The author of the monograph is a Candidate of Culturology, Associate Professor of Tyumen State University. The monograph tests approaches to the understanding of the essence of Hobbes’s and Locke’s ideas about miracles that are more flexible than a formational-evolutionist approach. The monograph presents the main characteristics of these ideas as Christian philosophical ones, shows their general Christian direction and the historiographic perspective of studying these ideas primarily in line with Christian philosophy. The monograph is intended for (...) experts in the history of philosophy, the history of ideas, theology, religious studies, historical anthropology, as well as for those interested in the problems of historical-philosophical knowledge. Автор монографии – кандидат культурологии, доцент Тюменского государственного университета. В монографии апробируются более гибкие подходы к пониманию сущности идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах по сравнению с формационно-эволюционистским подходом. Представлены основные характеристики идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах как христианских философских идей. Показана общехристианская направленность идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах и историографическая перспективность изучения этих идей в первую очередь как христианских философских идей. Монография рассчитана на специалистов в области истории философии, истории идей, теологии, религиоведения, исторической антропологии, а также на всех, кто интересуется проблемами историко-философского знания. (shrink)

The history of ideas is an interdisciplinary field that began as an offshoot of the history of philosophy and was transformed by notions of perspective and cultural context drawn from the tradition of historical studies. The result is the practice of intellectual history, which has been carried out between the poles of inquiry commonly known as internalist and externalist, corresponding to mental phenomena and collective behavior in cultural surroundings. These are not opposed but rather complementary methods, (...) and intellectual history may be seen as the inside of cultural history and cultural history as the outside of intellectual history, the intellectual historian's task being to bring the two into alliance. (shrink)

'Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition.'In 1757 the 27-year-old Edmund Burke argued that our aesthetic responses are experienced as pure emotional arousal, unencumbered by intellectual considerations. In so doing he overturned the Platonic tradition in aesthetics that had prevailed from antiquity until the eighteenth century, and replaced metaphysics with psychology and even physiology as the basis for the subject. Burke's theory of beauty encompasses the female form, nature, art, and poetry, and he analyses our delight in (...) sublime effects that thrill and excite us. His revolution in method continues to have repercussions in the aesthetic theories of today, and his revolution in sensibility has paved the way for literary and artistic movements from the Gothic novel through Romanticism, twentieth-century painting, and beyond. In this new edition Paul Guyer conducts the reader through Burke's Enquiry, focusing on its place in the history of aesthetics and highlighting its innovations, as well as its influence on many subsequent authors from Kant and Schiller to Ruskin and Nietzsche. (shrink)

The history of ideas deals with the elemental unit-ideas which for Lovejoy are components of systems distinguished by their patterns. Special histories explain how a particular form of human history developed. General histories draw on special histories to document or explain social contexts. Since patterns influence philosophers, the history of ideas contributes little to the history of philosophy, a discontinuous strand within a period's continuous intellectual history. By accepting cultural pluralism, denying the (...) monistic position that there always are internal connections among all or some strands of intellectual and cultural history, both continuity and change in philosophy can be best understood. (shrink)

The information technological progress that has been achieved over the last decades has also given the humanities the opportunity to expand their methodological toolbox. This paper explores how recent advancements in natural language processing may be used for research in the history of ideas so as to overcome traditional scholarship's inevitably selective approach to historical sources. By employing two machine learning techniques whose potential for the analysis of conceptual continuities and innovations has never been considered before, we aim (...) to determine the extent to which they can enhance conventional research methods. It will amount to a critical evaluation of how the advantages of computational in-breadth analysis could be combined with the merits of traditional in-depth analysis in a philosophically fruitful way. After a brief technical description, the approach will be applied to an example: the conceptual (dis)continuity between medieval and early modern philosophy. All the challenges encountered during development and application will be carefully evaluated. We will then be able to assess whether these tools and techniques present promising extensions to the methodological toolbox of traditional scholarship, or whether they do not yet have the potential for a task as complex as the analysis of philosophical literature. The present investigation can thus be seen as an experiment on how far one can go with current machine-learning techniques in this area of research. In doing so, it provides important insights and guidance for future advances in the field. (shrink)

We propose a new method for the history of ideas that has none of the shortcomings so often ascribed to this approach. We call this method the model approach to the history of ideas. We argue that any adequately developed and implementable method to trace continuities in the history of human thought, or concept drift, will require that historians use explicit interpretive conceptual frameworks. We call these frameworks models. We argue that models enhance the comprehensibility (...) of historical texts, and provide historians of ideas with a method that, unlike existing approaches, is susceptible neither to common holistic criticisms nor to Skinner's objections that the history of ideas yields arbitrary and biased reconstructions. To illustrate our proposal, we discuss the so-called Classical Model of Science and draw upon work in computer science and cognitive psychology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The History of Ideas:Precept and Practice, 1950–2000 and BeyondAnthony GraftonIn the middle years of the twentieth century, the history of ideas rose like a new sign of the zodiac over large areas of American culture and education. In those happy days, Dwight Robbins, the president of a fashionable progressive college, kept "copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, (...) and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name" on the table in his waiting room. True, Robbins did not exist: he was the fictional president of Randall Jarrell's equally fictional Benton, a liberal arts dystopia where "[h]alf of the college was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe."1 But Jarrell's notation of the Journal's status was accurate nonetheless.2The Journal, in the twenty years or so after its foundation, attracted attention from many quarters, some of them unexpected. And it occupied a unique position, between the technical journals of history and philology, [End Page 1] each firmly identified with a discipline, in which professional humanists normally published their results, and the quarterlies, often based not in disciplines but in liberal arts colleges and universities, which cultivated a mixed readership to which they offered fiction and poetry as well as essays. By contrast with both, the JHI fifty years ago ran on a rich mix of technical articles and wide-ranging essays that could easily have attracted the attention of a sophisticated administrator—or at least made a good impression on his coffee table. Bliss was it to be a subscriber in that happy day when the JHI glowed with something of the luster that haloed Representations in the 1980s and Critical Inquiry more recently.3The main reason for the Journal's prominence was that it represented a new field, appealingly located between disciplines as the Journal was between other sorts of periodical. In its postwar heyday, the history of ideas was not a dim subdivision of history, itself a discipline whose luster has worn off with time, but an intellectual seismic zone where the tectonic plates of disciplines converged and rubbed against one another, producing noises of all sorts. In recent years, it has sometimes seemed impossible, even to the best informed observers, that intellectual history, or the history of ideas, ever enjoyed this sort of prestige. A quarter century ago, Robert Darnton surveyed the state of intellectual and cultural history in the United States in an informative and influential essay. Using a language more resonant of the historical President Carter than the fictional President Robbins, Darnton detected "malaise" everywhere he looked. In the fifties, he noted, intellectual historians had seen "their discipline as the queen of the historical sciences. Today she seems humbled." True, desperate cries for help were not yet called for. Historians continued to write histories of ideas, and even to cast them in the technical languages of A.O. Lovejoy or Perry Miller: "one still finds 'unit-ideas' and 'mind' among the trendier terms." The just-published Dictionary of the History of Ideas, moreover, offered a vast selection of Lovejoyan formal analyses, systematically organized, to the reading public.4 [End Page 2]But for the last ten years, Darnton argued, younger scholars, especially graduate students, had been scrambling over the gunwales of the good ship History of Ideas, abandoning the effort to converse abstractly with the mighty dead, and clambering in hordes over the side of a newer vessel, Social History, which boasted a Hogarthian passenger list of heretics, misfits, and military women. At the level of the dissertations written in history departments, social history was outpacing intellectual, by a proportion of three to one. At the level of the scholarly journal, too, social history had forged ahead, though by a smaller margin. In the murkier, but no less significant, world of opinion, finally, the decline of intellectual history appeared clearest. History of ideas no longer occupied the cutting edge in young scholars' mental vision of their discipline.Social history, after all, had captured the minds of a generation—or a large percentage of it—in the 1960s, thanks both to the power of... (shrink)

History of the human race from the point of view of mankind's changing ideas--sociological, cosmological, philosophica.

Dictionary entry of "Idealism" in the "New Dictionary of the History of Ideas".

B a c k g r o u nd. The article critically examines the concept of peace in the context of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. This study delves into the historical, diplomatic, and philosophical dimensions of the Treaty between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China in the mid-twentieth century. M e t h o d s. The study is based on a systematic analysis of the original documents of the Sino-Soviet Treaty and (...) other primary sources that record the context and content of the agreement. The article uses a comprehensive analysis of primary sources, diplomatic correspondence, political discourse, and philosophical narrative to illuminate various interpretations and implementations of the treaty's peace provisions. Analyzing the philosophical basis of the agreement, it is taken into account how the ideas and concepts of friendship, union and mutual assistance were interpreted in the philosophical context of both countries. The article uses methods of comparative analysis to establish common and distinctive features between the ideology of the Sino-Soviet Treaty. Re s u l t s. The study provides valuable information about the geopolitical dynamics of the 20th century, shedding light on how the two major communist powers managed their diplomatic relations. By examining the ideological underpinnings and practical implications of the Treaty's peace-oriented provisions, the article contributes to understanding the broader landscape of international relations in this dynamic period. C o n c l u s i o n s. The study provides important information about the geopolitical dynamics of the 20th century, revealing how the two leading communist states managed their diplomatic relations. The article also considers the prospects for the development of dynamics between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, examining the difficulties and problems that arose in maintaining peaceful relations between powerful states with common political ideologies based on the principles of Marxism. Analyzing the ideological foundation and practical consequences of the peacekeeping principles in the treaty, the article contributes to a better understanding of the broad context of international relations and philosophical narrative. (shrink)

This paper presents a framework of four types of meaning and understanding in the history of political thought and intellectual history. Previous frameworks have overlooked a whole type of meaning – the type often prioritised by political theorists and philosophers. I call this “extended meaning.” Correcting a wrong turn in philosophy of language in the 1950s, I show how extended meaning has robust intellectual foundations, and I illustrate its value for textual interpreters. Even historians often need extended meaning, (...) for example to help resolve ambiguous passages. So, the main types of meaning are not alternatives: scholars interested in one kind of meaning still need others. This paper thus celebrates both diversity and unity. (shrink)

A recent innovation in the study of methods in the history of ideas is the introduction of elements of semantic externalism from the philosophy of language. Studies that rely on semantic externalism have done so to address particular questions of method in political theorising, including the interpretation of ‘essentially contested concepts’, and the issue of relativism in historical contextualism. In this paper, I critically review the use of semantic externalism, and associated methods such as Kripke’s causal theory of (...) reference, in the history of ideas. I explore the barriers that might prevent the use of externalism, and how studies relying on externalism seek to overcome such barriers. I then assess both the implications of relying on externalism, as well as a set of limitations. (shrink)

This article argues for a conception of the history of ideas that treats philosophy historically while avoiding sociological reductionism. On the view presented here, philosophical problems characteristically arise from a conflict of commitments, at least some of which have roots in wider forms of life and ways of seeing the world. In bringing such 'doxa' to our attention, the history of ideas, it is argued, plays a role that is both genuinely historical and, at the same (...) time, contributes to philosophical argument in making these commitments available to scrutiny. The article defends the permissibility of the apparent 'anachronism' involved in such interpretations. Although they may violate the 'principle of attribution' advocated by Quentin Skinner in his seminal 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas', that principle should not be accepted. The ascription of authorial intentions does indeed form an important part of interpretation, but intentions should not be understood either in a 'Cartesian' fashion (as recapturing what was 'in the author's mind') or in the modified version of Austinian speech-act theory advocated by Skinner. (shrink)

How can the development of ideas in a scientific field be studied over time? We apply unsupervised topic modeling to the ACL Anthology to analyze historical trends in the field of Computational Linguistics from 1978 to 2006. We induce topic clusters using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and examine the strength of each topic over time. Our methods find trends in the field including the rise of probabilistic methods starting in 1988, a steady increase in applications, and a sharp decline of (...) research in semantics and understanding between 1978 and 2001, possibly rising again after 2001. We also introduce a model of the diversity of ideas, topic entropy, using it to show that COLING is a more diverse conference than ACL, but that both conferences as well as EMNLP are becoming broader over time. Finally, we apply Jensen-Shannon divergence of topic distributions to show that all three conferences are converging in the topics they cover. (shrink)

A six-volume survey of the history of Western thought and culture, presented through 700 alphabetically arranged entries. Each entry explores the origin, cultural interpretations, and historical themes of such subjects as beauty, love, feminism, diversity, and social capital, among many others. For students and general readers.

Emphasis on autonomy of texts presupposes that there are perennial concepts. But researchers' expectations may turn history into mythology of ideas; researchers forget that an agent cannot be described as doing something he could not understand as a description, and that thinking may be inconsistent. They will never uncover voluntary oblique strategies and by treating ideas as units will confuse sentences with statements. On the other hand, a contextual approach to the meaning of texts dismisses ideas (...) as unimportant effects. Neither method shows how what was said was meant is crucial for understanding. There are no perennial problems; philosophers of different times do not speak directly to us. But history of ideas helps us recognize the contingency of many of our beliefs. (shrink)

Arthur O. Lovejoy conceived of the history of ideas as an interdisciplinary study, encompassing a variety of fields, including literary history, comparative literature, the history of folklore and ethnography, the history of language and the history of religious beliefs. This volume gathers together some of the most significant articles concerning the theory and practice of intellectual history, by Lovejoy himself and other scholars. Contributors: DONALD R. KELLEY, ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY, FREDERICK J. TEGGART, LEO (...) SPITZER, THEODORE SPENCER, ABRAHAM EDEL, PAUL O. KRISTELLER, PHILIP P. WIENER, JOSEPH A. MAZZEO, LEONARD KRIEGER, DANIEL J. WILSON, EDWARD P. MAHONEY, FRANCIS OAKLEY,JOHANN HUIZINGA, JOSEPH KATZ, CALVIN G. RAND, NILS B. KVASTAD, LESTER G. CROCKER and PATRICK H. HUTTON. (shrink)

While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School--Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst--have persistently defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like? Amy (...) Allen fractures critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a political imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resouce we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future. (shrink)

Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government (...) spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us. (shrink)

A comparison of the recently-published New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (2005) with its predecessor, The Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973), reveals much about the development of the history of ideas itself over the last half century. Generally, there has been a movement from a defense of the "Western tradition" against illiberal forces of left and right to an attempt to explore and understand the immense variety of post-colonial identities. Some failings (...) of the New Dictionary, however, suggest that the discipline has yet fully to solve the problems posed by this new orientation. (shrink)

This paper explores the intertwinement of ontology and history that happened after the idealist turn of Kantian transcendentalism, particularly in classic German idealism and later in American pragmatism. The paper focuses on the less remarked-upon consequence of this intertwinement, namely the possibility of a new reading of history based on changes in concepts and habitual mentality. The paper proposes a new take on historiography that vindicates Hegel’s insight but changes his approach to a pragmatist one, more apt to (...) face historical changes in a technical way and less easily twistable into ideological frameworks. The paper argues that the notion of habit, as phenomenologically and semiotically described by Peirce, is the fundamental cellule of the pragmatist take on the entanglement of history and ontology. The paper elaborates on the notion of habit, singling out a special form of it called “gesture” that can be a useful tool for reading the history of the human spirit without incorporating Hegel’s dialectic and Absolute. The paper compares the notion of gesture as it originated in the pragmatist tradition with the parallel use of the term in the early studies of Michel Foucault and argues that the notion of gesture is better equipped to tackle a theoretical reading of history. (shrink)

Two types of criticism are frequently levelled at the history of ideas in general and the history of political theory in particular. The first is very much that of historians practising in other fields; that it is written as a saga in which all the great deeds are done by entities which could not, in principle, do anything. In it, Science is always wrestling with Theology, Empiricism with Rationalism, monism with dualism, evolution with the Great Chain of (...) Being, artifice with nature, Politik with political moralism. Its protagonists are never humans, but only reified abstractions—or, if humans by inadvertence, humans only as the loci of these abstractions. The other charge, one more frequently levelled by philosophers, is that it is insensitive to the distinctive features of ideas, unconcerned with, or more often ineffectual in its concern with, truth and falsehood, its products more like intellectual seed-catalogues than adequate studies of thought In short it is characterised by a persistent tension between the threats of falsity in its history and incompetence in its philosophy. (shrink)

An unabridged edition with updated footnotes and layout, to include: Recent Criticisms of "Consciousness" - Instinct and Habit - Desire and Feeling - Influence of Past History on Present Occurrences in Living Organisms - Psychological and Physical Causal Laws - Introspection - The Definition of Perception - Sensations and Images - Memory - Words and Meaning - General Ideas and Thought - Belief - Truth and Falsehood - Emotions and Will - Characteristics of Mental Phenomena.

This volume describes features of biological autonomy and integrates them into the recent discussion of factors in evolution. In recent years ideas about major transitions in evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. They include questions about the origin of evolutionary innovation, their genetic and epigenetic background, the role of the phenotype, and of changes in ontogenetic pathways. In the present book, it is argued that it is likewise necessary to question the properties of these innovations and what was qualitatively (...) generated during the macroevolutionary transitions. The author states that a recurring central aspect of macroevolutionary innovations is an increase in individual organismal autonomy whereby it is emancipated from the environment with changes in its capacity for flexibility, self-regulation and self-control of behavior. The first chapters define the concept of autonomy and examine its history and its epistemological context. Later chapters demonstrate how changes in autonomy took place during the major evolutionary transitions and investigate the generation of organs and physiological systems. They synthesize material from various disciplines including zoology, comparative physiology, morphology, molecular biology, neurobiology and ethology. It is argued that the concept is also relevant for understanding the relation of the biological evolution of man to his cultural abilities. Finally the relation of autonomy to adaptation, niche construction, phenotypic plasticity and other factors and patterns in evolution is discussed. The text has a clear perspective from the context of systems biology, arguing that the generation of biological autonomy must be interpreted within an integrative systems approach. (shrink)

The use of computational tools in the humanities for science 2.0 practices is steadily increasing. This paper examines current research practices of a group of philosophers studying the history of philosophical concepts. We explain the methodology and workflow of these philosophers and provide an overview of tools they currently use in their research. The case study highlights a number of fundamental challenges facing these researchers, including: (i) accessing known relevant research content or resources; (ii) discovering new research content or (...) data; (iii) working collaboratively rather than individually. We propose a mash-up of search, visualization, and awareness tools addressing these challenges and discuss the design of the mash-up, its implementation, and evaluation with the target users. Through our case study, we demonstrate the benefits of a user-centered design approach, as well as the benefits of the concrete mash-up for historians of philosophy, and, importantly, the limitations of these tools for conducting historical and philosophical research. (shrink)

This paper provides a short summary of Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Logic stands here as a subset of Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as a matter of the grammar of our concepts. It studies the forms of reasoning appropriate to a discipline, rather than the material of that discipline. Hence, the logic of the history of ideas considers the nature of meaning, the way we should justify our (...) knowledge of past meanings, and how we should explain things such as the existence of meanings, the beliefs people held, and conceptual change. (shrink)

The story of American intellectual history's decline, fall, and phoenix-like rebirth in recent decades has become trite with the retelling: knocked from its position of prominence by the new social history and plunged into the chastened soul-searching of the famed Wingspread Conference of 1977, only to find itself rescued in part by the linguistic and cultural “turns” that swept the entire discipline of American history in the 1980s and 1990s. Like many a narrative, this one undoubtedly imposes (...) too clear a pattern of meaning on a messier reality, but also like many a narrative, it has powerfully shaped the professional identities of American intellectual historians by giving them a sense of where they have been and how they arrived at their current place. That current place is a hospitable one, in many ways, for in the last couple of decades American historians seem to have grown increasingly receptive to the notion that ideas have mattered in history. (shrink)

Between the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and Husserl’s Ideas in 1913, the nineteenth century was a pivotal period in the philosophy of mind, witnessing the emergence of the phenomenological and analytical traditions that continue to shape philosophical debate in fundamental ways. The nineteenth century also challenged many prevailing assumptions about the transparency of the mind, particularly in the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud, whilst at the same time witnessing the birth of modern psychology (...) in the work of William James. -/- Covering the main figures of German idealism to the birth of the phenomenological movement under Brentano and Husserl, Philosophy of Mind in the Nineteenth Century provides an outstanding survey to these new directions in philosophy of mind. -/- Following an introduction by Sandra Lapointe, fourteen specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors discuss key topics, thinkers, and debates, including: -/- German idealism, Bolzano, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Ernst Mach, Helmholtz, Nietzsche, William James, Sigmund Freud, Brentano’s early philosophy of mind, Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Husserl, and Natorp. -/- Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, continental philosophy, and the history of philosophy, Philosophy of Mind in the Nineteenth Century is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, and literature. (shrink)

A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena.The Restless Clock examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals—dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us (...) through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency.The Restless Clock reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Zha Changping takes inspiration from Western art theories and applies them to a contemporary Chinese context. The article has an ontological perspective, discussing how the concept of “relational aesthetics” manifests in Chinese contemporary art. It also discusses its relation to the history of ideas. The focus is on art, but the ontological perspectives on creation and humanity are universal.

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In _American Nietzsche_, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's (...) philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, _American Nietzsche_ dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 68J The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview. By HANS URS VON BALTHASAR. Translated by Joseph Fessio, S. J., Michael M. Waldstein (Preface), and Susan Clements (Conclusion). San Fran· cisco: Ignatius Press/Communio, 1991. Pp. 127. $9.95 (paper). Except for the preface and conclusion, Hans Urs von Balthasar's The Theology of Henri de Lubac first appeared as the long essay, "Henri de Lubac-L'oeuvre organique d'une vie," in (...) Nouvelle Revue Theologique 97 (1975), 897-913 and 98 (1976), 33-59, and translated by Joseph Fessio, S.J., as "The Achievement of Henri de Luhac" in Thought 51 (1976), 7-49. The preface was added soon after for the German edition, Henri de Lubac: Sein organisches Lebenswerk (Frei· burg im Breisgau: Johannes Verlag, 1976). The conclusion was added for Balthasar's and Jesuit Georges Chantraine's Le Cardinal de Lubac: L'Homme et son oeuvre (Paris: Ed. Lethielleux, 1983). While de Lubac denied " a true, personal philosophical or theo· logical synthesis " in the multiplicity of his oeuvre, he did believe that there could he found " a pattern that constitutes its unity " (de Luhac on p. 10). A more systematic work had been planned with Bruno de Solages, Peres Congar, Chenu, and others. In de Luhac's words, " the lightning bolt of Humani Generis killed the project" (p. 11). We can only wonder at what might have been. At the center of de Lubac's thought is a spiritual perception of "the essence of Christian mysticism" (p. 11). A hook on this subject was planned hut never completed; its fundamental importance was indicated by de Luhac in 1956: "I believe my hook on mysticism has inspired me for a long time in everything I work on; in its light I make my judgments and gain the criteria for ordering my thoughts and ideas" (p. 11). The purpose of Balthasar's little book is to trace these "great spiritual options of the master" (p. 26). Balthasar wrote his preface after he had received from de Luhac the manuscript that would he published as his Memoire sur l'occasion de mes ecrits (1989; ET: At the Service of the Church (1993]). Accord· ing to Balthasar, this "meandering" text has great value in display· ing the organic unity of de Luhac's writings in the contexts which occasioned them-" as well as the legendary condemnations and banish· ments prepared for him by his order and by the Church" (p. 9). De Luhac adopted the " fundamental elan " (p. 13) of Blondel, Marechal, and Rousselot. They enabled de Lubac to see in Thomas Aquinas " the paradox of the spiritual creature that is ordained beyond itself by the innermost reality of its nature to a goal that is unreachable for it and that can only he given as a gift of grace " (p. 13). Balthasar is unambiguous in his belief in the correctness of their interpretation. 684 BOOK REVIEWS Blondel, Marechal, and de Lubac were " martyrs for truth " (p. 13). De Lubac " exposed himself to the attacks of a tutiorist scholastic theology, armed with nothing but the historical and theological truth" (p. 13). Of the three, de Lubac was the most persecuted. The conflict with scholasticism is presented in all its sharpness. One must go back to Thomas himself, over the commentatorial tradition of John of St. Thomas and Cajetan, whose work represents, in the words of Gilson, " a successful ' corruptorium Sanctae Thomae.'... Thomas has been castrated by it" (p. 14). Gilson's "unqualified assent" to de Lubac's Thomistic conclusions means much to Balthasar, because it is "the assent of the greatest authority in the field of the history of phi· losophy" (p. 15). Upon reading Sumaturel (1946), Gilson wrote to de Lubac that the difference between the scholastic and the humanist theologians, like de Lubac, in part lies in the way they understand propositions. The scholastics " understand only univocal propositions and those that seem to be univocal. The former [humanist theologiansJ, by contrast, are more interested in the truth that the proposition attempts to formulate and that partly escapes it" (p. 14). In their incomprehension and fear of analogy, the scholastics are represented as hankering after a security that... (shrink)

Historical records show that there was no real concept of probability in Europe before the mid-seventeenth century, although the use of dice and other randomizing objects was commonplace. Ian Hacking presents a philosophical critique of early ideas about probability, induction, and statistical inference and the growth of this new family of ideas in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Hacking invokes a wide intellectual framework involving the growth of science, economics, and the theology of the period. He argues (...) that the transformations that made it possible for probability concepts to emerge have constrained all subsequent development of probability theory and determine the space within which philosophical debate on the subject is still conducted. First published in 1975, this edition includes an introduction that contextualizes his book in light of developing philosophical trends. Ian Hacking is the winner of the Holberg International Memorial Prize 2009. (shrink)

First published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

2014 Reprint of 1945 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The first part deals with Greek cosmology and is the longest, the most elaborate and, on the whole, the liveliest part of a book which never deviates into dullness. The dominant thought in Greek cosmology, Collingwood holds, was the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, nature being the substance of something ensouled where "soul" meant the self-moving. Part II is "The Renaissance View of Nature." Collingwood describes the (...) rise and decline of the deists' view of Nature as a machine designed by the Great Contriver who, having turned it out, watches it go. Part III, "The Modern View of Nature," deals with very recent or contemporary philosophy and science, discerning in it a radical evolutionism first in biology and later in cosmology. Remains to this day a classic text in the history of ideas. (shrink)

Many writers have paid tribute to its power: Shakespeare urged his audiences to use it to create a setting; Hobbes asserted that "imagination and memory are but one thing; " for Wordsworth it was "the mightiest leveler known to moral world; " and to Baudelaire it represented "the queen of truth. " Imagination as artistic, poetic, and cultural predicate remains one of the most influential ideas in the history of Western thought. It has been simultaneously feared as a (...) dangerous, uncontrollable force, and revered as the supreme visionary power. The questions of its origins, nature, function, and effects have absorbed writers, theologians, and philosophers alike. J. M. Cocking's Imagination shows how these questions have recurred, through the ages and in various cultures. Exploring this theme, from antiquity to the Renaissance, it opens with a discussion of the treatment of imagination in the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Tracing its development in the Middle Ages, Cocking pays particular attention to the parallel tradition in Islamic thought of the period. The book pursues the concept through the theories of Dante and the neo-Platonists, concluding with the High Renaissance. (shrink)

The 'history of ideas', better known these days as intellectual history, is a flourishing field of study which has been the object of much controversy but hardly any historical exploration. This major new work from Donald R. Kelley is the first comprehensive history of intellectual history, tracing the study of the history of thought from ancient, medieval and early modern times, its emergence as the 'history of ideas' in the 18th century, and (...) its subsequent expansion. The point of departure for this study is the perspective opened up by Victor Cousin in the early 19th-century on 'Eclecticism' and its association with the history of philosophy established by Renaissance scholars. Kelley considers a broad range of topics, including the rivalry between 'ideas' and language, the rise of cultural history, the contributions of certain 19th- and 20th-century practitioners of the history of ideas in interdisciplinary areas of philosophy, literature and the sciences, and finally the current state of intellectual history. The central theme of the book is the interplay between the canon of philosophical thought and the tradition of language and textual study, the divergence of the latter marking the 'descent of ideas' into the realm of cultural history. (shrink)

"First Published in 1991, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.".

Bevir?s view that theories are prior to theorists, just in so far as they are prior to any observations which one might make and, by extension, any facts which one might invoke in support of any particular interpretative conclusions, is problematic when applied to intellectual history, for although it is in one sense true that all facts are ineluctably constituted by some or other underlying theory, it is also true that, in a vast number of important situations, all human (...) beings share the same basic theory. The most important implication of this shared stock of concepts, observations and facts, is that we shall often be able to see numerous aspects of a long?dead author?s world in much the same way as he or she saw it. (shrink)

Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion (...) of poetry, painting, and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of "imitation" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls "world-reflecting" and "world-simulating" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

The idea that we are mutually dependent on the recognition of our peers is at least as old as modernity. Across Europe, this idea has been understood in different ways from the very beginning, according to each country's different cultural and political conditions. This stimulating study explores the complex history and multiple associations of the idea of 'Recognition' in Britain, France and Germany. Demonstrating the role of 'recognition' in the production of important political ideas, Axel Honneth explores how (...) our dependence on the recognition of others is sometimes viewed as the source of all modern, egalitarian morality, sometimes as a means for fostering socially beneficial behavior, and sometimes as a threat to 'true' individuality. By exploring this fundamental concept in our modern political and social self-understanding, Honneth thus offers an alternative view of the philosophical discourse of modernity. (shrink)

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."--Immanuel Kant Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century--an activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our own time: between the Platonic (...) belief in absolute truth and the lure of authoritarianism; between the eighteenth-century reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentieth-century Fascism; between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militant--and sometimes genocidal--nationalism that convulses the modern world. This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, a new foreword in which award-winning novelist John Banville discusses Berlin's life and ideas, particularly his defense of pluralism, and a substantial new appendix that provides rich context, including letters by Berlin and previously uncollected writings, most notably his virtuoso review of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. (shrink)