This comprehensive account of the history of Chinese lexicography is the first book on the subject to be published in English. It traces the development of Chinese lexicography over three millennia, from the Zhou Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty. Revealing how the emergence of lexicographical culture in ancient China was linked to the teaching of ancient characters, it describes the subsequent development of primers, thesauruses, and dictionaries of all major types, including those of dialects and technical terms. (...) These works originated and appeared in ancient China, predating their western counterparts by hundreds of years: and in one form or another most of them remain in use today. (shrink)

A groundbreaking search for the origins of this expression, Flesh Becomes Word traces the scapegoat to its origins in Mesopotamian ritual across centuries of typological interpretation and religious reflection, to its first informal uses in ...

17 essays discussing the role of language in the history of western thought. Since Adam before the Fall named the animals by true insight into their essences, language has never ceased to be the pivot of efforts to understand human nature and our capacity to feel at home in the twin worlds of nature and society. This volume brings together seventeen essays that have appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideasover the last thirty years. Their common (...) theme is the role of language in aspects of the history of western thought from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. The essays cover questions in epistemology, religion, anthropology, lexicography, evolution, the theory of signs, and the origin of language. Contributors: FRANK L. BORCHARDT, MARGRETA DE GRAZIA, SIDONIE CLAUSS, JAN MIEL, THOMAS C.SINGER, VICTOR ANTHONY RUDOWSKI, JULES PAUL SEIGEL, JAMES McLAVERTY, J.R. KNOWLSON, STEPHEN K. LAND, LIA FORMIGARI, H.J. JACKSON, W. JAY REEDY, V.P. BYNACK, CYMBRE QUINCYRAUB, MICHAEL SPRINKER, S. MORRIS ENGEL. (shrink)

The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The book (...) relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory. (shrink)

Dies ist der erste Teil einer zweibändigen Studie zur Genese unseres heutigen, vom Anspruch her den chronologischen Verlauf der gesamten Menschheitsgeschichte strukturierenden „Epochen“-Systems. Der Band skizziert zunächst die geistesgeschichtlichen Prämissen. Von der rudimentären paläolithischen Zeiteinteilung führt er über die ältesten schriftlich dokumentierten Ordnungsversuche in den sumerischen bzw. ägyptischen „Königlisten“, griechische und römische Autoren, Petrarca, Bruni und Vasari bis zu Cellarius, der am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts die Drei-Zeitalter-Distinktion „Antike-Mittelalter-Neuzeit“ zum zentralen chronologischen Gliederungsprinzip der Weltgeschichte erhob. Anschließend stehen die drei klassischen, (...) von Pyrrhon, Polybios bzw. Ptolemaios entwickelten „Epoché“-Konzepte sowie deren Auftauchen und Rezeption im lateinischen Europa im Fokus. Sodann wird die erstaunlich spät, nämlich erst nach Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts einsetzende Transformation der „Epoché“ zur fundamentalen historiographischen Ordnungskategorie thematisiert. Schließlich verfolgen wir anhand zahlreicher Autoren sowie der kontemporären Lexikographie ihren auf Latein wie in den relevanten europäischen „Volkssprachen“ (Englisch, Französisch, Deutsch, Spanisch, Portugiesisch, Italienisch) stattfindenden Divulgationsprozeß. Dabei erweist sich der Ausgang des 17. Jahrhunderts erneut als Wasserscheide. Der erste Band endet deshalb an dieser Stelle, der zweite wird dann die weitere Entwicklung von 1700 bis zur Gegenwart analysieren. This is the first part of a two-volume study of the genesis of our modern-day system of epochs, which claims to structure the chronology of the entire history of mankind. The volume sets out by sketching the intellectual premises. It leads from the rudimentary Palaeolithic division of time via the oldest attempts at structuring to have been documented in written form, through to the Sumerian and Egyptian “King Lists”, to Greek and Roman authors, to Petrarch, Bruni, and Vasari, and finally to Cellarius, who in the late 17th century introduced the distinction between the three epochs of “Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern Era” as the basic chronological principle of organising the history of the world. This is followed by a closer look at the three classical concepts of “Epoché” as defined by Pyrrhon, Polybios and Ptolemaios, respectively, as well as their surfacing and reception in Latin Europe. Not until the second half of the 16th century, which is an astonishingly late point in time, can the transformation of “Epoché” into a fundamental category of historiographic structuring be detected. Finally, by studying numerous writers as well as the contemporary lexicography, we will outline the process of divulgation that took place both in Latin as well as in the relevant European “vernaculars” (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian). In the process, the late 17th century again proves to be a kind of divide. As a consequence, volume one ends here; a second volume (forthc.) will analyse the further development to the present day. (shrink)

It is widely believed by historians of linguistics that the 19th-century was largely devoted to historical and comparative studies, with the main emphasis on the discovery of soundlaws. Syntax is typically portrayed as a mere sideline of these studies, while semantics is seldom even mentioned. If it comes into view at all, it is usually assumed to have been confined to diachronic lexical semantics and the construction of some (mostly ill-conceived) typologies of semantic change. This book aims to destroy some (...) of these prejudices and to show that in Europe semantics was an important, although controversial, area at that time. Synchronic mechanisms of semantic change were discovered and increasing attention was paid to the context of the sentence, to the speech situation and the users of the language. From being a semantics of transformations', a child of the biological-geological paradigm of historical linguistics with its close links to etymology and lexicography, the field matured into a semantics of comprehension and communication, set within a general linguistics and closely related to the emerging fields of psychology and sociology. (shrink)

This paper synthesizes convergent lines of evidence to evaluate the hypothesis that objective falsity is essential to lying. Objective accounts of lying affirm this hypothesis; subjective accounts deny it. Evidence from history, logic, social observation, popular culture, lexicography, developmental psychology, inference, spontaneous description, and behavioral experimentation strongly supports the hypothesis. Studies show that the only apparent evidence against the hypothesis is due to task substitution, i.e. ethical concerns or perspective-taking interfering with performance on categorization tasks. I conclude that, (...) overall, existing evidence decisively favors objective accounts. (shrink)

In questo articolo rifletto sulla nascita della grammatica araba e il suo sviluppo come fonte dell’esegesi coranica dall’VIII al XIV secolo. Il legame tra esegesi e grammatica è stato oggetto di diversi studi che esaminano le origini delle categorie grammaticali. Sebbene non ci sia evidenza di uno spiccato interesse per la grammatica da parte degli esegeti coranici, essi hanno comunque dovuto adoperarla per spiegare i significati del testo sacro. In particolare, nei commentari classici è data particolare attenzione alla lessicografia e (...) meno alla struttura grammaticale. A ogni modo, in alcuni passaggi, anche se sporadici, le categorie grammaticali stesse fungono da spiegazione, essendo portatrici di significati. Questo si evince dalla letteratura sufi dove le terminologie della grammatica araba sono simboli delle stazioni dell’anima nel cammino spirituale, come nella _Grammatica dei cuori_ di al-Qushayrī. In questo articolo, analizzo il ruolo della grammatica nelle Scienze Coraniche secondo il teologo al-Ghazālī e dopo una panoramica della storia della disciplina nel periodo classico della storia islamica, e evidenzio il modo in cui le terminologie grammaticali servono per la comprensione profonda del significato nella Sūra al-Fātiha nel commentario sunnita di Ibn Kathīr. In this article I reflect on the emergence of Arabic grammar and its development as a source for Qur’ān exegesis from VIII to XIV century. The connection between exegesis and grammar has been the subject of several studies examining the origin of grammatical categories. Although there is no evidence of a clear interest for grammar by Qur’ān exegetes, they necessarily used it to explain the meanings of the sacred text. In particular, in the classical commentaries there is a particular attention to lexicography and less to the grammatical structure. However, in some passages, even if sporadic, the grammatical categories themselves perform an explanatory function, being bearers of meanings. This is manifest in Sufi literature where Arabic grammar terminologies are symbols of the stations of souls in the spiritual path, like in the _Grammar of the heart_ by al-Qushayrī. In this article, I analyse the status of grammar in Quranic Sciences according to the theologian al-Ghazālī and after an overview on the history of the discipline in the classical period of Islamic History, and I highlight the way grammar terminologies serve as a key to understand profound meaning in sura al-Fātiha in Ibn Kathīr’s sunni commentary. (shrink)

Le présent volume propose une cartographie de la recherche linguistique menée au Québec, avec beaucoup de dynamisme, entre 1960 et 2000. Les années 60 correspondent à une phase d'institutionnalisation de la discipline; l'an 2000 représente une rupture symbolique avec le XXe siècle et laisse un laps de temps raisonnable pour prendre un certain recul. Le livre présente ainsi une étude de cas sur l'histoire institutionnelle de la linguistique, qui fait écho à l'ouvrage éponyme Combats pour la linguistique, de Martinet à (...) Kristeva. Essai de dramaturgie épistémologique (2006) de J.-C. Chevalier et P. Encrevé. Les huit chapitres, qui forment l'ouvrage, font état des recherches réalisées pendant quatre décennies en sémantique, en lexicologie, en lexicographie, en phonologie, en grammaire et en sociolinguistique. Ils s'attardent aux filiations de la discipline avec le passé, à ses questionnements, ses acquis et ses legs ainsi qu'à ses limites, ses obstacles et ses déceptions. Ils se veulent un aide-mémoire pour les générations futures. Ce livre constitue de plus un apport aux études épistémologiques consacrées à l'évolution des méthodologies, des courants et des écoles linguistiques au XXe siècle. (shrink)

Situating the subject -- Hermeneutics and spech-act theory -- Hermeneutics, semantics, and conceptual grammar -- Lexicography, exegesis, and reception history -- Parables, narrative-worlds, and reader-response theories -- Philosophy, language, theology, and postermodernity -- Hermeneutics, history, and theology.

Kant's concept of sensuality, one of the revolutionary innovations of his philosophy, is anything but self-evident. It was however not recognized as a problem until it had been established how its specific aspects differ from the customary linguistic usage and the use of the term in the 18th century. The analysis of sources from the history of concepts which have hardly been considered up to now, the discussion of specific problems connected to Kant's language regulation and the examination of (...) the Latin source material show that there is a need for the revision of certain aspects. This applies not only to the history of the term sensuality but also to the lexicography which has been corrected and supplemented. In addition to the information for the history of aesthetics, this work makes an important contribution to determining the correct date of Kant's handwritten reflections. Kants Verstandnis von Sinnlichkeit, eine der umsturzenden Neuerungen seiner Philosophie, ist alles andere als selbstverstandlich. Als Problem erkennbar wird es jedoch erst dann, wenn herausgearbeitet wird, wie sich seine spezifischen Momente von dem im 18. Jahrhundert ublichen Sprach- und Begriffsgebrauch unterscheiden. Die Analyse von begriffsgeschichtlich bisher kaum berucksichtigten Quellen, die Erorterung der Sachprobleme, die mit der wohluberlegten Sprachregelung Kants verbunden sind, und die Untersuchung der lateinischen Vorlagen ergeben manchen Revisionsbedarf. Betroffen sind sowohl die Geschichte des Begriffs der 'Sinnlichkeit', als auch die Lexikographie, die korrigiert und erganzt wird. Neben Aufschlussen fur die Geschichte der deutschen Asthetik leistet die Arbeit einen wichtigen Beitrag zur richtigen Datierung von Kants handschriftlichen Reflexionen aus dem Nachlass. (shrink)

Latin dē, both in its prepositional and preverbal form, is characterized by multiple, varied, and seemingly unrelated senses. Unlike proposition-based lexicographical and historical linguistic accounts, an image-schematic definition systematically explains the range of its literal, physical senses and of its figurative, abstract senses, as well as the relations between them. Defining dē in terms of an image-schematic “scenario” portraying two entities connected by a directional trajectory in fact accommodates the co-existence of even antonymous senses within this word's semantic structure and (...) apparently radical divergences from its presumed essential literal meaning in Latin literature, due to the susceptibility of image schemas to “embodied” transformations such as perspective shifts and profiling effects. Dē's more abstract senses may also be linked in this way to widespread metaphorical patterns in Latin, showing that these senses are not haphazard but highly motivated semantically—with significant implications for lexicography, and literary and cultural history. (shrink)

1. I have fond memories of the Linguistic Society of America meeting in New Orleans just after Christmas in 1988, the last time I was able to see all my humanist friends from graduate school who were attending the concurrent meeting of the MLA. Shortly after that, the LSA decided to forego the company of humanists and assemble by itself during the first week of January. It's hard to fault the decision. Over and above the obvious practical advantages, like not (...) having to wait in line for forty-five minutes outside popular restaurants, the groups had been growing apart intellectually for some time. Few linguists bothered to cross town for MLA sessions on topics like onomastics, English usage, and the history of lexicography. Nor for that matter were those sessions drawing many MLA attendees, either. Literary people didn't seem to be much interested in language study anymore; what filled their ballrooms now were the sessions on deconstruction and other poststructuralist enthusiasms. It was like going back for your annual drink with your high-school sweetheart and finding that you had less and less to talk about. They didn't know what subjacency was and we didn't know what alterity was, and neither seemed to care. If you were of a mind to look for milestones, you could take that as the time when linguistic semantics definitively cut itself loose from its philological roots. Like a lot of semanticists, I had mixed feelings about the break. It's undeniable that linguistic semantics couldn't have come of age as an autonomous empirical discipline if it hadn't.. (shrink)

Ogyû Sorai was one of the greatest philosophers of early modern Japan. This volume, a monumental work of scholarship, offers for the first time in any Western language unabridged and fully annotated translations of Sorai’s masterpieces. The Bendô and Benmei are works of political philosophy that define the theoretical foundation for a leadership exercising total power, the best remedy, in Sorai’s view, for a regime in crisis. The translations are based on the 1740 woodblock edition, the first major edition of (...) these seminal texts published during the Tokugawa period. In his commentary, John Tucker situates the Bendô and Benmei in relation to Neo-Confucianism via what is known as "philosophical lexicography." This genre, which links Sorai’s thinking with Neo-Confucianism, is traced to the early-thirteenth-century Song dynasty text the Xingli ziyi by Chen Beixi. Although Sorai was an unrelenting critic the Neo-Confucian formulations of the great Song synthesizer Zhu Xi, his thinking remained, due to its genre, methodology, and conceptual repertory, essentially a radical revision of Neo-Confucian discourse. Tucker’s introduction also examines the reception of Sorai’s two Ben during the remainder of the Tokugawa, calling attention to radical tendencies in later developments of Sorai’s thought as well as to the increasingly scathing critiques of his "Chinese" approach to philosophy, language, and politics. Finally, it traces the vicissitudes of the two Ben in modern Japanese intellectual history and their role in the formation of the ideas of Meiji intellectuals such as Nishi Amane and Kato Hiroyuki. As before, however, Sorai came under attack—this time for his supposed irreverence toward the throne, the Japanese people, and the imperial nation-state. Though an unpopular philosophy in early twentieth-century Japan, in the postwar years Sorai’s thought was interpreted as an important modernizing force. While it critiques such ideologically grounded attempts to cast Sorai’s Bendô and Benmei as theoretical contributions to political modernization, Tucker’s study nevertheless acknowledges that Sorai’s masterworks, in their concern for language analysis as the way to solve philosophical problems, share significant common ground with the analytic approach to philosophy pioneered by various twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophers. (shrink)

Alan R. Perreiah - Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.2 319-321 Ann Moss. Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 306. Cloth, $74.00. Ann Moss offers an exciting and informative history of humanism from Johannes Balbus through Melanchthon, who completed the "turn" from scholastic to humanistic Latin. She marshals considerable evidence from lexicography and (...) letters that scholastics and humanists cultivated two idioms of Latin that created "two different mind-sets" , two "orders of truth-values" , and "two Latin speech communities that talked past one another" . While her main thesis that the "two linguistic universes" were "incommensurable" is questionable, it is a useful heuristic device to highlight differences between the two traditions. Moss illustrates many of her claims by controversies surrounding the legend of St. Ann, mother of Mary. Whether she is misled by the rhetoric of those heated debates on religious folklore, or whether they support her claim of "incommensurability" must be.. (shrink)

All aspects of the concept of collocation – the phenomenon whereby words naturally tend to occur in the company of a restricted set of other words – are covered in this book. It deals in detail with the history of the word collocation, the concepts associated with it and its use in a linguistic context. The authors show the practical means by which the collocational behavior of words can be explored using illustrative computer programs and examine applications in teaching, (...) lexicography and natural language processing that use collocation in formation. The book investigates the place that collocation occupies in theories of language and provides a thoroughly comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the current position of collocation in language studies and applied linguistics. (shrink)

From the Anglo-Saxons to the end of the Tudor era, many English glossaries and dictionaries were arranged topically rather than alphabetically and thus reflected the prevailing concerns of theology, philosophy, and natural history. These works are a fascinating part of the topical or onomasiological lexicographical tradition in England. In this book Werner Hüllen presents a learned and readable account of the topical tradition's principles and origins. He considers early glossaries, treatises for the learning of foreign languages, and didactic dialogues, (...) and provides in-depth examinations of later, more comprehensive works. He shows that the English tradition is embedded in a rich European tradition whose important representatives, such as Junius and Comenius, had a marked influence on the English methods. The book makes an important contribution to the history of the English lexicon and English semantics, and to the study of English lexicography. It also reveals a great deal about the history of English ideas over nine centuries. "This is a work of enormously broad scholarship, which brings together a range of quite diverse elements into a coherent narrative which makes for absorbing and often surprisingly entertaining reading..... This is a rich and multifaceted book, and one which will appeal to a variety of audiences." International Journal of Lexicography"Hüllen brings to life relatively dry and difficult material by applying modern techniques to remote frameworks, setting new standards for research in dictionary history." Anglistik. Mitteilungen des deutschen Anglistenverbandes. (shrink)

When we look up a word in a dictionary, we want to know not just its meaning but also its function and the circumstances under which it should be used in preference to words of similar meaning. Standard dictionaries do not address such matters, treating each word in isolation. R. M. W. Dixon puts forward a new approach to lexicography that involves grouping words into 'semantic sets', to describe what can and cannot be said, and providing explanations for this. (...) He provides a critical survey of the evolution of English lexicography from the earliest times, showing how Samuel Johnson's classic treatment has been amended in only minor ways. Written in an easy and accessible style, the book focuses on the rampant plagiarism between lexicographers, on ways of comparing meanings of words, and on the need to link lexicon with grammar. Dixon tells an engrossing story that puts forward a vision for the future. (shrink)

The book contains essays in honor of Victor Raskin. The contributions are all directly related to some of the major areas of work in which Raskin's scholarship has spanned for decades. The obvious connecting idea is the encyclopedic script-based foundation of lexical meaning, which informs his pioneering work in semantics in the 1970s and 1980s. The first part of the book collects articles directly concerned with script-based semantics, which examine both the theoretical and methodological premises of the idea and its (...) applications. Script-based semantics is the foundation of both Raskin's ground-breaking work in humor research (addressed by the articles in part 2) and in Ontological semantics (addressed in part 3), the most recent development of script-based semantics. The fourth part is dedicated to a less-known, but equally important, strand of Raskin's research, the applications of linguistics to other fields, including writing, lexicography, and professional applications (e,g., tourism). Overall, the book provides and up-to-date, in-depth discussion of an influential strand of the discussion on semantics and its most recent developments and influence on other seemingly unrelated fields, such as Cognitive Linguistics. (shrink)

In 2021, a second updated edition of Eschig’s and Pircher-Eschig’s translation of the Austrian Civil Code (ABGB) (Allgemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch für die gesammten deutschen Erbländer der Oesterreichischen Monarchie (ABGB 1811). (as amended), 2023) was released. This edition holds particular relevance due to its potential applicability across a spectrum of players operating at the intersection of language and (civil) law, including legal professionals, the hospitality industry, and mediators. We find that this comprehensive translation may not only serve as a valuable resource (...) for (legal) practice but also holds significance for research in diverse fields, including (applied) legal linguistics, lexicography, translation studies, and comparative law. Moreover, this translation alleviates the challenges faced by practitioners inside and outside of law when dealing with legal concepts and lexis, along with their interdependencies in continental civil law discourse. We suggest that the work is particularly useful for legal departments of international companies, but also for hotel chains and/or mediation offices, seeking insights into the specifics of the Austrian legal-linguistic landscape. While computer-assisted translation and machine translation cannot be denied their utility, they should not be seen as capable of entirely replacing human expertise. Indeed, machine translations may not be able to capture the subtle multi-faceted interplay of emerging legal, linguistic, and/or cultural contexts when dealing with the legal concepts and interrelated terminology of the ABGB. In conclusion, we acknowledge the significance of high-quality legal translations, as the one under review, that have been thoroughly reviewed by human experts, thus contributing to saving time and resources. (shrink)

The third edition of Webster’s International Dictionary, first published in 1961, represented a novel approach to lexicography. It recorded the English language used in everyday life, incorporating colloquial terms that previous grammarians would have considered unfit for any responsible dictionary. Many were scandalized by the new lexicography. Trademark lawyers were not the most prominent of these critics, but the concerns they expressed are significant because they touched on the core structure of the trademark as a form of property (...) in language. In the course of eavesdropping on everyday usage, Merriam-Webster’s lexicographers picked up on the use of trademarks as common nouns: “thermos” as a generic noun for any vacuum flask, “cellophane” as a term for transparent wrapping, and so on. If Webster’s Third were to be taken as sound evidence of the meaning of words, then the danger was that some of the most familiar marks in the USA would be judged “generic” in the legal sense, and would thereby cease to be proprietary. In this article, we explore the implications of this encounter between law and lexicographic technique. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859–1940), the most prominent member of nineteenth-century French spiritualism, is the first philosopher who explicitly defined philosophy as a practice which consists in posing problems anew and in creating concepts. In this article, I will try to reconstruct the progressive importance acquired by the terms ‘problem’ and ‘concept’ in nineteenth-century French philosophy and how they combined in Bergson’s theories about creativity, invention and novelty. I will argue that Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a creative intellectual practice was the (...) result of a negotiation, inside a pre-existent spiritualist framework, between, on the one hand, neo-Kantianism and, on the other hand, evolutionism which strongly influenced empirical psychology and the emerging social sciences. Bergson’s solution, influenced by the evolution of mathematics and literary theory, was just one of the possible options, and the main alternative to a new form of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

Originally published in 1971, this volume examines the relationship between the history and sociology of education. History does not stand in isolation, but has much to draw from and contribute to, other disciplines. The methods and concepts of sociology, in particular, are exerting increasing influence on historical studies, especially the history of education. Since education is considered to be part of the social system, historians and sociologists have come to survey similar fields; yet each discipline appears to (...) have its own aims and methodology. (shrink)

Originally published in 1972, this book is concerned with education as part of a larger social history. Chapters include: The roots of Anglican supremacy in English education The Board schools of London The use of ecclesiastical records for the history of education Topographical resources: private and secondary education from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

There is a common tradition in European education going back to the Middle Ages which long played a part in providing the curriculum of schools which catered both for the wealthy and for able sons of less well-to-do families. Originally published in 1974, this volume examines the relationship between education and society in the different countries of Europe from which differences in tradition and practice emerge. The countries discussed include: France, Germany, the former Soviet Union, Poland and Sweden.

Politics and Modernity provides a critical review of the key interface of contemporary political theory and social theory about the questions of modernity and postmodernity. Review essays offer a broad-ranging assessment of the issues at stake in current debates. Among the works reviewed are those of William Connolly, Anthony Giddens, J[um]urgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Roy Bhaskar. As well as reviewing the contemporary literature, the contributors assess the historical roots of current problems in the works of (...) Nietzsche and Max Weber. (shrink)

Part of the educational system in England has been geared towards the preparation of particular professions, while the identity and status of members of some professions have depended significantly on the general education they have received. Originally published in 1973, this volume explores the interaction between education and the professions. It also looks at the education of the main professions in sixteenth century England and at how twentieth century university teaching is a key profession for the training of new recruits (...) to other professions. (shrink)

An Outline History of Chinese Philosophy has been jointly written and compiled by over 20 specialists and scholars from nine renowned universities in China, including Wuhan University and Sun Yat-sen University. It provides a concise introduction to the origin and development of Chinese philosophy from antiquity to 1949, the year the People's Republic of China was founded, expounding its status and features at different historical stages. It gives a historical and logical delineation of the development of Chinese philosophy by (...) highlighting its origin and development during the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, the golden age of philosophical thought during the Warring States Period, and the strides made by the Chinese philosophical system from Qin-Han times to the Ming and Qing dynasties, as well as new visions brought by social reforms since the mid-Ming Dynasty. This book presents readers with a detailed and accurate text, lucid discussions and simple explanations of complex ideas. It is not only a monograph with academic and textual value, but also a must-have for readers to better understand and study Chinese philosophy and culture. (shrink)

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. _Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History_ offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of (...) our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a “new humanism,” one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity. (shrink)

The article examines Thomas Kuhn's work in the history of science with special attention to its relevance to subsequent developments in social epistemology. The article begins with a discussion of Kuhn's historical work, and the so-called historical turn in philosophy of science. It then examines Kuhn's views on textbook science, followed by an analysis of Kuhn's views on the relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science. Then it discusses Kuhn's contributions to our understanding of (...) the social dimensions of scientific inquiry. Finally, it discusses his influence on the social epistemology of science and the sociology of science. (shrink)

Late nineteenth-century German anthropology had to compete for intellectual legitimacy with the established academic humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), above all history. Whereas humanists interpreted literary documents to create narratives about great civilizations, anthropologists represented and viewed objects, such as skulls or artifacts, to create what they regarded as natural scientific knowledge about so-called 'natural peoples'-colonized societies of Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas. Anthropologists thus invoked a venerable tradition that presented looking at objects as a more certain source of knowledge than (...) reading texts. Visual representations, especially of the colonized, not only allowed anthropologists allegedly objective insight into humanity but also put them in direct contact with popular audiences of ethnographic spectacles, exotic photography, and even pornographic images. Anthropologists thus sought to create a peculiar kind of anthropological vision that both differentiated them from humanists as 'objective' natural scientists but also distinguished them from the leering 'Schaulust' that they believed characterized popular consumption of exotic images. To do so they invented technologies of visual representation that eschewed the subject position figured by linear perspective. These novel optics dispensed with the leering subject posited by popular spectacles and the knowing subject posited by humanism and created an anti-humanist form of knowledge. (shrink)

Li Zehou is widely regarded as one of China’s most influential contemporary thinkers. He has produced influential theories of the development of Chinese thought and the place of aesthetics in Chinese ethics and value theory. This book is the first English-language translation of Li Zehou’s work on classical Chinese thought. It includes chapters on the classical Chinese thinkers, including Confucius, Mozi, Laozi, Sunzi, Xunzi and Zhuangzi, and also on later eras and thinkers such as Dong Zhongshu in the Han Dynasty (...) and the Song-Ming Neo-Confucians. (shrink)

A complete history of Islamic political thought from early Islam to the present Now in its 2nd edition, this textbook describes and interprets all schools of Islamic political thought, their origins, inter-connections and meaning. It examines the Qur'an, the early Caliphate, classical Islamic philosophy and the political culture of the Ottoman and other empires. It covers major thinkers such as Averroes and Ibn Taymiyya as well as a number of lesser authors, and Ibn Khaldun is presented as one of (...) the most original political theorists ever. It draws on a wide range of sources including writings on religion, law, philosophy and statecraft expressed in treatises, handbooks and political rhetoric. The new edition analyses the connections between religion and politics, covering the most recent developments in Islamic political thought and the most recent historical scholarship. It ends with a critical survey of reformism and Islamism from the late-19th century up to the present day. (shrink)

This essay surveys the present position of postmodernism with respect to the effect of its ideas upon historiography. For this purpose it looks at a number of writings by historians that have been a response to postmodernism including the recently published collection of articles, The Postmodern History Reader. The essay argues that, in contrast to scholars in the field of literary studies, the American historical profession has been much more resistant to postmodernist doctrines and that the latters' influence upon (...) the thinking and practice of historians is not only fading but increasingly destined to fade. The essay also presents a critical discussion of the current philosophy of postmodernism in its bearing upon historiography, directed chiefly against its claim that the world has undergone an epochal transition from the modern to a postmodern age; its theory of language and linguistic idealism; its opposition to historical realism and denial of the actuality of the past as a possible object of reference; and its theory of historical narrative as unconstrained fictional construction. This discussion includes a consideration of the work of postmodernist thinkers such as J.-F. Lyotard, of the recent books by David Roberts and Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. which espouse a postmodernist theory of history, and of the narrativist theory of Hayden White. The essay also notes some of the reasons for postmodernism's appeal; and while it does not deny that postmodernist philosophy may have served a useful purpose in provoking historians to be more self-critical and aware of their presuppositions and procedures, it maintains that its skeptical and politicized view of historical inquiry is deeply mistaken, out of accord with the way historians themselves think about their work, and incapable of providing an understanding of historiography as a form of thought engaged in the attainment of knowledge and understanding of the human past. (shrink)