Intellectual history

About: Intellectual history is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9358 publications have been published within this topic receiving 162196 citations. The topic is also known as: history of science and learning.

Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

Abstract: No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in "For Marx" (1965), and "Reading Capital" (1968). These works, along with "Lenin and Philosophy "(1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship. This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science. Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist." Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history."

Theses on the Philosophy of History

Abstract: A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could ehindxist. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at moment of danger. "In relation to the history of organic life on earth," writes a modern biologist, "the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at close of a twenty-four-hour day. The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe. Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history.

The university in ruins

Abstract: Foreword by Diane Elam Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. The Idea of Excellence 3. The Decline of the Nation-State 4. The University within the Limits of Reason 5. The University and the Idea of Culture 6. Literary Culture 7. Culture Wars and Cultural Studies 8. The Posthistorical University 9. The Time of Study: 1968 10. The Scene of Teaching 11. Dwelling in the Ruins 12. The Community of Dissensus Notes Index

Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

Abstract: Toulmin offers a radically new interpretation of Western intellectual history that humanizes our conception of modernity and reconciles the precision of scientific theory with the reality of human experience.