In Intellectual Life in the Ḥijāz before Wahhabism, Naser Dumairieh argues that, as a result of changing global conditions facilitating the movement of scholars and texts, the seventeenth-century Ḥijāz was one of the most important intellectual centers of the Islamic world, acting as a hub between its different parts. Positioning Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī (d. 1101/1690) as representative of the intellectual activities of the pre-Wahhabism Ḥijāz, Dumairieh argues that his coherent philosophical system represents a synthesis of several major (...) post-classical traditions of Islamic thought, namely kalām and Akbarian appropriations of Avicennian metaphysics. Al-Kūrānī's work is the culmination of the philosophized Akbarian tradition; with his reconciliation of Ibn ʻArabī's ideas with Ashʻarī theology, Ibn ʻArabī's ideas became Islamic theology. (shrink)

The Sociology of Intellectual Life outlines a social theory of knowledge for the 21st century. Steve Fuller deals directly with a world in which it is no longer taken for granted that universities and academics are the best places and people to embody the life of the mind. While Fuller defends academic privilege, he takes very seriously the historic divergences between academics and intellectuals, attending especially to the different features of knowledge production that they value."--BOOK JACKET.

From the earliest times, American ethics, the rules for the moral \& intellectual life of the West, used to be founded upon the two principles of self-reliance and good neighborliness. Here we consider the underlying functions of neural brain circuits, organic structures that have evolved adaptively by Darwinian rules subject to selection pressure. In the left brain resides our self-reliant private Ego, making plans, launching initiatives. Your public Ego dwells in the right brain, looking around, meeting with your (...) friendly neighbor. A main component is our bilateral interior cosmos, providing us with all the detailed information about our environment as well as the universe at large. (shrink)

The Metaphysical Society was founded in 1869 at the instigation of James Knowles (editor of the Contemporary Review and then of the Nineteenth Century) with a view to 'collect, arrange, and diffuse Knowledge (whether objective or subjective) of mental and moral phenomena' (first resolution of the society in April 1869). The Society was a private dining and debate club that gathered together a latter-day clerisy. Building on the tradition of the Cambridge Apostles, they elected talented members from across the Victorian (...) intellectual spectrum: Bishops, one Cardinal, philosophers, men of science, literary figures, and politicians. The Society included in its 62 members prominent figures such as T. H. Huxley, William Gladstone, Walter Bagehot, Henry Edward Manning, John Ruskin, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. (shrink)

"First edition published by South End Press 1991"--Title page verso.

This paper examines how Kant's Copernican shift in philosophy had a decisive influence on philosophical religious thought; reflection on the nature of subjectivity shaped how the question of God was approached and understood. I examine three interrelated issues at the forefront of nineteenth and twentieth-century thought on subjectivity and the problem of God. These are a) the ontological nature of subjectivity and what it reveals about the conditions of possibility of a subject's relation to the Absolute; b) interiority and subjectivity (...) with respect to the subject's relation to God, and c) the theme of the "unhappy consciousness" and how its development led to important attacks on theism. I look at these issues as they were worked out by F. Schleiermacher, G.W.F Hegel, S. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, P. Tillich, and K. Rahner. (shrink)

Research into the sociology of intellectual life reveals numerous appeals to the public conscience of intellectuals. The way in which concepts such as ‘the public intellectual’ or ‘intellectual life’ are discussed, however, conceals a long history of biased thinking about thinking as an elite endeavour with prohibitive requirements for entry. This article argues that this tendency prioritizes the intellectual realm over the public sphere, and betrays any claims to public relevance unless a broader definition (...) of what counts as intellectual life is introduced. By calling for a shift from the notion of public intellectuals to Jane Jacobs’ (1961) idea of the ‘public character’, a publicly situated and affect-laden conception of intellectual life is articulated with the aim of redefining intellectual life as an ordinary, collective pursuit, rather than the prerogative of a few extraordinary individuals, as well as restoring the role of the senses in theoretical discussions on the life of the mind. The theoretical scope of this article therefore is to cast the net wider in the search for meanings of what public intellectual life is, can or may be in a larger context than ‘intellectualist’ discussions currently allow. (shrink)

An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a (...) birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity. (shrink)

This imaginative and unusual book explores the moral sensibilities and cultural assumptions that were at the heart of political debate in Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. It focuses on the role of intellectuals as public moralists and suggests ways in which their more formal political theory rested upon habits of response and evaluation that were deeply embedded in wider social attitudes and aesthetic judgments. Collini examines the characteristic idioms and strategies of argument employed in periodical and polemical writing, and reconstructs (...) the sense of identity and of relation to an audience exhibited by social critics from John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold to J.M. Keynes and F.R. Leavis. (shrink)

Explores how the French theory of philosophy, which became popular during the last three decades of the twentieth century, spread to America and examines the critical practices that French theory inspired.

In Maurice Blondel’s work, the problem of immortality is dealt with in terms of one’s resolution of the problem of human destiny articulated in the form of a self-determinative option. Although this option can take many determinate forms, it is ultimately one between egoism and selfishness or mortification and charity. In the course of this paper, I outline this opposition and indicate in particular how it bears on intellectual life and culture. For Blondel, the theoretical and the practical (...) could not be neatly separated; thinking and expression are forms of action, and action requires structuring for its intelligibility and fruition. One commits oneself and forms the elements of one’s ultimate judgment, not only by what one does, but also by what one says or thinks, what doctrines and institutions one commits oneself to. (shrink)

“A great story, full of twists and turns.... Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.” —Stanley Fish, _Think Again, New York Times_ “In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is (...) fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the reference on both sides of the Atlantic.” —Jacques Derrida “The Atlantic Ocean has two sides, and so does French Theory. Reinvented in America and betrayed in its own country, it has become the most radical intellectual movement in the West with global reach, rewriting Marx in light of late capitalism. Breathtakingly moving back and forth between the two cultures, Francois Cusset takes us through a dazzling intellectual adventure that illuminates the past thirty years, and many more decades to come.” —Sylvere Lotringer During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation. Outside the academy, “French theory” had a profound impact on the era’s emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America’s cultural and intellectual fabric. French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today-showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life. François Cusset, a writer and intellectual historian, teaches contemporary French thought in Paris at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and at Columbia University’s Reid Hall. His books include Queer Critics and La Décennie. Jeff Fort is assistant professor of French at the University of California, Davis. He has translated works by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, and Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

A multi-faceted study of intellectual transformation in early modern Europe as seen through the eyes of a leading French scholar and cleric, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721).

_Argues that academics’ intellectual engagement with a public beyond the walls of their own specialties, and even beyond the walls of the academy, was long a commonplace and significant part of the work of professors and writers in the humanities._.

Argues that academics’ intellectual engagement with a public beyond the walls of their own specialties, and even beyond the walls of the academy, was long a commonplace and significant part of the work of professors and writers in the humanities.

From Chapter two in Science, Faith, and Society, to the central mediating center of the long argument in Personal Knowledge, “Conviviality,” Polanyi continued to extend his “post critical inquiry” in his visits toa wide variety of centers and institutes which relate to his earliest intellectual and aesthetic education in the salon of his mother. The concept of conviviality finds its autobiographical correlative in such spaces.