Intellectual History

Harold Coward's Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada (2014) would seem to provide the long awaited concluding installment to the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion (CCSR)-sponsored and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded State-of-the-Art Review of the academic study of religion in Canada that began in the early 1980s. Under his general editorship, the series set out to provide a history, description, and comprehensive analysis of Religious Studies as conceived and practiced in its Canadian context. 1 Although all the volumes certainly provided exhaustive and detailed, if now largely out of date, accounts of specific regions, missing was a synthetic and comparative overview to pull them all together. 2 Such a volume would ideally serve as a prolegomenon to writing a national history of the field that could, among other things, note trans-regional themes, document common trends, and so on. That Coward's volume is written as a memoir, however, means that that overview continues to remain a scholarly desideratum. In what follows I wish to reflect on some of the possibilities and problems inherent to the series with an eye toward writing a proper history of the academic study of religion in Canada. 3 Any attempt to write this history has to take into account at least two factors. The first is regionalism (which includes bilingualism) and the second is the general proximity to the United States. Let me take up each of these in turn. Regionalism Canada, as should be clear from even the quickest glances at a globe or map, is a huge country, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean,

In this lecture, Fabrizio Bigotti explores the Renaissance rediscovery of Galenic anatomy and how it impacted the making of early modern philosophy. Most notably, he attributes Galen’s influence to the fortune of two main texts, the Quod animi mores and De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis in which the Greek physician discusses the relation between body and soul, mental faculties, the elemental composition of matter, and the passions of the soul. The anthropological vision Galen’ laid out in these texts was sufficient to shift the attention of early modern physicians and philosophers from the Medieval ‘narrative of the body’, whereby the body is seen as a text, to an organic substratum to be cut in pieces on the anatomy table and to be eventually rendered as an image. Galen himself was no longer perceived as a pious upholder of natural theology but as a materialist who denied the immortality of the soul. By challenging a traditional historiographical account that described Renaissance Galenism in terms of decline and fall, Fabrizio Bigotti will argue for a new assessment of Galen's legacy, also read through the lens of those who opposed or reacted critically to it and thus contributed to the shaping of important aspects of the early modern debate on anthropology, ethics, psychology and even quantified experimentation. Among these many innovations and transformations, the notion of 'ingenuity' (ingenium) deserves particular attention. Hidden within this corporeal, inherent and heritable inclination, two major themes that side disquietingly with the development of modern subjectivity can be identified: the 'corporeality of the body', and the common destiny of humans and animals.

"Besides numerous significant works concerning the fields of both natural and humanistic disciplines written by the famous Renaissance scholar Faustus Vrančić, there is also a less well-known manuscript, Illyrica historia, fragmenta ex variis Historicis, cum Latinis, tum Graecis, hinc inde collecta a Fausto Verancio Siceno, Episcopo Chanadiensi. This article deals with precisely that unfinished compilation of fragments from the works of Greek and Roman authors. A detailed analysis of quotations included in this manuscript shows Vrančić’s good knowledge of the Greek and Roman literary corpus, and places him among the supremely learned persons of his times. The Illyrica historia presents Faustus Vrančić as an versatile Renaissance scholar and thinker. This work of his fully meets the criteria of quality of the contemporary historiography of his age, but today does not have a great scholarly value. However, the sources quoted in this compilation of fragments testify not only to the level of preservation and accessibility of particular works, but also to the interest of Vrančić himself, who by this work represented himself as a versatile Renaissance scholar. Besides the all mention above, this manuscript is valuable also because it contains quotations from some today less well-known and less often used works.
 
Keywords
historiography, Dalmatia, Šibenik, cultural history, humanism
"

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

Situated within the wider post-secular turn in politics and international relations, this collection focuses not on religion per se, but rather explicitly on theology. Contributions to this volume highlight the political theological foundations of international theory and world politics, explicitly recasting theology and politics as symbiotic discourses with all the risks, promises and open questions this relation may involve. The overarching claim this volume makes is that all politics has theology embedded in it, both in the genealogical sense of carrying ineradicable traces of its theological origins, but also in the more ontological sense of being enacted by alternative configurations of the theologico-political. The book is unique in bringing together a diverse group of scholars, spanning knowledge areas as varied as IR, political theory, philosophy, theology, and history to investigate the complex interconnections between theology and world politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, international relations, intellectual history, and political theology.

Josiah Tucker, who was the Anglican dean of Gloucester from 1758 until his death in 1799, is best known today as a controversialist, a political economist and a lesser contemporary of Adam Smith. Little attention has been paid, however, to the important relationship between his religious writings and his wider economic thought. This article addresses this lack of attention in two ways: first by demonstrating the link between Tucker's conception of civil and religious liberty and his "science" of political economy, and second by drawing sustained attention to his economic adaptation and reformulation of the moral philosophy of Bishop Joseph Butler, Tucker's ecclesiastical mentor from 1739 to 1752. Emphasizing Butler and Tucker's views on the traditional Christian virtue of charity, and the moral duty of the rich towards the poor, the article suggests that both clergymen were proponents of a sociability-based, neo-Stoic conception of human nature, which was not only compatible with, but also dependent upon, the established Anglican Church and state and the predominantly Whig commercial order. In consequence, Tucker's political economy was premised on the unavoidability of social subordination and economic inequality as necessary hallmarks of modern commercial society. Accordingly, the article closes with a brief discussion of Tucker's "Butlerian" assessment and rejection of the "anti-social" doctrine of individual natural rights, associated with the popular radicalism of the American and French Revolutions in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Critical comments from one member of the Siamese elite in the second half of the nine- teenth century on the merits of the form of government of the United States of America published in a newspaper called Bangkok Recorder led to the dissemination of liberal concepts in Thailand for the first time in its history. In his published articles, Dan Beach Bradley, an American missionary and the publisher of Bangkok Recorder, mentioned freedom, equality, constitutional and republican government, free press, liberal mind, and meritocracy. The dis- semination of these liberal concepts marks the beginning of liberalism in Thailand.

Quentin Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University College London. He is the author of numerous books and articles on early modern political thought and is a founder of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ of the history of political thought.

This interview, conducted by Teresa Bejan with Professor Skinner at his home in London in March 2011, is our longest yet. We’ll be publishing it in two parts: the first on Prof. Skinner’s research and method is below, and the second, on his own intellectual context, will follow in December.

While " inclusion " has been seen as a central mode of redressing ongoing injustices against communities of color in the US, Indigenous political experiences feature more complex legacies of contesting US citizenship. Turning to an important episode of contestation, this essay examines the relation between inclusion and the politics of eliminating Indigenous nations that was part of a shared policy shift toward " Termination " in the Anglo-settler world of the 1950s and 1960s. Through a reading of Indigenous activist-intellectual Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), it demonstrates how the construction of what I call the " civic inclusion narrative " in post–World War II American political discourse disavowed practices of empire-formation. Widely considered a foundational text of the Indigenous Sovereignty Movement, the work repositioned Indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into the nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding decolonization. Deloria's work provides an exemplary counterpoint to the enduring thread of civic inclusion in American political thought and an alternative tradition of decolonization—an imperative that continues to resonate in today's North American and global Indigenous struggles over land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty.

In order to better cope with the pressures and stresses of the current day, modern psychology is anxiously seeking to find new therapies to address the increasing disorders within the human psyche. In the process new fields of research, such as humanistic and transpersonal psychology, curiously appear to borrow more and more from the wisdom of the ages. This volume, containing eighteen articles by noteworthy expositors of the perennial philosophy such as Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Frithjof Schuon, presents the spiritual psychology of the wisdom traditions as a much-needed antidote to the current impasse in modern psychology.

Some Endorsements for Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy:

“[Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy] is more than an anthology. It is a wisely crafted collection of classic and contemporary scholarship noting that what many are seeking is what has always been, a perennial philosophy, that remains foundational. As one of the authors, Tage Lindbom, properly notes, ‘Secularization is a fish in troubled waters.’ This book claims the waters and is essential reading for all those who may have forgotten or are simply ignorant of the rich foundation provided by the perennial philosophy.”
—Ralph W. Hood, Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, past president of the Psychology of Religion division of the American Psychological Association, co-founder of The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion and co-author of The Psychology of Religion

“A necessary and bracing critique of the assumptions and limitations of contemporary Western psychology, this generous volume is also a passionate call and learned guide towards a truer perspective that embraces man's spiritual nature.”
—Gabor Maté, M.D., and author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Knowing the nature of the mind is perhaps the most difficult undertaking, especially in today’s world. To comprehend the nature of mind one needs to turn to the domain of religion and spirituality. Yet the truth of the mind and its complexity cannot explicitly be defined in words. Inner or transcendent wisdom sees the mind’s own nature without the duality of the seer. Suchness (tathatā) of mind is only experiential and not expressible. The words used to describe thought are themselves a product of thought, which is conditioned and limited. Thus, differences and contradictions are unavoidable. Therefore, a comparative study of different viewpoints and commentaries is immensely important to awaken the inner intelligence to see the mind as it is. Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy: Studies in Comparative Religion edited by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is an outstanding effort in this direction.”
—Samdhong Rinpoche, former Prime Minister (Kalon Tripa) of the Tibetan Government-in-exile, author of Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World: Tibetan Buddhism and Today’s World

“The rise of psychology has impacted the study and practice of spirituality, the experiences and attitudes relevant to ultimate human values that transcend ordinary behavior. Each chapter of this remarkable book demonstrates this interaction in a unique and provocative way. But rather than using psychology to reduce and ‘psychologize’ spiritual topics, its authors demonstrate how directives from the spiritual traditions can enhance and even illuminate the enduring importance of psychology in the 21st century.”
—Stanley Krippner, Saybrook University, co-author of Spiritual Dimensions of Healing

“The work at hand is a thinking and debating man’s delight. If you have any interest at all in attempting to include an educated and enlightened view of man’s higher functions in your purview of the world, you will learn from and enjoy this collection of essays. If you already have some knowledge in this area, brace yourself: you may see some of your favorites sharply criticized. A thought-provoking work.”
—Bruce W. Scotton, University of California, San Francisco, co-editor of Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology

“This book, superbly edited by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, is a masterful critique of the field of psychology and its loss of the sacred ground in which it once was rooted. It offers depth psychologists an opportunity to contemplate timeless truths echoed through the centuries by perennial philosophers who have always claimed psyche is subordinate to Spirit. Although ignored in depth psychology’s early years due to prejudice and lack of understanding, this is a message today’s psychotherapists must take seriously. Human beings need a deeper and wider transpersonal vision of who and what we are, which the saints and sages of the world’s spiritual traditions have always pointed to. In psychotherapy with a therapist committed to such a vision, patients penetrate into their unconscious depths and not infrequently awaken to the Ground of all Being. Their suffering itself occurred because they had turned away from Spirit. Above all, this volume passionately calls upon depth psychology to remember its origin in the perennial wisdom at the core of the great religions. There is something of a polemic in these pages. It deserves to be considered by depth psychologists of all persuasions.”
—Bryan Wittine, Transpersonal psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst

“This anthology from Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is a must reference for anyone who is interested in psychology and its relationship to spirituality, and in developing an inclusive dialogue between disciplines that favor an integral outlook on the person and his or her potential. Selections in this anthology will inspire us to reexamine the metaphysical underpinnings of psychology, and remind us how important it is to rise above science’s attempt to reduce the human being to an epistemic object.”
—Sangeetha Menon, National Institute of Advanced Studies (Bangalore, India), Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), author of The Beyond Experience: Consciousness in Bhagavad Gita

“This anthology has some of the most discerning essays and reviews on spirituality and psychology, which provide much-needed care and caution to all those engaged in bringing them together or who wish to do so in future. Therefore, it is a must-read for all those who teach, research, consult, or study in such frontier areas as transpersonal psychology, states of consciousness, mind-body relation, holistic health, Indian psychology, and so on. It will be an invaluable textbook for courses in these and other related areas. I congratulate the editor of the book.”
—Kiran Kumar K. Salagame, University of Mysore (India), Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), author of The Psychology of Meditation: A Contextual Approach

“One of the finest collections of essays on the Perennial Philosophy—a must-read for all psychologists who are engaged with spirituality and transpersonal psychology. The essays which critique modern psychology (including transpersonal psychology, and the framework of Carl Jung), in the light of the Perennial Philosophy are a revelation and make compelling reading. The book serves as a corrective to the excesses of modern psychology, and to this end Sotillos has done a commendable job. I for one will include the book in some of the graduate courses that I teach.”
—Suneet Varma, University of Delhi, co-editor of Foundations of Indian Psychology

“To its credit modern science by-and-large is becoming more cognizant of the essential connection between spirituality and psychological health and well-being and most of all its positive implications within the field of psychology. While there is ample data to document this in a plethora of academic journals and books, this new book Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy adds a novel contribution to the dialogue between psychology and spirituality, which captures many nuances that for the most part go unnoticed within these discussions, and last but not least, it provides a keen eye of discernment to understand this intricate relationship on a deeper level that is crucially needed. This work will be a valuable asset to students and long term mental health practitioners and professors alike who seek to better understand the relationship between psychology and spirituality.”
—Harold G. Koenig, Duke University, Director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, co-author of The Handbook of Religion and Health

Any cursory review of the past five years of Italian historiography on fascism obviously would be subject to multiple criticisms and be Condemned for partiality, especially since the time span under investigation is relatively brief and only the work of select Italian scholars can be considered.
Not all the published literature on fascism could be taken into
account, given the enormous attention still given to the subject in academic monographs and journalistic accounts.

Interpreters of Michel Foucault's 1966 Les mots et les choses have often conflated the terms 'episteme' and 'historical a priori'. This article suggests that the two terms are entirely separate: while 'episteme' refers to the configuration of thought in a given historical period, 'historical a priori' refers to the conditions of unity for a certain field of science within a given period. In his use of the term 'historical a priori', Foucault is thus much closer to Husserl than has hitherto been appreciated. Keeping the two terms separated also sheds new light on the archaeological method that Foucault uses, showing that there is a procedure to get from an archive of texts to the reconstruction of an episteme.

The significance of the German philosopher and social thinker, Georg Simmel (1858–1918), is only now being recognised by intellectual historians. Through penetrating readings of Simmel's thought, taken as a series of reflections on the essence of modernity and modern civilisation, Efraim Podoksik places his ideas within the context of intellectual life in Germany, and especially Berlin, under the Kaiserreich. Modernity, characterised by the growing differentiation and fragmentation of culture and society, was a fundamental issue during Simmel's life, underpinning central intellectual debates in Imperial Germany. Simmel's thought is depicted here as an attempt at transforming the complexity of these debates into a coherent worldview that can serve as an effective guide to understanding their main parameters. Paying particular attention to the genealogy and usage of the concepts of Bildung, culture and civilisation in Germany, this study offers contextual analyses of Simmel's philosophies of culture, society, art, religion and the feminine, as well as his interpretations of Dante, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe and Rembrandt.

The First of the Modern Ottomans blends biography with intellectual history. On the one hand, it is the story of an Ottoman life – the life of the scribe, ambassador, and prolific historian Ahmed Vâsıf (ca. 1735-1806), a man who improbably rose from obscurity in Baghdad to travel the empire, fight its wars, advise its sultans, and, in time, write its history. As a full-scale biography, the book is a rarity for the field of Ottoman history and reconstructs Vâsıf’s life, career, and opinions through meticulous research in both Ottoman and European sources. On the other hand, The First of the Modern Ottomans is also one of the first detailed intellectual studies of the early modern Ottoman Empire. Weaving together Vâsıf’s life and thought with the larger intellectual currents of the day – especially at the court of Sultan Selim III in Istanbul – it explores central debates among the Ottoman ruling elite over Europe, political reform, war and peace, justice, and the empire’s renewal. Vâsıf’s life reveals a vital response to the empire’s challenges at the turn of the nineteenth century – one that was novel and deeply enmeshed in Islamic philosophy, ethics, and statecraft.

Background/Context
With a rationale informed by the demographic imperative, the resegregation of public schools, and our positionalities as researchers, we understand both the high stakes and the complexity of capacitating White preservice and in-service teachers capable of anti-racist praxis and race-visible teaching and learning in public school classrooms.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
Deploying the framework of color blind racism, we systematically reviewed race-evasive White teacher identity studies and answered the question: What can we learn from twenty-five years of research?
Research Design
In using the method called the synoptic text, we engaged electronic databases, with special emphasis on ERIC EBSCOhost.  The simple and general search term “White teachers” conducted using year-by-year parameters provided most systematic net for capturing relevant studies.  In narrowing our focus, we developed the following criteria: (a) White teachers as central topic; (b) analytical emphases on color blind racism; (c) publication in peer-reviewed journals; (d) use of qualitative and/or narrative research methodologies; and, (e) publication date between 1990 and 2015.
Data Collection and Analysis
Our general search yielded one-hundred and thirty-six (N = 136) peer-reviewed empirical qualitative and/or narrative studies between 1990 and 2015, and after narrowing our criteria, we found forty-seven race-evasive White teacher identity studies (n = 47, 47/136) that we reviewed here. Each study in the document universe was abstracted, added to a spreadsheet, and categorized by emergent themes.
Findings/Results
The following five themes emerged and developed over the last twenty five years: (a) racialized silence and invisibility (9/47), (b) resistance and active reconstruction of White privilege (12/47), (c) whiteness in institutional and social contexts (8/47), (d) fertile paradoxes in new research (9/47), and (e) reflexive whiteness pedagogies (9/47).
Conclusions/Recommendations
We believe our literature review identifies the complex contours of White preservice and in-service teachers’ silence, resistance to, engagement in, and pedagogical grappling with racism, whiteness, and White privilege. The importance of preservice and in-service teachers being able to engage, understand, and challenge these issues becomes critically important at our crossroads in the present, especially given the recent election that bolstered open and tacit White supremacists into power. If White teachers are to engage racism, whiteness, and White privilege, they must do so with as opposed to for their students in a Freirean sense.  If teaching for social justice is important, renewed interest and investment in White teacher identity studies and related whiteness pedagogies is key for the next twenty five years.

Au tournant des années 1970, on assiste à l’émergence d’un renouveau féministe au Québec, marquée par la création du Front de libération des femmes du Québec en 1969. Une part du mouvement féministe envisage alors les activités domestiques non plus comme faisant partie d’une « nature féminine », mais comme un véritable travail. Cette démarche s’inscrit dans la recherche d’une oppression commune à toutes les femmes et dans l’idée d’une « communauté de situation ». Le travail ménager non rémunéré apparaît alors comme le « plus petit dénominateur commun » de la condition de toutes les femmes, et ce peu importe leur statut civil, leur classe sociale ou leur occupation. Durant les années 1970 et et 1980, plusieurs débats ont lieu quant à la reconnaissance de ce travail. Si certaines féministes défendent la revendication d’un salaire au travail ménager, plusieurs d’entre elles revendiquent plutôt une socialisation de ce travail par la mise en place de services collectifs (garderies populaires, cantines, etc.). D’autres féministes, enfin, demandent la mise en place de certaines réformes gouvernementales afin de réduire la précarité financière des mères et des ménagères. Dans la présente étude, nous proposons une analyse des discours sur le travail ménager, ainsi qu’un examen des différentes avenues de reconnaissance envisagées par les féministes québécoises. En analysant les publications de collectifs féministes, de groupes de femmes et d’organismes liés à la condition féminine, nous pouvons dès lors affirmer que le travail ménager a été un thème marquant pour le cheminement théorique et militant du mouvement des femmes. Bien qu’omniprésent dans les discours féministes des années 1970 et 1980, des collectifs plus radicaux aux associations féminines réformistes, il a été bien rapidement oublié dans les bilans et dans l’historiographie. Nous tenterons alors de mettre de l’avant les discours féministes sur la reconnaissance du travail ménager comme élément de continuité au sein du mouvement féministe.

A collective intellectual biography that sheds new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy.

Would the most recognizable ideas in the French social sciences have developed without the influence of Brazilian intellectuals? While any study of Brazilian social sciences acknowledges the influence of French scholars, Ian Merkel argues the reverse is also true: the “French” social sciences were profoundly marked by Brazilian intellectual thought, particularly through the University of São Paulo. Through the idea of the “cluster,” Merkel traces the intertwined networks of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Roger Bastide, and Pierre Monbeig as they overlapped at USP and engaged with Brazilian scholars such as Mário de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, and Caio Prado Jr..

Through this collective intellectual biography of Brazilian and French social sciences, Terms of Exchange reveals connections that shed new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy, even as it prompts us to revisit established thinking on the process of knowledge formation through fieldwork and intellectual exchange. At a time when canons are being rewritten, this book reframes the history of modern social scientific thought.

This paper aims to account for what I describe as the gentrification of the humanist tradition by strengthening the bond between the epistemic merger of virtue theory and the still emergent category of political economy in eighteenth-century discourses. I use Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) to trace the shifting relation between character and currency to historical transformations in transatlantic slavery and the development of an innovative line of rhetoric capable of registering the historical novelty of ‘creditable’ yet ‘unreal’ value. I argue that the text articulates contemporary fears that the growth and diversification of character through the process of commodity production and exchange rendered virtue in a politically paradigmatic form archaic and remote. In other words, Austen's narrativized account of the advent of paper money and public credit dramatizes how these linguistic transformations resulted in a wider cultural unease about the socially determined indicators of value, character, and race, and meant that not merely the functioning, but the intelligibility of society depended upon the success of a program of reification. Yet I caution that the novel's conclusion signals that the success of this program remained anxiously unsettled at the close of the eighteenth century and that it instead acknowledges how the modern dialects of credit precariously subsumed grammars which had traditionally given shape to the material or otherwise ‘real’ foundations of civic personality and virtue.

Two Systems, Two Countries is an unabashedly heterodox addition to a growing body of critical work on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) suppression of local identity and political freedoms in Hong Kong. What Carrico’s contribution uniquely provides is a penetrating analysis of the various schools of thought that make up the diverse landscape of Hong Kong nationalism.

Die Untersuchung versteht sich als Beitrag zu der in der Literaturwissenschaft, Philosophie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte geführten Debatte um die Darstellungsformen von Wissen bzw. das »Wissen der Literatur«, geht jedoch in zweifacher Hinsicht über diese hinaus. Zum einen zeigt sie, wie und warum die Forderung nach einer gegenüber wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis alternativen, literarisch vermittelten Erkenntnis in einer bestimmten geistes- und kultur-geschichtlichen Konstellation virulent wird: in der Lebens- bzw. Weltanschauungsphilosophie von 1870 bis 1930 sowie im Werk Robert Musils. Zum anderen nimmt die Arbeit eine Akzentverlagerung vor. Im Mittelpunkt steht nicht die oft mit unbefriedigenden Ergebnissen diskutierte Frage, ob Literatur generell, sondern unter welchen konkreten Umständen ein bestimmtes literarisches Werk Wissen vermittelt. Die nicht zuletzt mithilfe von Begrifflichkeiten und Einsichten der Analytischen Erkenntnistheorie formulierten Bedingungen, unter denen dies der Fall ist, ermöglichen schließlich exemplarische Analysen von Musils schriftstellerischen Versuchen, eine »lebendige Erkenntnis« zu kommunizieren.

The act of traveling has always had a hold on the human imagination, and consequently, travel writing has been a popular and influential literary genre through the centuries. Its intellectual influence upon science and culture is sometimes forgotten, for it was mostly to travelogues that people learned about far away cultures and began to discuss about human difference.
The following paper tries to discern the role travel literature has had in the development of ethnography since the discovery of America in 1492 and its impact in European (and Western) ideas about the Other; particularly the modern concept of race as it appeared in the 19th century.

Researchers have long questioned how debunked myths such as the blood libel – the notion that Jews used Christian blood in their ceremonies – were able to persist for so long. This essay explains the social function of such myths in one context by presenting a public debate on Judaism carried out in the pages of the two leading Christian periodicals of the early eighteenth century in Germany. One journal put forth the orthodox Lutheran viewpoint, the other that of “Pietist” reformers. Through these journals, a battle took place for control of the Lutheran church, and thus for much of public life in Protestant Germany. Because Pietists believed Jews to hold a special place in God’s plan, they sought to rehabilitate Jews to their Christian readers and to argue for better conditions for Jewish communities. Orthodox Lutheran leaders quickly identified Pietists’ “Jew-friendly” policies as an Achilles’ heel. To attack Pietists, the orthodoxy dredged up and re-publicized centuries-old anti-Judaic propaganda, negative images that the orthodoxy linked to Pietists. Representatives of the Lutheran orthodoxy thus deployed anti-Judaic stereotypes in order to shore up their own church-political hegemony. Through this media manipulation, the Lutheran state church was able to seed fear among Christian readers and to argue that Pietist reformers and Jews were pollutants that needed to be cleansed from church and society.

We tend to think of freedom as something that is best protected by carefully circumscribing the boundaries of legitimate state activity. But who came up with this understanding of freedom, and for what purposes? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of thinking about freedom in the West, Annelien de Dijn argues that we owe our view of freedom not to the liberty lovers of the Age of Revolution but to the enemies of democracy.

The conception of freedom most prevalent today—that it depends on the limitation of state power—is a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking about liberty. For centuries people in the West identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. They had what might best be described as a democratic conception of liberty.

Understanding the long history of freedom underscores how recently it has come to be identified with limited government. It also reveals something crucial about the genealogy of current ways of thinking about freedom. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who created our modern democracies—it was invented by their critics and opponents. Rather than following in the path of the American founders, today’s “big government” antagonists more closely resemble the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.

Scritto autobiografico per Martin Heidegger 'Ragazza venuta da lontano', (Das Mädchen aus der Fremde) così la chiamavano i compagni di classe quando frequentava le elementari a Linden, piccolo centro nella zona di Hannover, dove era nata (1906). La definizione è tratta dal titolo di una famosa lirica di Schiller, poeta molto noto e amato dai tedeschi. L'uso frequente della rima rende le sue poesie tanto orecchiabili da rimanere impresse al punto che, alcuni versi, si diffondono nel linguaggio popolare come motti o proverbi. Questa lirica descrive come, ogni primavera, una ragazza straniera distribuisca doni a ciascuno ma, prima di far ritorno al luogo di origine, che a tutti rimane sconosciuto, destinerà il regalo più bello a una coppia di innamorati. Schiller, con questa composizione, fa della terra straniera e della ragazza che vi proviene, una fonte di regali che premiano, col dono più bello, coloro che si amano. In questa poesia Hannah Arendt intuisce un carattere profetico; infatti, se i compagni da piccoli la chiamavano così con tono scherzoso, una volta cresciuti e influenzati dall'ambiente familiare e sociale questo 'venuta da lontano' assumerà i toni dispregiativi di 'straniera, ebrea' creando quel clima persecutorio poi culminato nella dittatura hitleriana che la costrinse a fuggire lontano. Cercherà riparo prima in Francia e poi, insieme alla madre e al secondo marito Heinrich Blücher, in America, paese che le concesse la cittadinanza ponendo fine al suo stato di apolide (1951). Qui, riprese a scrivere liberamente, battendosi contro ogni forma di dittatura sia quella nazista, ormai crollata, sia quella comunista ancora esistente e sostenuta da molti intellettuali. Con argomenti politico-filosofici condusse una battaglia per i diritti civili e per configurare una società basata sul rispetto della dignità umana e delle leggi. Nella relazione del processo a Eichmann espresse serenamente quali erano le colpe pur alienandosi così gran parte del sostegno della comunità ebraica. Opporsi alle convenzioni è battaglia per la libertà. Ecco i doni che sarà in grado di elargire questa ragazza venuta ma anche andata e arrivata lontano.

"Words and Phrases, Unchanged for Centuries.

Containing a rich glossary and in excess of 300 words and phrases, the texts demonstrate the strength of the Macedonian language through preservation.

Following is a comparison of sentences between the texts and the Macedonian
dialect of Bitola as spoken today.

16th cent., Kostur dialect
21st cent., Bitola dialect

Gospodine, brate, da si zdrav, da si prost, ostavi ni da spime, ela da jame, i da pieme, dol da pojdime, da rabotime.
Gospodine, brate, da si zdrav, da si prost, ostai ne da spiame, ela da jaime, i da piame, dolu da pojdime, da rabotime.

Imate hljap-o da kupime, imate vino da kupime, ot koja strana da pojdime vo
Bogasko.
Imate lep da kupime, imate vino da kupime, od koja strana da pojdime vo
Bogatsko.

As can be clearly noticed, most of the vocabulary and grammar is identical.
All of the elements that would later be required to rejuvinate the Macedonian people as they were shaking off centuries of subjugation, were present during this period. The language of the people had solidified, a tradition of heraldry and symbolism had developed which incorporated the emblem of a rapant lion and historical figures from Macedonia's past, and the churches continued preserve the local customs and serve as cultural centres for the population. The significance of all these elements together cannot be overstated, the language of medieval Macedonia is the same as the language of the Macedonians today. Unfortunately, only a small portion of the larger amount of Macedonian literature from the Middle Ages has survived, much of it being looted and destroyed by Greek-speaking officials, clerics and teachers. Nevertheless, Macedonian as a language reached its current form centuries before the creation of the Balkan states in the 19th and 20th centuries. "