Showing papers on "Intellectual history published in 1983"

Ramus, method, and the decay of dialogue : from the art of discourse to the art of reason.

Abstract: Renaissance logician, philosopher, humanist, and teacher, Peter Ramus (1515-72) is best known for his attack on Aristotelian logic, his radical pedagogical theories, and his new interpretation for the canon of rhetoric. His work, published in Latin and translated into many languages, has influenced the study of Renaissance literature, rhetoric, education, logic, and-more recently-media studies. Considered the most important work of Walter Ong's career, "Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue" is an elegant review of the history of Ramist scholarship and Ramus's quarrels with Aristotle. A key influence on Marshall McLuhan, with whom Ong enjoys the status of honorary guru among technophiles, this challenging study remains the most detailed account of Ramus's method ever published. Out of print for more than a decade, this book-with a new foreword by Adrian Johns-is a canonical text for enthusiasts of media, Renaissance literature, and intellectual history.

The New England Mind: From Colony to Province

Abstract: The New England Mind: From Colony to Province is one of Perry Miller's masterworks, exploring the intellectual history of the Puritans through a deep investigation of the thought of the Puritan divines. In this book, as well as its predecessor The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Miller asserts a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system.

Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism

Abstract: "This lucid study moves changing ideas about sex roles from the margins to the center of intellectual history. With superb insight and erudition Rosenberg discerns the connections between social science and feminism which replaced the ideal of 'true womanhood' with 'the new woman' at the turn of the 20th century. Besides brilliantly illuminating the personalities and ideas which led from one intellectual era to another, the book contributes groundbreaking research to the question of feminism's fate in the 1920s."-Nancy F. Cott "Weaving anecdote and analysis, Rosenberg shows how the women's experiences in academic and institutional settings influenced the direction and content of their theoretical work."-Kathryn Kish Sklar, The Wilson Quarterly

Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language

Abstract: Dominick LaCapra calls for a new view of intellectual history-one that will revitalize the importance of reading and interpreting significant texts. In ten essays, he reformulates the problem of the relation between the "great" texts of the Western tradition and their contexts. Seeking to refine "context" into a concept useful to historical research, LaCapra urges intellectual historians to learn from lessons and developments in contemporary literary criticism and philosophy, fields that have undertaken a radical reassessment of the reading of texts.

Foundations of music history

Abstract: Translator's preface Foreword 1. Is history on the decline? 2. The significance of art: historical or aesthetic? 3. What is a fact of music history? 4. Does music history have a 'subject'? 5. Historicism and tradition 6. Hermeneutics in history 7. The value-judgment: object or premise of history? 8. The 'relative autonomy' of music history 9. Thoughts on structural history 10. Problems in reception history Bibliography Index.

China and Charles Darwin

Abstract: Although Charles Darwin never visited China, his ideas landed there with force. Darwinism was the first great Western theory to make an impact on the Chinese and, from 1895 until at least 1921, when Marxism gained a formal foothold, it was the dominant Western ism influencing Chinese politics and thought. The authority of Darwin, sometimes misiniterpreted, influenced reformers and revolutionaries and paved the way for Chinese Marxism and the thought of Mao Tse-tung. This study evaluates Darwin's theory of evolution as a stimulus to Chinese political changes and philosophic challenge to traditional Chinese beliefs. James Pusey bases his analysis on a survey of journals issued from 1896 to 1910 and, after a break for revolutionary action, from 1915 to 1926, with emphasis on the era between the Sino-Japanese War and the Republician Revolution. The story of Darwinism in China involves, among others, the most famous figures of modern Chinese intellectual history.

The synergism hypothesis

Abstract: I think it is fair to say that synergy is an idea whose time has finally come. It seems that every week another new example of synergy is reported in some scientific journal, and articles about synergy are nowadays routinely accepted for publication in various disciplines. This was certainly not the case 30 years ago. Back then using the term “synergy” in a journal submission was an almost certain kiss of death. I speak from personal experience. So times have changed. However, the theory proposed in my 1983 book, The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution^ has had a more complex journey, and herein lies a bit of intellectual history and some lessons about the culture and politics of science.

History Teaching and Philosophy of History

Abstract: It would probably be fair to say that most history teachers in Britain still regard philosophy of history (if they give it a thought) as an alien, even pretentious, activity, irrelevant to their practical concerns. This is partly explained by the attitude shown toward philosophy of history by many professional historians in the universities, which is characteristically a mixture of condescension and suspicion; and it partly derives from the fact that teachers in the under-resourced British school system have little time for reflection. In the circumstances it is not surprising that there is a long tradition that teaching history is self-evidently handing on to children in simplified form whatever account of the past (or of certain passages of it) has been given by professional historians. The assumptions upon which such a view rests are by no means necessarily naive and incoherent, but they are often unexamined by those who make them. The practices which this tradition has supported have included some intelligent and inspired teaching, but more often have led to children learning historical information rather as one might learn railway timetables or telephone numbers, or (marginally less futile) as one might learn the principal products of different nations. This tradition does not go unchallenged. For most of this century there has been a continuous current of opposition to the conception of history teaching as imparting "the facts," an opposition founded in the first instance on an awareness of the importance of evidence in history, and on an intuitive appeal to something like the "good grounds" criterion of knowledge. In recent years this kind of view has been strengthened by the arguments of Paul Hirst (which elucidate the notion of the development of mind in terms of the acquisition of "forms of knowledge") and by the claims of Bruner that the "central ideas," "concepts," or "fundamentals" of a subject may be taught in some honest form at school level. 1 Together these two strands of thought have led to increased interest in the nature of history as a discipline, and arguments as to what should or could be taught. Other influences working in the same direction have been a

Themes in intellectual history: May Fourth and after

Abstract: Many factors combined to create the great intellectual upsurge of 1919 and the early 1920s that in the Chinese fashion has been given a neutral numerical designation as the 'Five-four' movement. The main focus of this chapter is on themes and issues which were to dominate the discourse of the intellectual stratum during the May Fourth period and after. The grandest and most enduring theme of all is the theme of historical or evolutionary progress as first interpreted in the writings of the great pioneers like K'ang Yu-wei, Yen Fu, and T'an Ssu-t'ung. The Chinese Revolution of 1911 produced no social revolution. One of the more significant conflicts which emerged out of the winds of doctrine of the May Fourth period was the debate between Hu Shih, Li Ta-chao and others concerning the question of 'problems versus -isms'. Another outcome of the May Fourth movement was the whole 'neo-traditionalist' reaction against the 'totalistic iconoclasm' of the movement.

Liberation Deferred? the Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877-1918

Abstract: This book offers an intellectual history of the English-speaking Canadian woman's suffrage movement. It argues that the motivations of a great many suffragists were affected by their membership in a social elite that saw the need to regulate society's future and hoped the family would remain the foundation of that future.

Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment

Abstract: Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) is remembered as the defender of Venice against the Papal Interdict of 1606 and as the first, and greatest, historian of the Counter-Reformation. The sources of his undoubted hostility to clerical authority have always been a matter of controversy; many contemporaries claimed that Sarpi was an 'atheist', while to others his anticlericalism suggested that he was in secret a Protestant. In the present book David Wootton argues that Sarpi's public opinions must be assessed in the light of the views expressed in his private papers. Starting from the Pensiere, in which Sarpi formulated a series of philosophical and historical arguments against Christianity, Mr Wootton seeks to reinterpret Sarpi's life work as being the expression, not of a love of intellectual liberty, nor of a commitment to Protestantism, but of a carefully thought out hostility to doctrinal religion. This interpretation of Sarpi serves to cast new light on the man and his work. But it also throws new light on the intellectual history of his age. Historians such as Lucien Febvre and R. H. Popkin have sought to deny the existence of systematic unbelief in Sarpi's day. Others, such as Christopher Hill and Carlo Ginzburg, have found evidence of a radical, popular tradition of unbelief. This book seeks, through its account of Sarpi's beliefs, to penetrate the hypocrisy which contemporaries agreed characterised the age, and to lay the foundations for a new understanding of the intellectual origins of unbelief.

Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity

Abstract: Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, composed in 1596, has long been accepted as a fundamental contribution to the theory of colonization, but it has not been adequately appreciated as a political text because commentators have at once exaggerated and diminished its originality.1 The exaggeration has happened because scholars have contended that Spenser's opinions were altogether more advanced than those held by any of his contemporaries in Ireland, and the diminution has resulted from the attribution of these advanced opinions to the influence of Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bodin, and, most recently, of Calvin.2 It is argued in this paper that neither exaggeration nor diminution is warranted; both tendencies can be accounted for by the application of that approach to intellectual history whereby the scholar who proceeds from the assumption that all ideas can be traced to a fundamental thinker sets himself the task of identifying the influence exerted by one of these great progenitors upon his chosen author. This method has frequently been challenged, and the most convincing alternative approach to the study of intellectual history has been well demonstrated in Quentin Skinner's Foundations of Modern Political Thought.3 Here Skinner proceeds from the assumption that all political theorists are acquainted with a broad range of ideas, and that it is the force of circumstances which compels each author to select from those available to him that body of ideas which provides him with a sense of purpose and direction. Thus, as Skinner sees it, the intellectual historian should continue the effort to trace influences, but should also seek to relate each text to the context in which it was produced, with a view to explaining the author's process of selection.4

A History of Christian Theology: An Introduction

Abstract: A History of Christian Theology offers a consice yet complete chronicle of the whole history of Christian theology, from its background in the history of Israel to the various modes of liberation theology in the late 20th century. This book is an intellectual history, a story of people and their ideas. It will be valuable for college and seminary students as well as lay study groups.

Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies

Abstract: In September of 1982, columnist Peter S. Jay of the Baltimore Sun turned from his usual concern with the intricacies of city politics to the absurdities, or so he perceived them, of the academy.1 His specific target was the world of English Studies, and he began by observing that "Professors, especially professors of literature, have always been fair game." My purpose here is to inquire into the reason why this should be so, why professors of literature should so often be the objects of criticism and ridicule, and why the source of the criticism is so often the literary community itself. Jay of course is not a member of that community, but the charges he levels are familiar; we have all heard them, and some of us may even have made them. The bill of indictment contains several particulars, but the basic complaint is that teachers of literature, and especially of English, have abandoned their proper study, "the study of life itself, as seen by writers of skill and vision," and given themselves over to the trivialities that accompany "specialization run amok," to topics (the examples are Jay's) like "Lesbian Feminist Poetry in Texas" and "The Trickster Figure in Chicano and Black Literature" or "other ephemera." Rather than committing themselves to "the broad stream of intellectual history," these men and women have become "academic timeservers trying to make their field so obscure, and its language so arcane, that no one can possibly understand it but themselves and a handful of other insiders." As a result, departments of English find themselves without clients and "now pander to the whim of the moment in a desperate attempt to attract ... paying bodies."

The Black Athlete in Big-Time Intercollegiate Sports, 1941-1968.

Abstract: THE FAILURE of the scholarly community to look seriously at the history of blacks in big-time intercollegiate sports is a missed opportunity to understand an important dimension of African-American intellectual history, the nature and development of the modern civil rights struggle, and the black protest movement. Protest is synonymous with the experience of black people in the United States from slavery to the present. In the immediate years before America's advent into World War II, important challenges were made, from a variety of perspectives against the status quo of racial discrimination. The pre-war years were a period of intellectual vitality and social and political activism among blacks. Sports reflected the protest sentiment in the arts, literature, and politics. Two blacks were nationally prominent in sports in these years: Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. Their emergence as national symbols and sport heroes involved political and psychological dimensions as well as physical feats. Jesse Owens' four gold medals in the 1936 Olympic Games were a triumph for American democracy over Nazism. They were also Owens' personal protest statement through athletic performance. Much the same can be said of Joe Louis' defeat of Max Schmeling in their second fight in 1938. Owens and Louis were not inert, unthinking objects, as they have often been portrayed. Their way of protesting against the racism that they and other blacks experienced was through proving themselves as black men and as Americans. They offered victory after victory as their statements for racial equality and the rights of full citizenship.1 Other black sports figures took their own approach to protest. Boxing great Henry Armstrong hammered away at discrimination on numerous occasions. Several times he refused fights in segregated arenas such as the American Legion Hall in Indianapolis. Canada Lee, the former boxer, demonstrated his protest spirit in playing the title role, Bigger Thomas, in the stage production of Richard Wright's Native Son. And Paul Robeson, the former Rutgers All-American, continued his assertion of selfhood through acting, singing, and political protest. Although overlooked by scholars in their examinations of the civil rights movement, big-time intercollegiate sport as represented by the Big Ten, Big Eight, Pac Ten, Southeast, Southwest, and Ivy League conferences, for example was an important arena of protest in the pre-war years. Black athletes at predominantly white universities had been both

Theories and Theory Groups Revisited

Abstract: In the late 1960s, the tools and ideas of a revived sociology of science were ready to be applied to sociology. Up to that point, analysis of sociological theory consisted of intellectual history such as Sorokin's (1928) and Martindale's (1960); scholars had not tried to use a systematic examination of the social and institutional background to the development of a discipline or specialty as a point of departure for evaluating the history of theory (Gouldner, 1966). Empirical studies in the sociology of science were composed of a summary of social connections (such as coauthorship or citation), a bit of history, some interviews, and the texts of the theory statements themselves (see Libbey and Zaltman, 1967; Fischer, 1966; Garvey and Griffith, 1968). This hodge-

People’s History and Social Science History

Abstract: A friend and colleague of an author reviews a two-volume history. Acknowledging his relationship with the author the reviewer calls the books “excellent, full of rich new insights, sparkling with intelligence, the sentiment which underlies our empassioned love for the historian’s craft, one of the most beautiful of the discplines devoted to the study of man.” “Yet,” the reviewer continues, “it is striking that the individual is almost entirely absent…. Psychology, although not totally ignored, is always collective psychology.…Is not the author,” the review continues, “turning back to the schematic.…toward the sociological, a seductive form of the abstract?” (Febvre, 1941b: 177, 128). Sit back and imagine the time, place, and people involved in this story: a 1980s traditional historian, perhaps a radical people’s historian, excoriating a social scientific colleague? Not at all; this is no case of contemporary backlash. The time was 1941, the review Lucien Febvre, the author Marc Bloch, the book, La societe feodale.

Missionaries and the Intellectual History of Africa: A Historical Survey

Abstract: Historical studies of Christian missionaries in Africa have not prospered in recent years. The Journal of African History, which printed six articles on missionaries during the first ten years of its existence, has only printed two articles on the subject in the course of the last ten years. Only one book on missionaries has been published by a major university press in Britain or America since 1972. Very occasionally articles about missionaries appear in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and African Affairs but never in the Canadian Journal of African Studies or the Journal of Modern African Studies.

Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905

Abstract: Despite the substantial scholarly interest in Austrian intellectual history during the past decade, what we have learned about Austrian intellectual life remains isolated from our received models of Central European German culture. Scholars who study Austrian philosophy and literature are inclined to emphasize the “diachronic constants” of an intellectual tradition that is unfamiliar to most students of German philosophy, literature, and history. Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century frequently ignore key Austrian figures altogether; major literary figures, such as Grillparzer or Stifter, are often regarded as peripheral in discussions of German literature; and political historians continue to imagine German history in terms of Prussia and the achievements of Bismarck. Thus, our knowledge of the German culture of the Habsburg Monarchy or of Vienna at the turn of the century still has not been brought into relation to a model of German culture that is dominated by Northern, Protestant, and idealist traditions. The relations within this wider realm of German culture are far too complex to submit to easy summary, and any honest attempt at empiricism confronts a staggering mass of potential evidence, even in the case of the more limited question of the influence of North German culture in nineteenth-century Austria.

Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939: Preface to the 1983 reissue

Abstract: M y purpose in writing this book was not to give a general history of all kinds of thought expressed by Arabs, or in the Arabic language, during the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. I was concerned with thought about politics and society within a certain context: that created by the growth of European influence and power in the Middle East and North Africa. In the course of the period which the book covers, the Arabic-speaking peoples were drawn, in different ways, into the new world-order which sprang from the technical and industrial revolutions. It was an order which expressed itself in the growth of European trade of a new kind, the consequent changes in production and consumption, the spread of European diplomatic influence, the imposition in some places of European control or rule, the creation of schools on a new model, and the spread of new ideas about how men and women should live in society. It is to such ideas that I refer rather loosely when I use the word ‘liberal’ in the title; this was not the first title I chose for the book, and I am not quite satisfied with it, for the ideas which had influence were not only ideas about democratic institutions or individual rights, but also about national strength and unity and the power of governments. As the century went on, it became more and more difficult to ignore the processes of change and not to react to them in some way.

The Dream of Nation: a Social and Intellectual History of Quebec by Susan Mann Trofimenkoff (review)

Abstract: and while the Cold War was at its bitterest. This period has been the centre of considerable historical controversy over the past decade and a half, especially in the United States where a generation of revisionist historians have enlarged the definition of logic and proof in their pursuit of their fantasy of an economically determined policy of American imperialism. Holmes's sober analysis of us actions from a contemporary Canadian perspective will give little comfort to the dwindling number of revisionist enthusiasts in the unlikely event, of course, that many American historians will think the opinion of a modest but critical ally worth having. Those who do, however, will find themselves richly rewarded by the best study to date of a wide range of Canadian policy. This is a book which it pays to read through for an overall impression of what Canadian diplomacy used to be, and then to re-read, because its clear and logical organization makes it invaluably encyclopedic, furnishing a handy instant account of this or that aspect of Canada's international comportment. The discussion of atomic policy, for example, gives all the salient facts of that complicated and voluminous issue, crisply and succinctly, as Holmes leads the reader through the convolutions of the United Nations Commission on Atomic Energy. Holmes naturally writes from the viewpoint of the Department of External Affairs, and sticks by and large to describing policy as that department perceived or, more importantly, conceived it. The other components, formal or informal, of Canadian external relations await their own chroniclers.