From the Victorian era to our own, critics of Herbert Spencer have portrayed his science‐based philosophical system as irrelevant to the concerns of practicing scientists. Yet, as a number of scholars have recently argued, an extraordinary range of reformist and experimental projects across the human and life sciences took their bearings from Spencer's work. This essay examines Spencerian science as practiced by the biologist, sociologist, and town planner Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). Through a close examination of his experimental natural history of (...) the late 1870s and early 1880s, his wider writings on the evolutionary process in the 1880s, and his efforts later in that decade to improve the slums of Edinburgh, this essay reveals Geddes's deep, unifying, and energizing commitment to Spencer's program. Recapturing that commitment can not only help historians rethink Spencerian science as practice but also suggest ways of overcoming the dichotomy between elite ideas and practical activity that bedevils much contemporary historiography of science. (shrink)

Much has been written about the relationship between biology and social science during the early twentieth century. However, discussion is often drawn toward a particular conception of eugenics, which tends to obscure our understanding of not only the wide range of intersections between biology and social science during the period but also their impact on subsequent developments. This paper draws attention to one of those intersections: the British economist and social reformer William Beveridge’s controversial efforts to establish a Department of (...) Social Biology at London School of Economics during the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring a fully equipped laboratory headed by a leading geneticist, the Department of Social Biology was Beveridge’s attempt to “cross-fertilise” biology and social science and, in so doing, take the ideological heat out of social scientific, in particular economic, methods of investigation. Exploring why Beveridge’s project failed and throwing light on its long-term legacies, this paper considers what we can learn from the short-lived Department of Social Biology. (shrink)

"Identity" has become a core concept of the social and cultural sciences. Bringing together perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literary criticism, this book offers a comprehensive and critical overview on how this concept is currently used and how it relates to memory and constructions of historical meaning.

The concept of ‘femicide’ was first formulated in 1992 by Jill Radford and Diana Russell; nonetheless, it has not been widely discussed in feminist philosophical arenas.This situation has led to a narrow understanding and/or misunderstanding of the concept. For example, it is often applied to a phenomenon mistakenly assumed to occur “only in third world countries” or said to essentialize women. Through a new-materialist methodology, this paper contributes to the discussion on this concept from a feminist theoretical perspective.

"Collective memory" is an umbrella term for different formats of memory. Interactive and social memory are both formats that are embodied, grounded in lived experience that vanish with their carriers. The manifestations of political and cultural memory, on the other hand, are grounded on the more durable carriers of external symbols and representations and can be re-embodied and transmitted from one generation to another. The relation between "history" and "memory" has itself a history that has evolved over time, passing through (...) three stages: 1) the identity between history and memory, 2) the polarization between history and memory, and 3) the interaction between history and memory. Where history and memory are polarized, the historian assumes an intellectual and ethical function and concentrates on the lacunae of national memory thereby creating a countermemory. However, that there are certain contexts in which history and memory are also conflated in democratic nation states. If we look at the sector of public historical education we can observe a similar self-enforcing relationship between history, memory, identity, and power. In this context, history becomes the stuff of which political memory, identity, and myth is made of.Forms of participation in collective memory differ widely between informal social memory and the more organized format of political memory. Participation in social memory is always varied because it is based on lived experience and linked to autobiographical memory, while collective participation in national memory, in both totalitarian and democratic states, on effective symbols and rites that enhance emotions of empathy and identification. In the discourse of memory research. the term "myth" is used to distinguish between the object of historical knowledge on the one hand and collectively remembered events on the other. Myth in this sense of "collectively remembered history" is meant as a neutral description. Over the years, a change in style of history textbooks can be observed, which may be characterized by the move from monumental to selfcritical narratives and from isolationist narratives to those that connect to others in a transnational and global perspectives. Criteria are emerging for a critical evaluation of national narratives and political memory. (shrink)

Reseña de Vicente Ovalle, Camilo. (2019). [Tiempo suspendido]: una historia de la desaparición forzada en México, 1940-1980. México: Bonilla Artigas. 394 pp.

Dans le cadre de la construction du corpus PhraseoRoChe, un corpus diachronique rassemblant des romans de chevalerie du 13e au 17e siècle, cet article s’intéresse aux performances de différents analyseurs (étiqueteurs, lemmatiseurs, parseurs en dépendances) entrainés sur des états de langue connexes allant de l’ancien français au moyen français et au français moderne. Nous étudions ainsi la possibilité d’étendre ces analyseurs au-delà des états de langues précis sur lesquels ils ont été entrainés, en s’appuyant notamment sur les divergences entre analyseurs (...) pour identifier les annotations les moins fiables, et ainsi prioriser les interventions manuelles de correction / validation des annotations automatiques. Nous étudions également les possibilités offertes par un traitement superficiel de modernisation graphique pour tirer parti d’un analyseur moderne appliqué à des états de langue anciens. (shrink)

Is, as Hamlet once feared, the time out of joint? What has happened to our relation to the past and the future? The past has returned in various shapes: as nostalgia, as traumatic impact, and as historical origin or key event for the purposes of nation building. The future, meanwhile, has lost much of its glamor, too. The notion of progress and a utopian future have been eroded a growing ecological crisis. The seemingly solid moorings of our temporal orientation have (...) collapsed within the time span of a generation. In order to better understand our temporal crisis, we must start by reconstructing what has just disappeared. In this book, Aleida Assmann tracks the rise and fall of what she calls "the time regime of modernity," explaining what we have both gained and lost in this profound transformation of our cultural values and premises. (shrink)

Der 9. Band der Reihe behandelt das Thema der Identität, allerdings von einer ganz anderen Seite, von seinem Gegenbegriff der Verwandlung aus. Es geht dabei um die Frage: Was ist der Mensch? Ist er der Verwandlungskünstler, Rollenspieler, Maskenträger gegenüber der Welt der Tiere, die sich immer treu bleiben und immer dieselben sind? Hat er sich im Laufe der Kulturgeschichte vom archaischen Menschen, der als Schamane Tiergestalt annimmt, als Benandante zum Werwolf wird, im Ritus ein Leopard ist, zum modernen Menschen entwickelt, (...) der sich festlegen muß und festgelegt wird auf eine Identität, die ihm zum stahlhart unentrinnbaren Gehäuse wird? Und welche Rolle spielt die Schrift in diesem Prozeß? Bedeutet der Gegensatz von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit zugleich den Übergang von der labilen zur stabilen, zugeschriebenen und festgeschriebenen Identität? Diese und andere Fragen werden an archaischen Gesellschaften und Werken der Hochkultur ebenso erörtert wie an popkulturellen Phänomenen der Gegenwart. (shrink)

Stephen T. Casper and Steve Fuller’s commentaries on my paper “Completing Circle of the Social Sciences? William Beveridge and Social Biology at the London School of Economics during the 1930s” raises important questions about the historical entanglement of the political left, welfarism, biology, and social science. In this response, I clarify questions about my analysis of events at the London School of Economics in the early twentieth century and identify ways in which they are important in the present. I suggest (...) that there is much to be learned from the school’s failed experiment with social biology, not least when it comes to thinking about the historical contingency of relationships between progressive politics and biology. (shrink)

This special issue is the product of a conference, The Future of the History of the Human Sciences, which was held at the University of York in April 2016. The meeting brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and at various stages of their careers to reflect on what were identified as major challenges and opportunities for the research that History of the Human Sciences publishes. The articles included here are a sample of the responses that were (...) generated and contain reflections on not only the boundaries of history of the human sciences research but also the methods used within the discipline. As this introduction explains, the overall aim of the conference was to explore these questions in order to think about both future directions for research and ways in which we can ensure the field remains dynamic and vital. (shrink)

Pourquoi a-t-on souvent eu tendance a etudier chez Voltaire les notions de tolerance et de justice comme si c'etaient des entites distanciees ou parfois meme separables? Pourquoi n'a-t-on pas juge bon d'etudier le cheminement de sa pensee simultanement dans ces deux domaines qui etaient non seulement conjugues dans son esprit, mais aussi et surtout dont le contenu etait en perpetuel devenir? Pourquoi a-t-on privilegie l'etude de son action en faveur de certaines causes celebres au detriment, parfois total, de celles - (...) evidemment beaucoup moins illustres - qu'on n'evoque que peu souvent, sinon jamais? Pourquoi enfin, dans le contexte global de la carriere de ce champion de la tolerance et de la justice, le lecteur doit-il se contenter d'une mosaique incomplete, peu apte a faire apprecier la complexite de sa philosophie? La reponse a ces questions est sans doute simple: c'est que le canon litteraire accessible, plutot limite, ne faisait constamment favoriser, jusqu'il y a une vingtaine d'annees, que des vues d'ensemble partielles et guere changeantes. C'est la parution progressive, depuis 1970, et l'essor vigoureux, depuis 1988, de la grande edition scientifique des OEuvres Completes, procuree par la Voltaire Foundation, qui invite au contraire a decouvrir un nombre considerable de textes meconnus ou carrement inconnus, qui sont desormais devenus incontournables si l'on veut redefinir l'action de Voltaire en tant que champion des opprimes. Ce volume donne un apercu des contours d'une future etude d'ensemble actuellement en cours d'elaboration. (shrink)

What causes genocide? Why do some stand by, doing nothing, while others risk their lives to help the persecuted? Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide analyzes riveting interviews with bystanders, Nazi supporters, and rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust to lay bare critical psychological forces operating during genocide. Monroe's insightful examination of these moving--and disturbing--interviews underscores the significance of identity for moral choice. Monroe finds that self-image and identity--especially the sense of self in relation to others--determine and delineate (...) our choice options, not just morally but cognitively. She introduces the concept of moral salience to explain how we establish a critical psychological relationship with others, classifying individuals in need as "people just like us" or reducing them to strangers perceived as different, threatening, or even beyond the boundaries of our concern. Monroe explicates the psychological dehumanization that is a prerequisite for genocide and uses her knowledge of human behavior during the Holocaust to develop a broader theory of moral choice, one applicable to other forms of ethnic, religious, racial, and sectarian prejudice, aggression, and violence. Her book fills a long-standing void in ethics and suggests that identity is more fundamental than reasoning in our treatment of others. (shrink)

This book encompasses the complexities without sacrificing the other main virtue of the collection: to definitively illuminate the debate for all.

How do people maintain their humanity during wars? Despite its importance, this question receives scant scholarly attention, perhaps because of the overwhelming aspect of war. The generally accepted wisdom is that wars bring out the worst in us, pitting us against one another. "War is hell," William Tecumseh Sherman famously noted, and even wars clearly designated "just" nonetheless inflict massive destruction and cruelty. Since ethics is concerned with discovering what takes us to a morally superior place, one conducive to human (...) flourishing and happiness, studying what helps people survive wartime trauma becomes an extremely valuable enterprise. A Darkling Plain thus fills an important scholarly void, analyzing wartime stories that reveal much about our capacity to process trauma, heal wounds, reclaim lost spirits, and derive meaning and purpose from the most horrific of personal events. (shrink)

Few recent advances in science have generated as much excitement and controversy as human embryonic stem cells. The potential of these cells to replace diseased or damaged cells in virtually every tissue of the body heralds the advent of an extraordinary new field of medicine. Controversy arises, however, because current techniques required to harvest stem cells involve the destruction of the human blastocyst. This even-handed, lucidly written volume is an essential tool for understanding the complex issues—scientific, religious, ethical, and political—that (...) currently fuel public debate about stem cell research. One of the few books to provide a comprehensive overview for a wide audience, the volume brings together leading scientists, ethicists, political scientists, and doctors to explain this new scientific development and explore its ramifications. (shrink)

This is a book about moral choice and courage. It is not, however, an abstract work of moral philosophy or psychology. Rather it is an exploration of the choices made by real individuals faced by moral quandaries. Monroe and her students interviewed people who faced moral dilemmas to see what motivated them to make difficult moral choices. These ranged from public officials dealing with issues of honesty and equity in public policy, to individuals facing private difficulties as well as people (...) who choose to focus their lives helping those in need. What explains a courageous choice? Monroe argues that moral courage comes from one's understanding of their identity. As she found in her previous work on rescuers of Jews during the holocaust, the people she interviews in this book felt that they had no choice but to take a courageous stand. Monroe explores how this identity develops through the life stories of these individuals. (shrink)