Showing papers on "Intellectual history published in 1979"

A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism

Abstract: Part 1 Trends in Enlightenment thought: Catherine II and Enlightenment philosophy the emergence of Russian Enlightenment philosophy Nikolai Novikov and Freemasonry the aristocratic opposition. Part 2 The culmination of the Enlightenment in Russia - Aleksandr Radishchev: Radishchev's life Radishchev's social philosophy Radishchev's views on ethics and education radical reform or revolution? the treatise on immortality. Part 3 Gentry conservatives and gentry revolutionaries: Nikolai Karamzin the Decembrists. Part 4 Anti-Enlightenment trends in the early 19th century: mysticism the Wisdom-lovers and Russian Schellingianism. Part 5 Petr Chaadaev: Chaadaev's metaphysics and philosophy of history Russia's past and future Chaadaev's place in Russian intellectual history. Part 6 The Slavophiles: the Slavophiles' philosophy of history and social ideals the concept of the "integral personality" and "new principles in philosophy" Slavophile ecclesiology Slavophilism as conservative Utopianism the disintegration of Slavophilism. Part 7 The Russian Hegelians - from "reconciliation with reality" to "philosophy of action": Nikolai Stankevich Mikhail Bakunin Vissarion Belinsky Aleksandr Herzen. Part 8 Belinsky and different variants of westernism: Belinsky's westernism the liberal westernizers. Part 9 The Petrashevtsy: the social and political ideas of the Petrashevtsy the philosophical ideas of the Petrashevtsy. Part 10 The origins of "Russian socialism": the evolution of Herzen's views Nikolai Ogarev. Part 11 Nikolai Chernyshevsky and the "Enlighteners" of the sixties: Chernyshevsky's anthropological materialism Nikolai Dobroliubov and the dispute over the "superfluous men" Dmitry Pisarev and "nihilism" critics of the "Enlighteners" Apollon Grigoriev and Nikolai Strakhov. Part 12 Populist ideologies: from "go to the people" to the "people's will" Petr Lavrov Petr Tkachev Nikolai Mikhailovsky. Part 13 Anarchism: Mikhail Bakunin Petr Kropotkin. Part 14 Ideologies of reaction after the reforms: Nikolai Danilevsky Konstantin Pobedonostsev Konstantin Leontiev. Part 15 Two prophetic writers: Fyodor Dostoevsky Lev Tolstoy Dostoevsky and Tolstoy - a comparison. Part 16 Variants of positivism: dogmatic positivism Grigory Wyrouboff critical positivism - Vladimir Lesevich positivism and psychology positivism and sociology. Part 17 Vladimir Soloviev and metaphysical idealism: Soloviev's religious philosophy Aleksei Kozlov and pan-psychism Boris Chicherin and the Hegelians of the second half of the 19th century. Part 18 From populism to Marxism: between populism and Marxism Plekhanov and the "rational reality" Plekhanov's literary criticism and aesthetics legal populism legal Marxism Lenin's early writings. Index.

A System of Social Science: Papers Relating to Adam Smith

Abstract: The second edition of this guide to Adam Smith's system of thought has been fully updated to reflect recent developments in Smith scholarship and Professor Skinner's experience of teaching Smith to a student audience. The material from the first edition has been extensively rewritten, and four new chapters have been added, covering Smith's essays on the exercise of human understanding, and his relationship to Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Sir James Steuart. Professor Skinner places Smith's system of social, and moral, science firmly within the context of contemporary British and Continental intellectual history, dealing in particular detail with the founders of the Scottish Enlightenment and with the French Physiocrats. A close reading of a broad range of texts, supported by a deep knowledge of contemporary institutional history, suggests the patters of their influence through the various recensions of Smith's extant works. The essays similarly explore Smith's own reception among his peers and successors. The essays in this volume have been developed from Professor Skinner's lecture course on 'The Age and Ideas of Adam Smith', taught to senior undergraduate and graduate students in political economy. Their relevance extends out to students of economic history, philosophy, and the history of ideas in the eighteenth century, as well as to all those involved in the study of Adam Smith. Each essay can be read as a self-contained unit, supported by a full bibliography and notes; the book as a whole expounds a single coherent argument which demonstrates how Smith's works are inter-related.

The Brahmo Samaj and the shaping of the modern Indian mind

Abstract: As the forerunners of Indian modernization, the community of Bengali intellectuals known as the Brahmo Samaj played a crucial role in the genesis and development of every major religious, social, and political movement in India from 1820 to 1930. David Kopf launches a comprehensive generation- to-generation study of this group in order to understand the ideological foundations of the modern Indian mind. His book constitutes not only a biographical and a sociological study of the Brahmo Samaj, but also an intellectual history of modern India that ranges from the Unitarian social gospel of Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore's universal humanism and Jessie Bose's scientism. From a variety of biographical sources, many of them in Bengali and never before used in research, the author makes available much valuable information. In his analysis of the interplay between the ideas, the consciousness, and the lives of these early rebels against the Hindu tradition, Professor Kopf reveals the subtle and intricate problems and issues that gradually shaped contemporary Indian consciousness. What emerges from this group portrait is a legacy of innovation and reform that introduced a rationalist tradition of thought, liberal political consciousness, and Indian nationalism, in addition to changing theology and ritual, marriage laws and customs, and the status of women.Originally published in 1979.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The History of Contract as a Motif in Political Thought

Abstract: THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN CONTRACTARIAN THOUGHT has been radically distorted by certain pervasive assumptions in the established classics on the subject. As intellectual history, the story of European contractualism was created by the formidable mind of the German legal scholar, Otto von Gierke, in the late nineteenth century. Most of Gierke's career was devoted to the research and writing of his monumental Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, whose four volumes were published in 1868, 1873, 1881, and 1913. Actually composed two decades before publication, the fourth volume contains the critical sections on contractarian thought during the period 1500-1800, which Ernest Barker published in English translation in 1934.' As amplified and disseminated by Barker, and J. W. Gough, Gierke's views have become standard for our understanding of this aspect of early modem political thought. Within his framework of supposed essentials, a host of specialized studies has appeared. Although valuable in some respects, much of this work is vitiated by ahistorical dogma. We shall first attempt to uncover his dogmatic elements and then proceed to sketch an alternative story. The first task is by no means simple, for the literature is full of contradictory assertions and judgments. Everyone agrees on the centrality of contractarian arguments to the political thoughts of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries; but, aside from consensus at this trivial level, almost every statement about the history of contract has been met with contradictions. We are told, for example, that social contract theory was-and was not-invented in ancient Greece, that the Christian Middle Ages did-and did not-rediscover or anticipate the rediscovery of social contract theory, and that the Protestant and Cath-

History and philosophy of the life sciences

Abstract: ▶ Open to historical, philosophical and social studies of the full range of the life sciences, including medicine, agriculture and biotechnology ▶ Presents pioneering discussions of the philosophical, social and historical relevance of key developments in the life sciences ▶ Represents research communities and traditions around the world ▶ Includes Comments & Notes section with discussion pieces, review articles and interviews

Social theories of the press : early German and American perspectives

Abstract: A book which concentrates on the reflections of early American sociologists and their German colleagues or teachers who have contributed to the development of communication and mass communication in the US and elsewhere. It suggests that the intellectual history of the field may yield theoretical insights on the relationship between communication and advancement of society, which may in turn have consequences for the development of communication and mass communication research today. 'This is one of the more important bits of historical digging in some time...it helps to create a larger theoretical basis for historical studies in communication development.' -- Mass Media Booknotes, September 1979

Bantu in the Crystal Ball: II

Abstract: More than one-third of Africa is occupied by people who speak related languages belonging to a single family called Bantu. This has been recognized for more than a century. As early as 1886 Harry Johnston argued that this situation was the result of differentiation from a real single ancestral language, later called UrBantu or Proto-Bantu. The inevitable question arises: How could one language or a group of closely related dialects diffuse over such a vast area? The fact of Bantu expansion remains a major puzzle in the history of Africa. Many have risen to the bait of solving it.My main goal here is to recount the salient features of this century-long inquiry and in doing so to lead to an assessment of the present situation. Given the nature and the paucity of the available data, much of proposed reconstruction has been conjectural, so that the study of Bantu expansion also has been an exercise in conjectural history and in speculation. The available data are disparate and drawn from different disciplines, and the results tell us something about what can and what cannot be done in interdisciplinary research. In the telling I hope to demonstrate how much different considerations of the question have been moulded by the major themes in European and American intellectual history of the last century and how much scholarly tradition, once established, has directed and limited the solutions proposed.

The Boutroux Circle and Poincare's Conventionalism

Abstract: In France at the turn of the twentieth century, contemporary observers wrote of a renaissance in French philosophy which by the time of Henri Poincare's death in 1912 was irrevocably linked with his name and the philosophy of conventionalism.1 This conventionalist philosophy asserted that fundamental scientific principles are not reflections of the "real" nature of the universe but are convenient ways of describing the natural world insofar as they are not contradicted by observation or experiment. In addition to developments in philosophy, the 1890s and early 1900s were years of new achievement for French laboratories and science lecture halls, after decades in which the French sciences, like philosophy, had languished in the shadow of German accomplishments. Indeed, at the turn of the century, a renaissance in French philosophy was paralleled by a renaissance in French science associated with the names of Becquerel, the Curies, Perrin, Langevin, and, again, Poincare.2 Inevitably a suspicion comes to mind in studying these two parallel renaissances in French intellectual history that there are links between the two renaissances in this period; one such link surely is in the figure of Henri Poincare (1854-1912), whose reputation as a mathematical physicist at the turn of the century is exceeded perhaps only by that of Einstein. Poincare's conventionalist philosophy has been one of fruitful debate since its inception. Yet, one may ask, how did this con-

The History of Psychology and the Ends of Instruction

Abstract: Serious and busy experimenters hear with a smile that a colleague's special interest is the history of psychology. And, when time permits them to enter into discourse on the merits of the subject, they often move beyond the perimeter of mere tolerance and into the headier reaches of heroic defense. All too often, however, the generous support is but an extension of the protections conferred by the First Amendment. Thus: Smith is a respected colleague, and if he wants to spend his time on the history of psychology, he has every right to do just that. After all, this department hosts sillier courses than that! Less frequently but with unsettling regularity, a colleague will come forth with a moreactive form of support, and insist that students should be apprised of the evolution of the discipline so that they will appreciate the progress that has occurred over the centuries. How can the novice respect the achievements of the laboratory if he is unaware of the protracted epochs of (mere) speculation that had to be endured before psychology found the true light? Speaking only as one historian of psychology, I should say that it is reassuring but not gratifying to learn that I can always count on the Constitution for protection; or that I can count on my fellow-psychologists as long as the history of psychology provides a congratulatory context for today's pursuits. Yet, the problem here is of the historian's own making. As with those who offer courses in, for example, Psychoanalytic Theory or Experimental Psychology, or Cognition, he tends to judge the virtues of his subject to be self-evident, and considers requests for justification to be impertinent. Worse-and this is especially and lamentably so in psychology-he may not be clear in his own thinking about just what these self-evident virtues are. The history of psychology is one of the few realms of inquiry utterly dominated by less than a handful of texts, and nearly dominated by a single one. Two generations of historians have been nurtured by E. G. Boring's History of Experimental Psychology, a work whose hegemony would alone invite criticism, even if there were not additional deficiencies. This is not the occasion either for praising or for burying this Caesar of textbooks, but because of its uncommon influence, some remarks are in order regarding the turn it has given to thoughts about the role of historical study. What is most obvious about Boring's \"History\" is not merely that it was conceived as a history of a science, but that the history of this science evolved in a scientifically causal manner That this was an animating consideration is clear from the genealogical flavor of the work. One learns not only about who studied with whom, and about which work was read by this or that scholar, but learns further thatbecause of the experience in question it was somehow \"natural\" or \"inevitable\" that a given point of view would arise. As a result of this orientation, the author has greatest difficulty discussing eccentric cases; i.e., those not easily located on the pedigree chart. Thus, Thomas Reid is dismissed as something called a \"faculty psychologist\" and the \"father\" of the \"Scottish school,\" but one is not told whether these are compliments or condemnations. Nor is one instructed in the fact that Reid'scritique of Hume's psychology is, itself, one of the most formidable treatises in philosophical psychology. We learn in the same work that Herbart was \"wrong\" in declaring that a scientific psychology could not be experimental, but that Herbart can be forgiven his errors because he didn't live long enough to derive benefits to his thinking from Weber, Fechner, Wundt, et al. Here, then, is the second conspicuous feature of Boring's classic: the generally uncritical acceptance of contemporary perspectives as those toward which all earlier notions were striving; as those against which all earlier notions must be compared and evaluated.

‘traditions’ as context in the history of political theory

Abstract: An adequate methodology in the history of political theory is dependent on a adequate philosophy of history. Firstly, in the course of a critical consideration of other writers on methodology (principally W. G. Greenleaf and Q. Skinner) it is suggested that ‘intellectual traditions’, of two sorts, might provide an appropriate unit of context. Secondly, a broadly anti-naturalist philosophy of history is adopted, which makes use of Collingwood and Hegel, and it is argued that intellectual traditions are compatible with this view of historical knowledge. It is concluded that the opposition between the universalist text-orientated approach and the particularist historical approach to the study of the history of political theory is a false dichotomy. We can learn from past ideas as a traditional inheritance.

Ethics of Death and Dying: Historical Perspective.

Abstract: The ethical dilemmas surrounding dying and death today can be understood more adequately when placed in an historical perspective. The methodology of intellectual history is employed to examine the sequence of cultural stages from prehistory to the contemporary scene, using the concept of the death system (Kastenbaum) as an organizing formulation. It is suggested in conclusion that a modern version of the meliorist ethos can lend support to the on-going modes of biomedical research and the application of the activist therapeutic principle in medical practice. Humanity has labored and suffered too much to abandon hope at this time and either submerge the personality of the individual or turn to a nihilistic “death worship” (Borkenau).

Between the Italian Renaissance and the French Enlightenment: Gabriel Naudé as an editor.

Abstract: A LTH O UGH I am not an expert in French History and Literature, I have been occasionally prompted to touch the borders of this field when studying the history of philosophy and of learning. This paper, in spite of its somewhat pretentious title, deals in fact with a group of minor bibliographical data that are not even completely unknown. Since in my opinion bibliography, although a modest tool of research, is in a way the skeleton or scaffolding of literary and of intellectual history,1 I shall try to add some flesh to the bones of those data, and to use them for gaining a broader perspective. I have now been encouraged to look more closely at some facts and questions of which I had been aware for a long time, but which I had not really faced. For a student of the Renaissance who feels at home in the fifteenth

Justifying a Theory Vs. Giving Good Reasons for Preferring a Theory

Abstract: European intellectual history exhibits an ambivalent attitude towards the idea of progress Whether there has been progress since antiquity in the art of living and practical wisdom has been and is, with good reason, doubted For many thinkers the fallibility and finitude of mankind seemd to make the idea of any progress at all dubious1 But the cognitive progress in the natural sciences became the paradigm of progress for all areas, and in this way the groundwork for progressivism was laid There was already no longer so much certainty about progress in the liberal arts Has there, for example, been progress in interpreting Homer’s works? In one sense, certainly, but in another it is not entirely clear what such progress would consist in — say, in a ‘better understanding’ (than, for example, Homer’s contemporaries had) or in something else? To what extent the concept of progress in the natural sciences, if we assume this concept to be satisfactorily clarified, can be applied or at least extended to certain social sciences and liberal arts as well is an open question Nevertheless, it is unquestionably expedient to clarify the concept of cognitive progress in the natural sciences before turning to this question Moreover, not only is cognitive progress in the natural sciences the paradigmatic example, but possibly this is the only area in which one cannot deny progress That there may be undesirable side effects of progress, consequences of the industrial application of technologies based on science which we judge to be negative, is not pertinent to our theme

Local and Community History: Some Cautionary Remarks on an Idea Whose Time Has Returned.

Abstract: LOCAL AND COMMUNITY history may well be one of the fastest growing popular intellectual pursuits in the United States today. At a time when history languishes in the schools, many Americans are engaged in separate searches into their "roots"-writing histories of their towns, families, ethnic communities, and parish churches. Though the particular enthusiasms and interests which comprise this phenomenon are diffuse and as yet without a common voice, we may still speak with accuracy of the existence today of a popular local and community history "movement," for, as this essay is to argue, there seems to be a core of attitudes, emotions, and goals common to the participants. For historians and history teachers, this popular movement suggests new opportunities to establish their discipline's primacy in the popular culture and imagination. But more importantly, history teachers may now utilize with renewed vigor and increased acceptance familiar local and community material in pursuit of the historian's highest and ultimate concerns-to bring objectivity and DAVID A. GERBER is an Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he teaches courses in American social history. The recipient of a Ph.D. from Princeton University, he is the author of Black Ohio and the Color Line (1977). The public adulation of Roots prompted his interest in understanding current trends in popular history and their implications for historians.

Professional Seminar in Clinical Psychology Taught from a Historical Perspective

Abstract: largely from these materials for my bulletin boards. For example, I have used one on Henry Herbert Goddard, emphasizing his work at Vineland, his research on the Kallikaks, his involvement in the eugenics movement, and his work on the Committee for the Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded. The display includes photos, letters to and from Goddard, and letters supportive and critical of his work. Another display is on Titchener and includes some of his correspondence, a copy of a Leipzig class roll from one of Wundt'sclasses listing Titchener asa student, photos, a brief biographical sketch by Titchener's nephew, a telegram from H. P. Weld announcing Titchener's death, and other items. Other displays feature Tolman, Binet, Wundt, Lewin, and Harry and Leta Hollingworth. Some are organized around schools such as Gestalt psychology; others feature events such as psychology during World War I or the 1929 International Congress of Psychology. These displays are time consuming to prepare, but the rewards are great. Even though most of the documents are copies, the students seem really stimulated by these papers of the early days of psychology. It is also excellent exposure to the nature of archival documents. I have attempted to describe one course in the history of psychology. This course does not produce a class of historical researchers, nor isthat its intent. It is hoped that the students will acquire an awareness of the roots of their field, an understanding of the significance of the phrase "a history of psychology," and an appreciation of the excitement inherent in that awareness and understanding.

A North American Perspective for Colonial History

Abstract: LIKE MOST SCHOLARS, colonial historians sometimes suffer from a failure of imagination. Too often we are led by filial piety, political anachronism, and professional training to conceive of our subject as the history of the thirteen English mainland colonies, sometimes but too seldom with an eastward glance toward the mother country. Our

The Father of Revisionism Revisited: Eduard Bernstein

Abstract: Most historians of modern Europe have at least an impression of Eduard Bernstein, the "father of revisionism," and his impact on his times. We may be able to summon up an image of him from the familiar photographs: bearded and bespectacled, learned and benevolent, slightly quizzical. We know him as a determined, independent-minded critic of what he took to be "cant" in the socialist movement; perhaps also as a modest, sensitive, rather private person. We have some idea of the doctrines he attacked, whether we view the attacks as clear-sighted or muddle-headed, and we know that his publications at the end of the 1890s brought on one of the great crises in the consciousness of the Marxist labor movement, the "revisionist controversy." But for all this, few of us can feel that our image of Bernstein is entirely in focus. For Bernstein, "the first and greatest of the heresiarchs of Marxism,' '2 has been consigned by both admirers and detractors to the position of a representative figure, a statue in the halls of socialist history. The many formidable problems that attach to the study of his workproblems in the relationship of ideology and politics, of ideology and reality-have, with certain honorable exceptions, largely gone unaddressed. Furthermore, the context for the study of Bernstein has for some fifteen years now been undergoing full-scale scholarly review. New sources have been opened up, new perceptions of the socialist movement-quasisociological, for the most part-brought to bear. There has been a rebirth of interest in Marxist theory outside the Eastern bloc. The accumulation of detail and nuance from the new historical research on socialism has not always resulted in proportionately edifying insights; East German research remains concerned with rigidly separating "good" and "bad" stands with a view to establishing an unquestioned tradition ("intellectual history as genealogical research," this has been called),3 while much of West German

Two Developments in the Rise of the Modern Intellectual

Abstract: This paper argues that two linked intellectual developments--the "Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns" and the evolution of the genius concept--played an important yet often ignored role in the rise of the modern intellectual. It is suggested that these two developments led ultimately to a climate of opinion receptive to the view of the critical intellectual as one who feels himself compelled to act as a "conscience" of society--a view inextricably linked with the very definition of the terms "genius" and, to a degree, "intellectual." The failure to appreciate the contributions of the genius concept to the making of the modern intellectual, so it is argued, will lead to a less than thorough and comprehensive understanding of the struggles and complexities involved in the development of the modern man of intellect.