Journal ArticleDOI
The Kyoto School, the Cambridge School, and the History of Political Philosophy in Wartime Japan
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In this article, the focus of the Cambridge School on the importance of contextual readings should open up the history of political thought to extra-European contexts, in fact its method serves to close down this possibility by emphasizing the continuity between places in the past and the present of the historian.Abstract:
As a discipline, the history of political thought itself has a history of competing methods: on the one hand, there are political theorists whose principle interest is in the use to which the ideas they find can be put—they seek to put the discoveries to work on instances of perennial problems in the present. On the other hand, there are those whose real interest is in trying to understand what the ideas meant at the time they were written—they seek to reconstruct the place of the ideas within a given historical context and how those ideas functioned to address political problems at that time. The temporal and intentional focus of these two approaches is so different that they might constitute different enterprises entirely. To the extent that historians of political thought are interested in history, the predominant method for analyzing the meaning and context of texts for the last few decades has been the so-called Cambridge School. It is the contention of this article that while the focus of the Cambridge School on the importance of contextual readings should open up the history of political thought to extra-European contexts, in fact its method serves to close down this possibility by emphasizing the importance of continuity between places in the past and the present of the historian. In other words, this method reduces to a process of narrating the historical identity of the Eurocentric discipline. Furthermore, I suggest that the work of the wartime Kyoto School contains methodological insights into the history of political thought that might overcome this problem and provide for a more inclusive (or at least a less exclusive) approach to the field.read more
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History of Political Thought
TL;DR: The History of Political Thought as discussed by the authors explores the history of political theory from Ancient Greece up until proletarian thought in the early twentieth century, and pays particular attention to the connection between economic and political theory during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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Journal ArticleDOI
Revisiting America's Occupation of Japan
TL;DR: The authors surveys and evaluates the last decade of English-language scholarship on the Occupation of Japan, locating it within American history, Japanese history, post-colonial studies, and the new international history.
References
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Book ChapterDOI
Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas
TL;DR: The problem of coherence in the history of ideas can be traced back to the notion of the coherence of a moral philosophy as discussed by the authors, which was introduced in the early 20th century.
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The Go-Between
TL;DR: The Go-Between as discussed by the authors is a story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, which is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.
BookDOI
Philosophy in history : essays on the historiography of philosophy
TL;DR: The history of philosophy has been studied extensively in the literature, see as discussed by the authors for a survey of some of the most important works on the subject. But the main focus of this paper is on the relationship of philosophy to its past.
Book ChapterDOI
Philosophy in History: The historiography of philosophy: four genres
TL;DR: Rational and historical reconstructions of the arguments of great dead philosophers have led to charges of anachronism as mentioned in this paper, and the authors of this paper have argued that we should treat the history of philosophy as we treat history of science.
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Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan
TL;DR: In this paper, Harootunian examines the work of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who, like their European counterparts, saw modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless change that uprooted the dominant historical culture from its fixed values and substituted a culture based on fantasy and desire.