Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2022.2097407
D. Miano, J. Thornton
ABSTRACT In this article, we re-examine the oft-assumed link between theories of modernity and the “death of fortune”. It is often argued that recourse to “fortune” as a legitimate cause of events had declined substantially by the end of the seventeenth century, replaced by aetiologies based on the calculation of probabilities inspired by the techniques of the new science. Focusing on the reception of the Greek historian of the Hellenistic period, Polybius, in whose Histories tyche appears in a notorious variety of roles, we argue that fortune was subtly replaced, but not as drastically as assumed, as a cause of events by a number of influential figures in the development of modern historiography, in particular, Bossuet (1627–1704) and Hegel (1770–1831). We argue that, far from seeing a “death of fortune” in the works of these authors, the reader is met with a radical transformation of this ancient rhetorical and ethical trope, albeit subordinated to particular theological and philosophical preoccupations.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2022.2097579
R. Yeo
ABSTRACT The notion of a “query” occurred in legal, medical, theological and scientific writings during the early modern period. Whereas the “questionary” (from c. 1400s) sought replies from within a doctrine (such as Galenic medicine), in the 1600s the query posed open-ended inquiries, seeking empirical information from travellers, explorers and others. During the 1660s in Britain, three versions of the query (and lists of queries) emerged. Distinctions need to be made between queries seeking information via observation and those asking for experimentation, and between those aiming to keep theory to one side and those that framed theoretical conjectures. My examples are drawn from the work of the Royal Society of London (founded 1660) and from some of its leading members, especially Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2022.2097576
Daniel Midena, R. Yeo
ABSTRACT This introduction to the following five articles discusses concepts, practices and debates before and after the adoption of the term “questionnaire” in the late nineteenth century. Information gathering by way of itemized questions was established in the early modern period (c. 1500–1700). Developments associated with questionnaires in the modern period (such as mass standardized items) began in the late 1800s; but there was significant scrutiny of the questionnaire itself in the decades between the two World Wars.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2022.2097582
G. Mak
ABSTRACT The first scientific questionnaire to establish gender and sexual “intermediate” identities “objectively” was published in 1899 by the internationally renowned sexologist and pioneer of LGBTI emancipation, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). In this article, I show that this questionnaire changed how interactions took place between psycho-medical professionals and people who did not conform to sexual or gender norms. Rhetorically, the questionnaire created a delicate balance between self-expression and objectification of the subject. It broke down already existing semiautobiographical case histories into a list of characteristics, behaviour, and inclinations; all predicated on a conventional binary view of gender. I conclude that the questionnaire paradoxically activated and reified conventionally binary-gendered phenomena precisely by offering gender nonconformist people a robust frame for (gender-fluid) self-understanding; an inheritance still haunting us today.
{"title":"Magnus Hirschfeld’s 1899 psychobiological questionnaire: the paradoxes of de-narrativizing sexual and gender nonconformity","authors":"G. Mak","doi":"10.1080/17496977.2022.2097582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2022.2097582","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The first scientific questionnaire to establish gender and sexual “intermediate” identities “objectively” was published in 1899 by the internationally renowned sexologist and pioneer of LGBTI emancipation, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). In this article, I show that this questionnaire changed how interactions took place between psycho-medical professionals and people who did not conform to sexual or gender norms. Rhetorically, the questionnaire created a delicate balance between self-expression and objectification of the subject. It broke down already existing semiautobiographical case histories into a list of characteristics, behaviour, and inclinations; all predicated on a conventional binary view of gender. I conclude that the questionnaire paradoxically activated and reified conventionally binary-gendered phenomena precisely by offering gender nonconformist people a robust frame for (gender-fluid) self-understanding; an inheritance still haunting us today.","PeriodicalId":39827,"journal":{"name":"Intellectual History Review","volume":"32 1","pages":"599 - 617"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47974787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2022.2097577
Margaret Schotte
ABSTRACT During the age of colonial expansion, European merchant companies used paper technologies as tools of control. This article analyses a set of tables produced in the 1690s by employees of the Dutch East India Company, as they recorded their daily efforts on a new method of desalinating ocean water. These printed “formulieren” should be viewed not only as a novel extension of the nautical logbook but also as an early phase in the development of questionnaires. Adapted from clerical formularies, these structured tabular records are an early instance of a single-purpose data collection document, one linked with a new piece of technology, for which performance was to be measured daily. These sparse columns allow us to recover the practices of the “watermakers” themselves: some filled out the tables diligently, others gave rough estimates after the fact. Each of these men approached a supposedly standard technology in a different way, allowing us to uncover surprising individualism from within columns of numbers.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2022.2097401
Floris Verhaart
ABSTRACT This article places the Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719) by Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (1670–1742) within the context of contemporary philology and antiquarianism. This was Du Bos’s magnum opus, in which he argued that the quality of art should be gauged on the basis of the aesthetic pleasure its audience derived from it and that beauty and moral uprightness were not necessarily connected. The work is usually connected with Locke’s sensualism and empiricism, but this article argues that another important context is Du Bos’s interest in contemporary scholarship. This connection is demonstrated through an analysis of Du Bos’s earlier work, in particular his Histoire des Quatre Gordiens, prouvée et illustrée par les Médailles (1695), his interaction with philologists like Pieter Burman the Elder (1668–1741), and references in the Réflexions to the work of, among others, Isaac Vossius (1618–1689).
摘要本文将让-巴蒂斯特·杜博斯（1670–1742）的《Réflexions sur la poésie et sur la peinture》（1719）批评置于当代文献学和古物学的背景下。这是杜的代表作，他认为艺术的质量应该以观众从中获得的审美快感为基础来衡量，而美和道德操守不一定联系在一起。这部作品通常与洛克的感性主义和经验主义联系在一起，但本文认为，另一个重要的背景是杜对当代学术的兴趣。这种联系可以通过对杜早期作品的分析来证明，特别是他的《四重奏史》（Histoire des Quatre Gordiens）、《Médailles》（1695）、他与老彼得·伯曼（Pieter Burman the Elder）等文献学家的互动（1668-1741），以及《Réflexions》中对艾萨克·沃斯（Isaac Vossius）（1618-1689）等人作品的引用。
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2022.2097583
Eric Hounshell
ABSTRACT In interwar Vienna, Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues developed an approach to survey research that used the questionnaire and the direct, face-to-face interview to gather data about subjective experience for aggregative analysis. For these young researchers, the questionnaire-based interview emerged from a contradictory set of Central European intellectual traditions and political concerns. Enthusiasm on the political left for quantification and the gathering of social data encouraged survey research; yet, local political allies and intellectual mentors also opposed the study of individual attitudes and the quantitative aggregation of such material. Academic psychology legitimized the use of “introspection” and facilitated the extension of this method to populations of untrained subjects. The methodological concept of the “model” helped overcome the Verstehen/Erklären dichotomy within debates over the proper methods of the human and social sciences. This article examines methodological and philosophical statements, study designs, and questionnaires to explain how the interview gained particular importance within this setting.
在两次世界大战之间的维也纳，Paul F. Lazarsfeld和他的同事开发了一种调查研究方法，使用问卷调查和直接面对面的访谈来收集有关主观经验的数据进行综合分析。对于这些年轻的研究人员来说，基于问卷的访谈出现在中欧知识传统和政治关切的矛盾中。政治左派对量化和收集社会数据的热情鼓励了调查研究;然而，当地的政治盟友和知识分子导师也反对对个人态度的研究和这种材料的定量汇总。学术心理学使“内省”的使用合法化，并促进了这种方法在未经训练的受试者群体中的推广。“模型”的方法论概念帮助克服了Verstehen/Erklären在关于人类和社会科学的适当方法的辩论中的二分法。本文考察了方法学和哲学陈述、研究设计和问卷调查，以解释访谈在这种情况下如何变得特别重要。
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2022.2097419
H. Ellis, D. Miano
ABSTRACT In this editorial, we introduce the main themes discussed in this special issue and advocate for a more integrative history of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries through a reconsideration of the language of 'ancient' and 'modern'. We discuss how the essays collected in this special issue seek to go beyond the recurring metaphor of quarrel and competition between antiquity and modernity, and the related representations of key individuals and groups as ‘pioneers’ of modern approaches, in order to move towards a more complex relationship of crossfertilization of 'ancient' and 'modern' knowledges. Each essay maintains that an appreciation of knowledge making as a fully embodied practice is vital for understanding the complex and sometimes contradictory role played by classical authors in the knowledge making of later periods. In different ways, all the essays demonstrate how ancient authors not only provided scholars in later ages (working in a range of disciplines) with a rich supply of evidence for their own works; more interestingly, perhaps, much of what has been viewed as innovation involved scholars drawing on ancient authors and techniques in new ways.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2022.2097410
W. Desmond
ABSTRACT This article locates Hegel’s understanding of the nature of knowledge in various contexts (Hegel’s logical system, Kantian idealism, the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopaedia) and applies it specifically to his systematic classification of histories. Here Hegel labels Herodotus an “original” historian, and hence incapable of the broader vision and self-reflexive method of a “philosophical” historian like Hegel himself. This theoretical classification is not quite in accord with Hegel’s actual appropriation of material from Herodotus’s narrative for his own purposes. These appropriations point in complex ways to dimensions of the “Father of History” which are proto-Hegelian, as well as to other dimensions which are not.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-30DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2022.2088928
John H. Zammito
historians ought to do research, how archives transform the historian’s character and how he became the model of what a historian is supposed to be (88, 97, 104); and, finally, Georg Waitz’s concern with researching the character of the writers of sources, to find out their moral and epistemic virtues and vices (107–8, 112–13). The question remains whether these historians and their moral and political project are actually “modern”. For, when we look more closely, it is clear that many of these historians focus on “reasonable human beings” (28, 61, 64), and that the “folly of men” could be prevented or mended by means of history. These historians used empirical knowledge to inform and improve human knowledge and morality. In other words, it is about progress of human nature. That is essentially the traditional Enlightened theory of humanity: there is a sharp distinction between an (unreasonable) past and a (reasonable) present; by learning from past errors, progress is achieved; such learning is possible because human nature is capable of learning as long as it is reasonable. In other words, human nature includes reason and therefore the capacity to learn. That is exactly why historicists considered the Enlightened view of history to be generalizing and judgemental and not historical, instead urging historians to refrain from judgement, to focus on the individual context, and most of all to “feel into” the past, while simultaneously becoming aware that the present is a product of the past. Of course, this debate is essentially on the flexibility and adaptability of notions like historicism, professionalization, Enlightenment and modernity, as well as the (dis)agreements on periodization, selection and perspective. Even though Eskildsen seems to employ a rather restricted view of historicism, Enlightenment and modernity, this does not diminish the achievement of his concise yet skilfully written and researched study of the Enlightened foundation of modern German historical scholarship. It is an original addition to the debate about the foundation of historical scholarship, and it contributes particularly to the field of moral and epistemic virtues and its role in Enlightened German historical scholarship.
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