further research. It underlines the significance of intellectual debates—and hence of intellectual history—for charting and explaining the process of postwar democratization and liberalization in the Federal Republic of Germany. (shrink)

Silvana de Souza Ramos and Iracy Ferreira dos Santos Junior’s interview with Emmanuel de Saint Aubert explores the history and role of the Husserl Archives (Paris) in fostering multidisciplinary research in phenomenology. Saint Aubert clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Husserl’s manuscripts, describing the situated and complex reading he undertook not only of these manuscripts but also of Husserl’s work as a whole. This aspect is particularly significant for contemporary French philosophical studies, as Merleau-Ponty played a pivotal role in (...) introducing Husserl’s ideas into French thought. This clarification allows us to show the originality of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, as it reveals that he was not merely an exegete of Husserl, but a restless and multifaceted thinker, deeply involved in the intellectual and political debates of his time. If he cannot be reduced to a mere reader of Husserl, neither can his later ontology be simply attributed to Heidegger’s influence. Once engaged in a meticulous study of the unfinished manuscripts that Merleau-Ponty left behind due to his premature death, which were drafts for a new book, Saint Aubert conducted a thorough investigation of Merleau-Ponty’s use of key terms in his ontology – chair, Leib, empiétement, chiasmi – showing that these terms do not literally translate or express concepts derived from Husserl or Heidegger. On the contrary, these terms acquire a multifaceted range of meanings in Merleau-Ponty’s writings, nourished by his philosophical readings and meditations, by his scientific and literary refinement, as well as his ethical and political concerns. Saint Aubert’s research, dedicated to the interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s so-called “unpublished” works, resulted in the publication of five books by Vrin, all guided by a transversal genetic reading of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Additionally, with the help of other researchers, Saint Aubert carefully edited and published several volumes of Merleau-Ponty’s manuscripts. This material, made available in an organized and contextualized manner, is of incomparable richness, allowing for a more precise understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s role in contemporary thought, while also illuminating the meaning of his ontological project. (shrink)

Annotation Based on the research he undertook in rare book collections housed in Scotland, the United States, Finland, Iceland, Holland, Germany and Austria, the author presents a systematic history of cannabalism as reflected in the mirror of philosophy.

This paper focuses on Georg Lukács, for it is in his work, and the attendant debates and disagreements, that an entire constellation of questions around Realism is first compellingly formulated. The purpose of the paper is to revisit Lukács’ theory of realism as a response to a host of mainstream currents shaping the landscape of Continental philosophy in the first three decades of the 20th century. Particular attention is paid to the problem of form and truth at the core of (...) Lukács’ theory of realism. (shrink)

The paper considers some intellectual roots of the contemporary multimodal analysis. The prehistory of microanalysis of social interaction includes semiotics of nonverbal communication and the anthropological study of patterns of expressive and communicative behavior as it was performed by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in the pioneering research on Balinese character. The Batesonian approach to interaction was influenced by cybernetic ideas—particularly the notion of feedback— which led to theoretical advances on communication in general and, particularly, in the study (...) of family interaction in a psychiatric perspective. The interdisciplinary research project that became known as “The Natural History of an Interview” was the first example of a broad interdisciplinary collaboration involving anthropologists, linguists and psychiatrists. It has brought about a detailed analysis of a filmed interaction that correlated data about talk, paralanguage, and body language (kinesics). The results of this project, as well as of the other attempts at kinesic microanalysis, allowed one to question the goals of research and the adequacy of research methods employed. However, the input from kinesics and, broader, semiotics of non-verbal communication was instrumental for including data about participants’ attention traced as gaze-direction into analysis of talk-in-interaction, as it was put in practice by Charles Goodwin. (shrink)

The history of philosophical thought has often been compared to a comedy of errors, and is one of the most important dimensions of the intellectual history of mankind. Quests for a correct view of the world and tragic mistakes, the polarization of philosophy into mutually exclusive trends, which is sometimes thought of as a permanent scandal in philosophy — these are not merely the searchings and sufferings of individual thinkers. This is the intellectual odyssey of mankind, (...) and those to whom it appears a farce apparently interpret the tragic only as the idols of the theater. But the fact is that antinomies, crises, retracing of steps, the discarding of real truths in favor of erroneous concepts long since refuted but stubbornly taken as true — are these things characteristic of philosophy alone? Philosophy is the intellectual image of mankind, and the contradictions of its development are of no small importance to the intellectual biography of humanity. (shrink)

This article examines approaches to early socialism from an intellectual history viewpoint, focussing on British Owenite socialism. It assesses the author's own research in the field over the past thirty-five years in an effort to measure the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches he initially adopted to the field. It attempts to balance insights associated with the so-called “Cambridge School” with those gained in particular from the standpoints of the history of religion and the history (...) of emotions, and a theory of group identity which can in part be associated with the history of utopianism. (shrink)

The studies of Japanese Intellectual History was born after the 1st World War when Japan occupied the position to confront the West in the world history. In this period, Japan expanded its influence in Southeast Asia. How to establish the national identity of ‘Japan’ was the research task of Japanese Intellectual History. This paper thinks about the meanings of the studies of Japanese Intellectual History by considering the birth, main issues, and the (...) direction of the studies of Japanese history of thought. One of the huge characteristics of researches on the Japanese Intellectual History First, it is the period of a shift in generations. On top of the retirement of the 1st-generation researchers such as Maruyama and Goyas in the postwar period, their younger scholars also faced the period of retirement. Second, it is the researches the history of thought without a view of history. The researches on the Japanese history of thought after Maruyama certainly showed its external expansion such as the expansion of research materials, close reading of historical records, cross-sectional research on the studies of Japanese Intellectual History and neighboring studies, criticism of modern knowledge, criticism of researches in the viewpoint of single-national history, and expansion to the East Asian history of thought. However, there is no distinct view of history including the researches on the history of thought. Thus, there are no researches aiming to suggest the whole image of studies on the history of thought. Third, the theme of researches on the history of thought is moving to modern times. Fourth, the researches on the Japanese history of thought are locked in a viewpoint of single-national history. It would be necessary to review the characteristics of Japanese Intellectual History in correlations of China, Joseon, and Japan. (shrink)

This article examines Alexandre Kojève’s attempts to differentiate between philosophy and wisdom; he thought of the two, particularly later on in his career, but also earlier, as distinctly non-identical. I trace Kojève’s transition from philosophy to practice in the corridors of power, motivated by his quest for wisdom, by outlining in some detail his stance on globalisation and the role of the state in his post-war dialogue with Carl Schmitt.

This article enquires into the notion of world poetics constructed by Wang Ning in the lead article of this symposium. By examining the relationship between the discourses of world literature and literary theory, and between theory and poetics in the context of Western, Middle Eastern, and Chinese cultural production, I argue that poetics and theory should be desynonymized. The notions of theory and poetics in these cultural zones were shaped and functioned differently. My analysis of these differences involves a conceptual (...) toolkit that goes beyond the current assumptions of Western theory. (shrink)

This paper aims to elucidate factors that contributed to the temporary loss of the European tradition of Taphonomy, developed during the first half of the twentieth century, and its rediscovery and reinvention in North America during the Post-War. Such factors are not restricted to the intellectual content of papers and books produced by researchers but have to do also with linguistic, cultural, historical, and institutional matters, which have shaped and conditioned the reception of ideas and concepts within Paleontology during (...) the twentieth century. These factors include the transition from a multilingual scientific culture to a monolingual one, the shift of palaeontology’s centre from Europe to the United States, and the ideology of researchers, among other factors. (shrink)

Hu Shi frequently gave lectures on the history of Chinese philosophy, especially the history of ancient Chinese philosophy, from the year 1919 to 1937. A large number of papers and dissertations published during this period are related to his research on this topic. In his opinion, there are three characteristics of the history of ancient Chinese philosophy: "religionalization of thought," "Indianization of philosophy," and "conflict between Chinese thought and Indian thought." In this paper, I explore Hu (...) Shi's deep insight into the religionalization of Confucianism in Han dynasty and into the thought of Taoism in the medieval times. (shrink)

Resumo O objetivo central deste texto é mapear a influência da sociologia weberiana na produção intelectual sobre o fenômeno religioso no Brasil. Mais especificamente, buscaremos compreender de que forma a prédica weberiana que estabelece a "afinidade" do protestantismo pietista com o "desencantamento" das imagens religiosas do mundo e a modernidade capitalista foi apropriada pela Sociologia da Religião, na tentativa de compreender o crescimento do pentecostalismo no Brasil. Assim, rastrearemos a produção sociológica, buscando estabelecer um paralelo entre as representações da sociedade (...) e da cultura brasileiras presentes na forma como os pesquisadores recortam e analisam o fenômeno pentecostal. Concentraremos nossas atenções nos trabalhos que seguem a linha teórica traçada por Cândido Procópio de Camargo, que podemos expressar esquematicamente da seguinte forma: conversão, ruptura com o passado tradicional (aqui representada pela pertença impensada a uma religião - catolicismo), desencantamento das crenças, que levaria à individuação e à ação racional e, finalmente, a modernização da sociedade brasileira. Vemos, portanto, que a reflexão procopiana e a de seus seguidores insere-se em um quadro intelectual mais amplo, que remonta à década de 1930, preocupado com as razões do atraso brasileiro e suas possibilidades de superação. Palavras-chave: Max Weber; Pentecostalismo; Desencantamento; Secularização; Modernização.The main purpose of this text is to map the influence of Weberian sociology on the intellectual production of the religious phenomenon in Brazil. Specifically, it endeavors to understand how the Weberian proposition, which establishes the "affinity" of pietist Protestantism with the "disenchantment" of religious images in the capitalist world and modernity, was appropriated by the Sociology of Religion in an attempt to understand the growth of Pentecostalism in Brazil. Thus, we review the sociological production, seeking to establish a parallel between representations of Brazilian society and culture evident in the way researchers consider and analyze the Pentecostal phenomenon. We focus our attention on the works that follow Cândido Procópio de Camargo's theory, which can be expressed schematically as: conversion, breaking with the traditional past (represented here by belonging thoughtlessly to a religion - Catholicism); disenchantment of beliefs, which would lead to individuation and rational action; and, finally, the modernization of Brazilian society. The conclusion points out that Camargo's thought and that of his followers are inserted into a broader intellectual framework, which dates back to the 1930s and is concerned with the reasons behind Brazilian underdevelopment and the chances of overcoming it. Key words: Max Weber; Pentecostalism; Disenchantment; Secularization; Modernization. (shrink)

The called Middle Ages was a time marked by the outbreak of resistance movements which had as main and common characteristic the opposition to the stance adopted by the Roman Catholic Church during this period of history. The target of this research is to identify the main features of the clergy in this period, as well as identify what were these resistance movements and their theological basis. The method adopted here is to search for bibliographical material, establishing as (...) the main base, notably the writings of the theologian José Comblin, who produced vast material on this issue. As result of this work, it could be detected that these movements occurred in a profuse way. Over that, it was also evident in this search result that power centralization, enrichment and inattention to the reality of the poor, all these outstanding features in the behavior of the Catholic Church in the period were elements that constituted the main cause of the outbreak of such movements. (shrink)

We cannot understand contemporary psychology without first researching its history. Unlike other books on the history of psychology, which are chronologically ordered, this Handbook is organized topically. It covers the history of ideas in multiple areas of the field and reviews the intellectual history behind the major topics of investigation. The evolution of psychological ideas is described alongside an analysis of their surrounding context. Readers learn how eminent psychologists draw on the context of their time (...) and place for ideas and practices, and also how innovation in psychology is an ongoing dialogue between past, present, and anticipated future. (shrink)

Like almost everything in the Soviet Union, the discipline of history of science and technology altered dramatically during the social upheaval of Gorbachev’s perestroika, in some ways that were predictable, and in other ways that were not. One new direction of research that has since grown into a bourgeoning field – the social history of Russian and Soviet science – is represented by the articles in this volume. This short introduction cannot substitute for a real historiographical (...) study, which will probably appear in due course. This is rather a personal memoir about the origin and motivations behind the approach; as incomplete as a participant’s memoir can be, but with some benefits of retrospective hindsight. Ten years ago, at a time of great fluidity in minds and intellectual agendas, many developments were driven primarily by intuition and the sheer momentum of Zeitgeist; now, as things have become somewhat settled, there is time for more reflection. (shrink)

The first book for which I had title-envy was Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost (1965). At once mysterious and memorable, the phrase on the cover promised (at least to my undergraduate eyes) a kind of history that was shadowy and unfamiliar. Thanks to the success of the social history it launched, the work now looks surprisingly straightforward: its facts and figures documenting premodern English society—its class structures, marriage practices, literacy rates, and so on—make the past feel (...) found. So much so that the very existence of so much data threatens to belie the claim of the title.But loss, for Laslett, is not absence; it is, rather, the condition of change through time, and his book was written to show precisely how much England had been transformed during the long course of the Industrial Revolution. In this sense, his title might serve for almost any account of people, places, or things that are no longer as they were.Worlds do nonetheless get lost, and we do not have to travel very far back into the past to become aware of the gaps in the record. Martin Mulsow has written a book that, finally, does justice to the precarious nature of what becomes history, and this new translation (sensitively rendered and beautifully produced) will prevent this magisterial work of German intellectual history from being lost on Anglophone readers. As a title, Knowledge Lost is not, to be sure, as catchy as Laslett's formulation. Nor does it capture the nuance of the name given to the original German publication (issued by Suhrkamp in 2012): Prekäres Wissen. What Mulsow recovers with a combination of historical narrative, historiographical analysis, and good old-fashioned sleuthing is the fragility of knowledge (and of those who traded in it) in early modern Europe.In a nice neologism, Mulsow names this group the Wissenprekariat (or “intellectual precariat”): his “knowledge underclass” includes radicals, obsessives, and cranks, but also mainstream scholars who simply became what Michel Foucault liked to call “infamous”—both scandalous, that is, and obscure. What makes the book essential reading even for those with little interest in the fringes of the Renaissance or Enlightenment is the anatomy of precarity itself, a state that shadows knowledge in many times and places. With a nod toward the “material turn” in historical writing, Mulsow pays particular attention to the risks involved in certain media or types of transmission. But he also looks at the social, disciplinary, and ideological forces that drive certain forms of knowing—and the figures with whom they are associated—underground.Thus his book amounts to nothing less than an alternative intellectual history of the early modern period, one that offers countless correctives to the received narratives that continue to favor the successful publications of major thinkers. But it is also a book for our own time. Mulsow's “Concluding Word” attempts to be optimistic, and he ends with a tantalizing list of the other unwritten histories that this one calls for—including “a history of maskings,” “a history of the ways knowledge could be appropriated on note cards that could easily be lost,” and “a history of the generational transfer of embarrassing knowledge.” His final paragraph acknowledges that “many kinds of precarity have declined” since the seventeenth century: now “we can insure ourselves against many risks, and... packages are reliably delivered.” Written only ten years ago, these words seem to come from another world we have lost, one before disrupted supply chains and the resurgence of populist politicians bringing back forms of precarity we thought we had left behind. If ever a book needed a new afterword, it is this one. (shrink)

This book tells the fascinating story of the people and events behind the turbulent changes in attitudes to quantum theory in the second half of the 20th century. The huge success of quantum mechanics as a predictive theory has been accompanied, from the very beginning, by doubts and controversy about its foundations and interpretation. This book looks in detail at how research on foundations evolved after WWII, when it was revived, until the mid 1990s, when most of this (...) class='Hi'>research merged into the technological promise of quantum information. It is the story of the quantum dissidents, the scientists who brought this subject from the margins of physics into its mainstream. It is also a history of concepts, experiments, and techniques, and of the relationships between physics and the world at large, touching on themes such as the Cold War, McCarthyism, Zhdanovism, and the unrest of the late 1960s. (shrink)

While it is no longer a commonplace among intellectual historians, the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of ignorance still pervades the popular imagination. Auguste Comte and his fellow Enlightenment philosophes have indeed cast a long shadow. The shadow is long and dark enough that many students of the history of philosophy, for example, still begin their graduate studies under the impression that little work of importance was produced between Plotinus and Descartes—at least little (...) that is relevant to the development of modern philosophy. It is fitting, therefore, that Yale’s important new series in western intellectual history is inaugurated by this magisterial account of the intellectual life of the one thousand years between 400 and 1400. The author, an accomplished historian of this period, provides much evidence supporting a sympathetic view of the medieval intellectual achievement. Her work, however, goes much further than this, for she argues that the foundations of modern intellectual development were laid in the medieval period rather than in the classical period of ancient Greece or the ancient Judeo-Christian tradition. While this thesis remains rather controversial, the comprehensive survey and comparative suggestions offered in the work provide useful and accessible correctives to the popular view of medieval intellectual life. (shrink)

The canon in the history of philosophy, as has been crystallized, needs revision with an emphasis on intercultural studies. Especially the view of self-contained cultures and communities, since antiquity up to the fifteenth century, forms an ahistorical construct, which is already being attacked and is in no position to offer anything fruitful to research. Within our complicated globalized environment, historians of philosophy ought to give priority to, and lay emphasis on, comparative study and “interculturality.” A comparative history (...) of philosophy aims to the understanding of the presuppositions of the act of philosophizing. (shrink)

Naloxone, which reverses the effects of opioids, was synthesized in 1960, though the hunt for opioid antagonists began a half-century earlier. The history of this quest reveals how cultural and medical attitudes toward opioids have been marked by a polarization of discourse that belies a keen ambivalence. From 1915 to 1960, researchers were stymied in seeking a “pure” antidote to opioids, discovering instead numerous opioid molecules of mixed or paradoxical properties. At the same time, the quest for a dominant (...) explanatory and therapeutic model for addiction was likewise unsettled. After naloxone’s discovery, new dichotomizing language arose in the “War on Drugs,” in increasingly divergent views between addiction medicine and palliative care, and in public debates about layperson naloxone access. Naloxone, one of the emblematic drugs of our time, highlights the ambivalence latent in public and biomedical discussions of opioids as agents of risk and relief. (shrink)

Highlighting the social tensions that confront the liberal tradition, Pierre Manent draws a portrait of what we, citizens of modern liberal democracies, have become. For Manent, a discussion of liberalism encompasses the foundations of modern society, its secularism, its individualism, and its conception of rights. The frequent incapacity of the morally neutral, democratic state to further social causes, he argues, derives from the liberal stance that political life does not serve a higher purpose. Through quick-moving, highly synthetic essays, he explores (...) the development of liberal thinking in terms of a single theme: the decline of theological politics. The author traces the liberal stance to Machiavelli, who, in seeking to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of the Catholic church, separated politics from all notions of a cosmological order. What followed, as Manent demonstrates in his analyses of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Guizot, and Constant, was the evolving concept of an individual with no goals outside the confines of the self and a state with no purpose but to prevent individuals from dominating one another. Weighing both the positive and negative effects of such a political arrangement, Manent raises important questions about the fundamental political issues of the day, among them the possibility of individual rights being reconciled with the necessary demands of political organization, and the desirability of a government system neutral about religion but not about public morals. (shrink)

Modern psychology does not address the great variety of elements constituting subjective experience or the relations among them. This essay examines ideas on the fine structure of awareness and suggests a more precisely characterized set of variables, useful to all psychologists interested in awareness, whether their focus is on computer simulation, neuroscience, or clinical intervention. This view builds on William James' insight into the qualitative differences among the parts of subjective experience, a concept nearly forgotten until recently reinterpreted in contemporary (...) cognitive terms by Mangan. I review, revise, and expand these ideas, and suggest their application to self-monitoring in several domains, including metacognition, action, and emotion. Sharpening and extending the distinctions James drew among key descriptive aspects of awareness gives us a more differentiated vocabulary for research and theory. (shrink)

The subject of this research is the philosophy of history of Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev as the founder of “Russian idea”, the problematic of which was principal in reasoning of the representatives of the Russian sociopolitical thought regarding the place of Russia in world civilization, its sociocultural and national identity. Alongside the assessments of the vector of Russian history as a whole and its separate stages, the subject of the analysis is also the character of (...) author’s discourse, which united the perception of history as the synthesis of historical narrative and philosophy of history, fine intuition, and rational analysis. Methodology of research of Chaadayev’s works as the most remarkable representative of Christian historicism suggest the application of interdisciplinary approach, principles of intellectual history, comparative culturology, and retrospective political science. The scientific novelty is defined by specification of the stages of creative evolution of P. Y. Chaadayev, conclusion on similarity of the worldview and theoretical-methodological basis of the delegates of two movements of the “Russian Europeanism” represented by the Westernizers and Slavophiles. Accent is made on the difference of the heuristic value of methodology of P. Y. Chaadayev’s history for the assessment of historical fates of the European and Russian people. (shrink)

A vital and timely reminder that modern life owes as much to outlandish thinking as to dominant ideologies What do the Nag Hammadi library, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, speculative feminist historiography, Marcus Garvey's finances, and maps drawn by asylum patients have in common? Jonathan P. Eburne explores this question as never before in Outsider Theory, a timely book about outlandish ideas. Eburne brings readers on an adventure in intellectual history that stresses the urgency of taking seriously--especially (...) in an era of fake news--ideas that might otherwise be discarded or regarded as errant, unfashionable, or even unreasonable. Examining the role of such thinking in contemporary intellectual history, Eburne challenges the categorical demarcation of good ideas from flawed, wild, or bad ones, addressing the surprising extent to which speculative inquiry extends beyond the work of professional intellectuals to include that of nonprofessionals as well, whether amateurs, unfashionable observers, or the clinically insane. Considering the work of a variety of such figures--from popular occult writers and gnostics to so-called outsider artists and pseudoscientists--Eburne argues that an understanding of its circulation and recirculation is indispensable to the history of ideas. He devotes close attention to ideas and texts usually omitted from or marginalized within orthodox histories of literary modernism, critical theory, and continental philosophy, yet which have long garnered the critical attention of specialists in religion, science studies, critical race theory, and the history of the occult. In doing so he not only sheds new light on a fascinating body of creative thought but also proposes new approaches for situating contemporary humanities scholarship within the history of ideas. However important it might be to protect ourselves from "bad" ideas, Outsider Theory shows how crucial it is for us to know how and why such ideas have left their impression on modern-day thinking and continue to shape its evolution. (shrink)

The present study aimed to investigate three questions concerning Kahneman’s Endowment Effect. (a) Does the Endowment Effect apply to negotiations on intangible items such as intellectual resources and time invested in academic chores? (b) Does the sequence in which proposals are presented to the negotiators influence the Endowment Effect and, if so, how? (c) Does the Endowment Effect have the same impact in on-going negotiations as in one-shot negotiations? The investigation focused on the trade-off made by students between advanced (...) courses and seminars, which we term as Academic Chores Trade-Off (ACTO). The results indicated the existence of the Endowment Effect in negotiations on the above intangible items (ACTO) but could also be partially interpreted as reflecting the negotiators attempts to improve their positions. The results also supported the existence of a Sequence Effect combined with an intensification of the Endowment Effect. The Endowment Effect in on-going negotiations was not found to be significantly different from that in the one-shot format. (shrink)

Discusses the problems of text and context in studying the philosophical writings of Wittgenstein, Ricoeur, Sartre, Jameson, Marx, and Bakhtin.

Where do ideas fit into historical accounts that take an expansive, global view of human movements and events? Teaching scholars of intellectual history to incorporate transnational perspectives into their work, while also recommending how to confront the challenges and controversies that may arise, this original resource explains the concepts, concerns, practice, and promise of "global intellectual history," featuring essays by leading scholars on various approaches that are taking shape across the discipline. The contributors to _Global (...) class='Hi'>Intellectual History_ explore the different ways in which one can think about the production, dissemination, and circulation of "global" ideas and ask whether global intellectual history can indeed produce legitimate narratives. They discuss how intellectuals and ideas fit within current conceptions of global frames and processes of globalization and proto-globalization, and they distinguish between ideas of the global and those of the transnational, identifying what each contributes to intellectual history. A crucial guide, this collection sets conceptual coordinates for readers eager to map an emerging area of study. (shrink)

The history of ideas is an interdisciplinary field that began as an offshoot of the history of philosophy and was transformed by notions of perspective and cultural context drawn from the tradition of historical studies. The result is the practice of intellectual history, which has been carried out between the poles of inquiry commonly known as internalist and externalist, corresponding to mental phenomena and collective behavior in cultural surroundings. These are not opposed but rather complementary methods, (...) and intellectual history may be seen as the inside of cultural history and cultural history as the outside of intellectual history, the intellectual historian's task being to bring the two into alliance. (shrink)

This volume is the third in a new series which makes available the writings of the new French liberals, of whom Pierre Manent represents a leading figure. These thinkers come to grips with modern liberal democracy, not in order to replace it, but in order to understand its origins, its history, its internal tendencies, its strengths, its pitfalls. This is a refreshing movement, insofar as it attempts to understand philosophically the modern political situation without either dismissing it in the (...) light of some utopia or criticizing it by a contrast to some idealized historical condition like the city-state. In this volume Manent proposes to clarify liberalism, the dominate understanding of the political in our time, but he does so in terms of liberalism's own history, that is, as the product of several great political thinkers' reactions to one another and to political and social changes in Europe and America. Accordingly, each chapter of the book treats a major thinker from Machiavelli through Tocqueville. (shrink)

Using Shahzad Bashir’s open-access publication A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures as a baseline, this symposium debates whether and how intellectual history can be done otherwise. Mohamed ‘Arafa follows Bashir’s invitation to explore the potential of open-ended historiographies when he thinks about the viability of a flexible method to interpret Sharī ʿ a. Nader El-Bizri interrogates whether the assemblage of personal experiential accounts offered by Bashir can be framed within the discourse of intellectual history (...) at all. Nauman Faizi reads Bashir’s approach as a radical attempt to open up hermeneutical possibilities. Lena Salaymeh suggests that modern aesthetics can contribute to neo-colonial distortions of the Islamic tradition, rather than offering alternatives to positivist historiography. Bashir proposes in his response that academics adopt generosity as an analytical gesture in their academic writing, a generosity that would enable different ways of being human in the world. (shrink)

The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The volume explores ways in (...) which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites--from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals--in which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred - some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures.The richness of contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across the Pacific to South Asia. (shrink)

One of the most distinguished cultural and intellectual historians of our time, Frank Turner taught a landmark Yale University lecture course on European intellectual history that drew scores of students over many years. His lectures—lucid, accessible, beautifully written, and delivered with a notable lack of jargon—distilled modern European history from the Enlightenment to the dawn of the twentieth century and conveyed the turbulence of a rapidly changing era in European history through its ideas and leading (...) figures. Richard A. Lofthouse, one of Turner’s former students, has now edited the lectures into a single volume that outlines the thoughts of a great historian on the forging of modern European ideas. Moreover, it offers a fine example of how intellectual history should be taught: rooted firmly in historical and biographical evidence. (shrink)

Recently, the diffusion of the so-called “new intellectual history” led to the dismissal of the old school of the “history of ideas” on the basis of its ahistorical nature . This formulation is actually misleading, missing the core of the transformation produced in the field. It is not true that the history of ideas simply ignored the fact that the meaning of ideas changes over time. The issue at stake here is really not how ideas changed (...) , but rather why they do. The study of the German tradition of intellectual history serves in this essay as a basis to illustrate the meaning and significance of the recent turn from ideas as its object. In the process of trying to account for the source of contingency of conceptual formations, it will open our horizon to the complex nature of the ways by which we invest the world with meaning. That is, it will disclose the presence of different layers of symbolic reality lying beneath the surface level of “ideas,” and analyze their differential nature and functions. It will also show the reasons for the ultimate failure of the “history of ideas” approach, why discourses can never achieve their vocation to constitute themselves as self-enclosed, rationally integrated systems, thereby expelling contingency from their realm. In sum, it will show why historicity is not merely something that comes to intellectual history from without , as the history of ideas assumed, but is a constitutive dimension of it. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IPhRAS), held in 2021. The purpose of the article is to give an overview of IPhRAS's contribution to the study of Aristotle's ethics within the framework of domestic Aristotelian studies, to note the main works of IPhRAS employees in this field. The material of the article is aimed not only at summing up the results to a significant date, but can (...) be used as an auxiliary reference point in the domestic research literature by all those interested in the ethics of Aristotle. The article examines the articles and monographs of IPhRAS employees, makes brief descriptions of the most significant ideas expressed in them, analyzes the general process of development of Aristotle's ethics research in IPhRAS. The result of the conducted research is the identification of two directions in the study of Aristotle's ethics by IPhRAS employees – philosophical-theoretical and historical-philosophical. Within the framework of the first direction, two types are also distinguished: those aimed at the theoretical reconstruction of Aristotle's teaching on morality itself and those that turn to Aristotle's works in search of modern significant concepts. The second direction is represented by translation work, structural and comparative analysis of Aristotle's texts in order to reproduce them as accurately as possible and clarify individual concepts and statements. The main conclusion of the study is the statement that IPhRAS has not yet developed a holistic school in the approach to the study of Aristotle's ethics, and also that the two discovered areas of research are being implemented separately from each other. However, in both directions, researchers proceed largely from the analysis of the philosophical language of the Stagirite, which makes not only historical and philosophical works significant for philosophical and theoretical ones, but also vice versa. Also, despite a relatively short history, the study of Aristotle's ethics at IPhRAS has a systematic nature, all generations of employees are involved in it, which promises its further successful development. (shrink)