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"Intellectual history"
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The Democratization of Knowledge in Renaissance Italy
The book identifies to what extent it is possible to speak of a democratization of knowledge in Renaissance Italy. It establishes the boundaries of the present investigation within the Aristotelian tradition, and outlines democratization as a process capable of assigning power to people. It deals with how the democratization of knowledge historically is invested equally in ideas from religion and philosophy, involving the same democratizers, moved by similar intentions, employing identical techniques of vulgarization and targeting equivalent communities of recipients.
eBook
American Labyrinth
Intellectual history has never been more relevant and more important to public life in the United States. In complicated and confounding times, people look for the principles that drive action and the foundations that support national ideals.American Labyrinthdemonstates the power of intellectual history to illuminate our public life and examine our ideological assumptions.
This volume of essays brings together 19 influential intellectual historians to contribute original thoughts on topics of widespread interest. Raymond Haberski Jr. and Andrew Hartman asked a group of nimble, sharp scholars to respond to a simple question: How might the resources of intellectual history help shed light on contemporary issues with historical resonance? The answers-all rigorous, original, and challenging-are as eclectic in approach and temperament as the authors are different in their interests and methods. Taken together, the essays ofAmerican Labyrinthillustrate how intellectual historians, operating in many different registers at once and ranging from the theoretical to the political, can provide telling insights for understanding a public sphere fraught with conflict.
In order to understand why people are ready to fight over cultural symbols and political positions we must have insight into how ideas organize, enliven, and define our lives. Ultimately, as Haberski and Hartman show in this volume, the best route through our contemporary American labyrinth is the path that traces our practical and lived ideas.
eBook
A short history of stupidity
We are living, it is often said, in a golden age of stupidity, in which boneheaded, mendacious politicians get elected by voters who've become too mindless to realise their interests are ill served by narcissists, while vapid social media influencers corrupt their no less witless followers with groundless conspiracy theories and eye-wateringly foolish takedowns of scientific expertise. Our time, one might be forgiven for thinking, is one in which the fool's gold of stupidity has become a desirable commodity, a must-have, with bumbling celebrities venerated more than those who have more than two brain cells to rub together. Jeffries analyses how we got into this parlous state. He considers what great minds have to tell us about the slippery nature of stupidity. If today we are living in a fool's paradise, has our species become too dim to learn anything from its rich history of folly?
BOOK
The Idea of Rome in Late Antiquity
This book approaches the manifestation and evolution of the idea of Rome as an expression of Roman patriotism and as an (urban) archetype of utopia in late Roman thought in a period extending from AD 357 to 417. Within this period of about a human lifetime, the concepts of Rome and Romanitas were reshaped and used for various ideological causes. This monograph unfolds through a selection of sources that represent the patterns and diversity of this ideological process. The theme of Rome as a personified and anthropomorphic figure and as an epitomized notion 'applied' on the urban landscape would become part of the identity of the Romans of Rome highlighting a sense of cultural uniqueness in an era when their city's privileged status was challenged. Towards the end of the chronological limits set in this thesis various versions of Romanitas would emerge indicating new physical and spiritual potentials.
eBook
Making Truth in Early Modern Catholicism
Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, the awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element of Baroque Science. Yet early modern actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself; including the notion that truth is out there, universal, and therefore situated at one remove from human manipulations. This book addresses the central question of how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, amidst uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields ranging from Astronomy to Business Administration to Theology investigate a number of practices that are central to maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth, the certainty that could be achieved about it, and of the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in differentiating fields of knowledge.
eBook
World of Patterns
The idea that the world can be understood through patterns and the principles that govern them is one of the most important human insights—it may also be our greatest survival strategy. Our search for patterns and principles began 40,000 years ago, when striped patterns were engraved on mammoths' bones to keep track of the moon's phases. What routes did human knowledge take to grow from these humble beginnings through many detours and dead ends into modern understandings of nature and culture? In this work of unprecedented scope, Rens Bod removes the Western natural sciences from their often-central role to bring us the first global history of human knowledge. Having sketched the history of the humanities in his ground-breaking A New History of the Humanities, Bod now adopts a broader perspective, stepping beyond classical antiquity back to the Stone Age to answer the question: Where did our knowledge of the world today begin and how did it develop? Drawing on developments from all five continents of the inhabited world, World of Patterns offers startling connections. Focusing on a dozen fields—ranging from astronomy, philology, medicine, law, and mathematics to history, botany, and musicology—Bod examines to what degree their progressions can be considered interwoven and to what degree we can speak of global trends. In this pioneering work, Bod aims to fulfill what he sees as the historian's responsibility: to grant access to history's goldmine of ideas. Bod discusses how inoculation was invented in China rather than Europe; how many of the fundamental aspects of modern mathematics and astronomy were first discovered by the Indian Kerala school; and how the study of law provided fundamental models for astronomy and linguistics from Roman to Ottoman times. The book flies across continents and eras. The result is an enlightening symphony, a stirring chorus of human inquisitiveness extending through the ages.
eBook