The influence of historiography on aspects of political thought in France, Italy and Germany. In recent years the overlap between political thought and historiography has changed the boundaries of intellectual history. Donald Kelley, the longtime editor of The Journal of the History of Ideas has played a leading part in this process. These essays by his friends and former students follow in his footsteps. The collection is divided into three parts: France, England [six essays], and Italy and Germany [four (...) essays]. Anthony Grafton and John Salmon provide an introduction, and the volume concludes with a bibliography of Donald Kelley's many works. Historians and Ideologues is designed for those with an interest in the contribution of historiography to political thought, and will be a timely addition to the growing reaction against the postmodern scepticism in historiographical research in this field. Contributors include Ann Blair, Julian Franklin, Kathleen Parrow, David Harris Sacks, Sarah Hanley, Daniel Woolf, Gordon Schochet, Joseph Levine, John Pocock, Perez Zagorin, William Connell, Donald Phillip Verene, and Michael Carhart. Anthony Grafton is a Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. John Salmon is the Marjorie Walter Goodheart Emeritus Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College. (shrink)

It has recently been suggested by Richard R. La Croix that there is a logical incompatibility between the doctrine of divine omniprescience — the notion that God knows what will happen in the future — and the commonly held belief that literary authors are creative with respect to the compositions they produce. This suggestion is, I take it, part of the overall claim that God's omniscience rules out human free choices, since if what one does is known before one does (...) it, then one can hardly be said to have chosen it. I will not, however, be concerned with this general controversy in the present paper, but rather with the specific one regarding literary creativity and divine omniprescience. La Croix defends this claim by defining literary creativity as follows: literary authorship is creative in the sense that by means of his composing activity an author is an agent who brings about the existence of some thing which did not exist prior to the composing activity of that agent and which would not exist without the composing activity of that agent or some similar agent. (shrink)

Finally, in four chapters greatly expanded for this edition, Griffin considers the latest scientific research on animal consciousness, pro and con, and...

University of Chicago Press, 2001 Review by Adriano Palma, Ph.D. on Aug 1st 2001 Volume: 5, Number: 31.

A collection of essays from some of the world's leading intellectual historians, representing an international spectrum of research into the history of philosophy, intellect, science and music. This collection of essays addresses, in specific historical ways and from particular disciplinary standpoints, the problem of knowledge and what used to be called the classification of the sciences. What is, or what passes for, knowledge? What are its divisions, and how should they be related? Who possesses this knowledge, and to what uses (...) has it been put? How is it transmitted, and how can its history be understood and written? Ranging across the epistemological barrier formed by the revolution of modern science, these contributions inquire into the changing disciplinary patterns of the tumultuous times between the renaissance and the enlightenment, that saw the fragmentation of old ideals and the creation of European modernity. Contributors: Donald R. Kelley, Ann Blair, Paul Nelles, Constance Blackwell, Ulrich Schneider, Martin Mulsow, J.B. Schneewind, Donald Verene, Peter Miller, Ann Moyers, Michael Seidler, Anthony Pagden, Paula Findlen, Anthony Grafton, Heikki Mikkeli, Nicholas Jardine, Londa Schiebinger. (shrink)

In a recent article in Religious Studies , Gregory S. Kavka argues that John Hick was wrong when he said that the statement ‘God exists’ is verifiable but not falsifiable. Kavka constructs an imaginary `resurrection world' ruled by Satan and inhabited by such resurrected evildoers as Hitler and Stalin. In such a world, those who had been virtuous in earthly life in the hopes of a Christ-dominated resurrection world discover that virtue is inversely rewarded, with the ‘living’ intolerable for them (...) and worst of all for those among them who had lived especially virtuous lives, i.e. the saints. Further, they are told by presumably knowledgeable inhabitants of this world that: …the historical Christ was an agent sent by Satan to raise in good people false hopes of eternal salvation. This story is confirmed by Satan himself who demonstrates through a huge telescope-like device how he continues to send false saviours to other planets inhabited by intelligent beings in a cruel plan to make such beings miserable in the long run. (shrink)

My purpose is to offer an assessment of the scientific legacy of Converse's “Belief Systems” by reviewing five productive lines of research stimulated by his authoritative analysis and unsettling conclusions. First I recount the later life history of Converse's notion of “nonattitudes,” and suggest that as important as nonattitudes are, we should be paying at least as much attention to their opposite: attitudes held with conviction. Second, I argue that the problem of insufficient information that resides at the center of (...) Converse's analysis has not gone away, and that newly fashioned models of information processing offer only partial remedies. Third, I suggest that the concept of the “average voter” is a malicious fiction, as it blinds us to the enormous variation in political attention, interest, and knowledge that characterizes mass publics, in Converse's time as in our own. Fourth, I develop an affirmative aspect of Converse's analysis that has mostly been overlooked: namely, that if ideological reasoning is beyond most citizens’ capacity and interest, they might fall back on a simple and reasonable alternative, which I will call “group‐centrism.” And fifth, I consider the possibility that while the majority of individual citizens falls short of democratic standards, the public as a whole might do rather well. (shrink)

Eminent scientists are well-placed to bring the novel works of others, even if not in their own areas of expertise, to general attention. In so doing, they may be able to extend original accounts or introduce new terminologies, but they are basically messengers, not innovators. In the 1940s an evolutionary theory of biological aging was explained by Peter Medawar, and informational concepts relating to DNA were explained by Erwin Schrödinger. Both explanations were eventually traced back to the Victorian polymath Samuel (...) Butler—one by Medawar’s research associate Alex Comfort, and the other, albeit indirectly, by Schrödinger himself. In his time Butler’s works were too erudite for general readers and too laden with populist jargon for contemporary experts to take seriously. However, today it appears counterfactually plausible that an early acceptance of his ideas would have greatly quickened the pace of research. (shrink)

Four years after the death of Charles Darwin, his research associate, George Romanes, invoked a mysterious process—“physiological selection”—that could often have secured reproductive isolation independently of, and prior to, natural selection, so leading to an origin of species. This postulate of two sequential selection modes can now be regarded as leading to modern “chromosomal,” as opposed to “genic,” speciation theories. Romanes’ abstractions—which confounded many, but not all, of his contemporaries—equate with divergences in parental DNA sequences that impede meiotic pairing in (...) their hybrid offspring, so rendering that offspring sterile. Unlike Darwin, Romanes saw hybrid sterility as a parental, rather than offspring, phenotype that would, within a species, reproductively isolate certain parents from each other while not impeding their crossing with other parents. This group selection would have empowered natural selection to act more advantageously than in its absence. Given suitable conditions, there could then be divergence from one species into two. The present essay introduces Romanes’ “Physiological Selection; an Additional Suggestion on the Origin of Species” 19:337–411; available as supplementary material in the online version of this essay) for the journal’s “Classics in Biological Theory” collection. (shrink)

In Fortunes of History Donald R. Kelley offers an authoritative examination of historical writing during the "long nineteenth century"--the years from the French Revolution to those just after the First World War. He provides a comprehensive analysis of the theories and practices of British, French, German, Italian, and American schools of historical thought, their principal figures, and their distinctive methods and self-understandings. Kelley treats the modern traditions of European world and national historiography from the Enlightenment to the "new histories" (...) of the twentieth century, attending not only to major authors and schools but also to methods, scholarship, criticisms, controversies, ideological questions, and relations to other disciplines. (shrink)

This study blends together ethical philosophy, neurocognitive-evolutionary studies, and literary theory to explore how imaginative discourse addresses a distinctively human deep sociality, and by doing so helps shape cultural and literary history. Deep sociality, arising from an improbable evolutionary history, both entwines and leaves non-reconciled what is felt to be significant for us and what ethical sense seems to call us to acknowledge as significant, independent of ourselves. Ethical Sense and Literary Significance connects literary and cultural history without reducing the (...) literary to a mere expression of something else. It argues that affective differences between non-egocentric and egocentric registers of significance are integral to the bioculturally evolved deep sociality that verbal art addresses-often in unsettling and socially critical ways. Much imaginative discourse, in early societies as well as recent ones, brings ethical sense and literary significance together in ways that reveal their intricate but non-harmonized internal entwinement. Drawing on contemporary scholarship in the humanities and sciences, Donald R. Wehrs explores the implications of interdisciplinary approaches to topics central to a wide range of fields beyond literary studies, including neuroscience, anthropology, phenomenological philosophy, comparative history, and social psychology. (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)

The Cambridge Companion to Socrates is a collection of essays providing a comprehensive guide to Socrates, the most famous Greek philosopher. Because Socrates himself wrote nothing, our evidence comes from the writings of his friends (above all Plato), his enemies, and later writers. Socrates is thus a literary figure as well as a historical person. Both aspects of Socrates' legacy are covered in this volume. Socrates' character is full of paradox, and so are his philosophical views. These paradoxes have led (...) to deep differences in scholar's interpretation of Socrates and his thought. Mirroring this wide range of thought about Socrates, this volume's contributors are unusually diverse in their background and perspective. The essays in this volume were authored by classical philologists, philosophers, and historians from Germany, Francophone Canada, Britain, and the United States, and they represent a range of interpretive and philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Sightings of the revolutionary comet that appeared in the skies of evolutionary biology in 1976—the selfish gene—date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries. It became generally recognized that genes were located on chromosomes and compete with each other in a manner consistent with the later appellation “selfish.” Chromosomes were seen as disruptable by the apparently random “cut and paste” process known as recombination. However, each gene was only a small part of its chromosome. On a statistical basis a (...) gene should escape disruption for many generations. This led George Williams and Richard Dawkins to a new definition of the gene, differing from conventional biochemical definitions in that there were no consistent genic boundaries. There had been no previous sightings of another revolutionary, albeit less verbally spectacular, comet that appeared in 1975—the homostability principle of Akiyoshi Wada. Each gene has a base composition “accent” that distinguishes it from its neighbors. We now see that recombination can be triggered by the shift in base composition at genic boundaries. Hence, the Williams-Dawkins definition approaches the conventional definitions. (shrink)

In this book, one of the world's leading intellectual historians offers a critical survey of Western historical thought and writing from the pre-classical era to the late eighteenth century. Donald R. Kelley focuses on persistent themes and methodology, including questions of myth, national origins, chronology, language, literary forms, rhetoric, translation, historical method and criticism, theory and practice of interpretation, cultural studies, philosophy of history, and "historicism." Kelley begins by analyzing the dual tradition established by the foundational works of Greek (...) historiography--Herodotus's broad cultural and antiquarian inquiry and the contrasting model of Thucydides' contemporary political and analytical narrative. He then examines the many variations on and departures from these themes produced in writings from Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian antiquity, in medieval chronicles, in national histories and revisions of history during the Renaissance and Reformation, and in the rise of erudite and enlightened history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout, Kelley discusses how later historians viewed their predecessors, including both supporters and detractors of the authors in question. The book, which is a companion volume to Kelley's highly praised anthology Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, will be a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in interpretations of the past. (shrink)

The use of analogy is an important component of human cognition. The type of analogy we produce and communicate depends heavily on a number of factors, such as the setting, the level of domain expertise present, and the speaker's goal or intent. In this observational study, we recorded economics experts during scientific discussion and examined the categorical distance and structural depth of the analogies they produced. We also sought to characterize the purpose of the analogies that were generated. Our results (...) supported previous conclusions about the infrequency of superficial similarity in subject-generated analogs, but also showed that distance and depth characteristics were more evenly balanced than in previous observational studies. This finding was likely due to the nature of the goals of the participants, as well as the broader nature of their expertise. An analysis of analogical purpose indicated that the generation of concrete source examples of more general target concepts was most prevalent. We also noted frequent instances of analogies intended to form visual images of source concepts. Other common purposes for analogies were the addition of colorful speech, inclusion (i.e., subsumption) of a target into a source concept, or differentiation between source and target concepts. We found no association between depth and either of the other _two_ characteristics, but our findings suggest a relationship between purpose and distance; i.e., that visual imagery typically entailed an outside-domain source whereas exemplification was most frequently accomplished using within-domain analogies. Overall, we observed a rich and diverse set of spontaneously produced analogical comparisons. The high degree of expertise within the observed group along with the richly comparative nature of the economics discipline likely contributed to this analogical abundance. (shrink)

Born in the fifth century BCE, Plato was one of the primary thinkers of Classical Greece. A mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, Plato is considered to be a foundational figure in Western thought.

A form of self-deception exists that is both intentional and common. In it, people act as if they are undergoing a certain state of mind as a tactic for experiencing the state. This kind of self- deception can be illustrated by what happens to players of simulation games. Someone playing a pilot in a flight simulator game, for example, comes to experience aspects of the world of a pilot. Research on hypnotic responding is used to illustrate the nature and effectiveness (...) of such a strategy of self-deception. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (2001) 577-592 [Access article in PDF] Eclecticism and the History of Ideas Donald R. Kelley "What we call the history of ideas," Joseph Mazzeo wrote in in 1972, "itself has a history." 1 In this country the history of ideas in the past century has been associated with the American philosopher and founder of this journal, Arthur O. Lovejoy, and his (...) epigones and critics. However, this field has an earlier history sub literam, going back almost two centuries, and a still deeper prehistory before the coinage of the phrase, traceable at least indirectly back to antiquity. The purpose of this essay is to trace some aspects of one intellectual tradition out of which the history of ideas has, knowingly or not, emerged.In 1829 Victor Cousin gave a diagnosis of and his prescription for philosophy in the wake of one revolution and on the threshold of another. He saw just three possibilities: either it could renounce its independence and submit again to authority, it could keep on retracing the circle of obsolescent systems, or--and this was his solution--it could "disengage what is true in each of these systems, and thus construct a philosophy superior to all systems [and] shall be neither this or that philosophy in its essence and in its unity." This procedure, "to select in all what appears to be true and good, and consequently everlasting,--this, in a single word, is ECLECTICISM." Moreover, Cousin added, "[i]f this philosophy is to be Eclectic, it must also be sustained by the history of philosophy."How had Cousin come upon this program? In December 1815, in the first year of both the Restoration Monarchy and his teaching at the École Normale Supérieure, he was lecturing on the history of philosophy. In post-revolutionary France this was a field in great disarray, and Cousin looked back to the great schools of the earlier generation, noting three in particular--the French, the [End Page 577] Scottish, and the German traditions, represented respectively by Condillac, Reid, and Kant. "It would be an interesting and instructive study," he told his enthusiastic young students, "to examine the weaknesses of these schools by engaging one with another and by selecting their various merits in the context of a great eclecticism which would contain and surpass all three." 2Over the next three decades this doctrine was publicized and extended by Cousin's many scholarly publications, by the still more famous lectures he gave after returning to his chair of philosophy in 1828, by his many international contacts and disciples, and by his later public career as minister of education. 3 For half a century before his death in 1867 Cousin had an unparalleled intellectual influence as virtually the "official philosopher" in France, with Eclecticism being widely regarded as a "state philosophy," 4 and translations of his works extending his renown into other parts of Europe and this country. In defending his achievements and hegemonic position Cousin claimed an absolute originality and a unique truth-value for his ideas. Eclecticism had not been drawn from German sources, he protested in 1855. "It was born spontaneously in our own spirit [notre esprit] from the spectacle of the resounding conflicts and the hidden harmonies of the three great philosophical schools of the eighteenth century," he declared. "Thus," he concluded, "eclecticism is a French doctrine and peculiar to us." 5Historically speaking, however, nothing could be further from the truth--or indeed further from the premises of the earlier eclectic tradition on which Cousin knowingly drew. The defining characteristic of his philosophy was its dependence not only on the three schools he recognized in his early years of teaching but on the whole history of philosophy from its Greek and especially Platonic beginnings, to which Cousin himself devoted much of his historical and philological [End Page 578] scholarship. That Eclecticism was a sort of higher plagiarism was admitted by Cousin himself: "What I recommend," Cousin said in 1817, "is an enlightened eclecticism which, judging with equity, and even with benevolence... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Life and Character Socrates in Aristophanes' Clouds Plato's Apology of Socrates Socratic Method Moral Psychology Education and Politics Irony Xenophon Conclusion Bibliography.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanian Cultural and Political IdentityDonald R. KelleyThe Journal of the History of Ideas, in collaboration with other institutions, including the Universities of Bucharest and Budapest and the Soros Foundation, recently sponsored the second in a series of international conferences being planned on topics in current intellectual history. (The first, “Interrogating Tradition,” was held at Rutgers University, 13–16 November 1997.) The Romanian conference, which was held in the Elisabeta Palace (...) in Bucharest (27–31 May 1998), was devoted to “Culture and the Politics of National Identity in Modern Romania.” Over forty scholars, mainly from Romania but some also from the U.S., France, Germany, and Hungary, gathered to discuss a variety of questions about Romanian society, past, present, and speculative future; and they were joined by at least as many visitors, especially students, from the local area and beyond.Topics discussed included politics, language, economics, historiography, religion, education, philosophy, ideologies, intelligentsia, particular intellectuals, minorities, and women (though not Gypsies or gays). Under this riot of rubrics a wide range of questions were posed in interdisciplinary fashion, with frequent, sometimes impassioned interventions. What is—was, might have been, can be—Romania? Who is a Romanian (and who not)? What is Romania’s relation to the West and the East? (And what are the “West” and the “East”?) To modernity, to modernism, to modernization? What is—has been, should be—the function of intellectuals, of political and cultural elites, in understanding the Romanian past and in setting a course for the future? What, more generally, is the role of history in answering such questions? Or is history perhaps (as Karl Krause remarked of psychoanalysis) the disease for which it claims to be the cure?Keith Hitchens’s keynote address suggested that rehashing old essentialist debates might not be productive at millennium’s end, but the conference itself could not avoid some excursions down the paths of memory and myth. For historians, Western historians anyway, Romania seems to have too many pasts. Located at the juncture of four previous empires, Romania is a mosaic, or perhaps a pandemonium, of ethnic, religious, economic, and ideological groups that can only imagine, or invent, a nationality. Geographically (and in many ways culturally) remote from the West, Romania for a long time (as Sorin Antohi remarked) lacked both a public sphere and a civil society; and suffering “a Counter-Reformation without a Reformation” (Alexandru Dutu’s phrase), it has not enjoyed a tradition of religious or ethnic toleration. Nor have either the Germans or the Jews (as Glass said) found their own unity within the changing borders of the modern Romanian state. Not until the nineteenth century did Romania develop, out of its Boyar background (as Siupiur argued), an intellectual elite that could create a modern national history and help turn “peasants into Romanians” (Antohi’s phrase); and even then this elite seemed more attracted to conservative [End Page 735] (Herder, Savigny, Burke) than to liberal views of autochthonism. Many features of Western modernity, such as Newtonian science, reached Romania late, and indeed there was a retrograde movement against liberalism under the aegis by orthodox religion. In any case this intelligentsia has been as fragmented and multiform as the Romanian past itself. True, some Romanian scholars like to posit a mainstream tradition, “excesses aside,” as one speaker put it—but how, asked another, can historians put “excesses” aside from the devastating perspective of this century?Political and cultural self-examination was the dominant theme of this conference. Nationality, said Pippidi, depends on three factors, viz., name, language, religion, and territory. The Romanian name dates from the tenth century, indicating a separation of the Roman from the Greek tradition in Wallachia; and from the seventeenth century the idea of a mainly Roman provenance was given privilege. As a language, “Romanian” was spoken in the late Middle Ages, but the first written document is dated 1521. The principal religion in Romania was and is Greek orthodox, although there are also Roman Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, and German Protestant communities, as well as the Uniate church created in the eighteenth century. As for the territory, this has been a matter of change, conflict, and confusion throughout the tragic course... (shrink)

In animals' natural lives, uncertainty is normal; and certainty, exceptional. Evaluating ambiguous information is essential for survival: Does what is seen, heard, or smelled mean danger? Does that gesture mean aggression or fear? Is he confident or uncertain? If they are conscious of anything, the content of animals' awareness probably includes crucial uncertainties, both their own and those of others.

My commentary calls attention to what makes Mr. Bowie's paper well worth intensive consideration. In my brief evaluation, however, I only lay out three incoherent elements of his proposed family model of labor-management relations.I argue that complete job security is not compatible with complete freedom to change firms; that, in practice, such security for all employees is not compatible with the shifting demand of our economic system, and that the model includes two kinds of spouse relationships — one affectional and (...) another competitive — that are incoherent with one another. My point is not that Mr. Bowie's model is fatally flawed, but that it needs to be improved. (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)

While the study of legal history grew up largely within the confines of the legal profession, it was equally the offspring of Renaissance humanism. Legal humanism, a branch of philology developed by lawyers rather than historians, laid the foundation for the study of legal, institutional, and even some social history. These lawyers based their work on the humanist method of critical reading of original sources, but soon realized that a truly historical view of law also required a systematic understanding of (...) jurisprudence. Their method led them to explore canon and feudal as well as Roman law. Although the legal humanists had no intention of allowing the science of law to be governed by the liberal arts, they did professionalize the study of legal history and thus reshaped historical scholarship in general. This experience demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary work in history. (shrink)

Annotation Contains texts from 112 historians of the last three millennia who discuss the problems, purposes, and methods of history writing. Kelley provides commentary and interpretation. Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Sightings of the revolutionary comet that appeared in the skies of evolutionary biology in 1976—the selfish gene—date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries. It became generally recognized that genes were located on chromosomes and compete with each other in a manner consistent with the later appellation “selfish.” Chromosomes were seen as disruptable by the apparently random “cut and paste” process known as recombination. However, each gene was only a small part of its chromosome. On a statistical basis a (...) gene should escape disruption for many generations. This led George Williams and Richard Dawkins to a new definition of the gene, differing from conventional biochemical definitions in that there were no consistent genic boundaries. There had been no previous sightings of another revolutionary, albeit less verbally spectacular, comet that appeared in 1975—the homostability principle of Akiyoshi Wada. Each gene has a base composition “accent” that distinguishes it from its neighbors. We now see that recombination can be triggered by the shift in base composition at genic boundaries. Hence, the Williams-Dawkins definition approaches the conventional definitions. (shrink)