JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS最新文献

Although the Republic of Letters has become today a main area of interdisciplinary research, early North America has remained largely impermeable to this new body of scholarship. In this article I use the category of the Republic of Letters to overcome some of the limitations of the "Atlantic world" paradigm and to shed new light on the intellectual history of eighteenth-century America. Along with studying the means through which American savants gathered information about scholarly trends and recent publications, I also bring to light the strategies they used to actively contribute to the production and organization of knowledge.

This article examines responses from Lutheran pastors, theologians, and physicians to the arguments given by Johann Weyer in 1563 that those women who confessed to a pact with the devil suffered from melancholy and were thus not responsible for their acts. Weyer's conception of melancholy was a medical one, yet among Lutheran pastors and theologians the concept of a spiritual form of melancholy emerged that came from religious sources. The article clarifies the difference between the concepts of medical and spiritual melancholy within Lutheranism and reviews the respective roles they played in the debates over Weyer's arguments.

This article traces the emergence and application of Max Weber's influential concept of charisma in his "Confucianism and Taoism" (1920) and "Politics as a Vocation" (1919), two texts that have not received much attention in the discussion of charisma. Through these texts, we learn to appreciate Weber's engagement with classical Chinese philosophy and the global composition of this key idea in the twentieth century.

A memoir of J. G. A. Pocock derived from his correspondence with Quentin Skinner between 1965 and 2020. The letters follow the development of Pocock's career from his early years in New Zealand to his move to the United States in 1966 and his long period of teaching at Johns Hopkins University. Among the topics covered are the gestation and publication of Pocock's most famous book, The Machiavellian Moment, and the evolution of his six-volume study of Gibbon's history, Barbarism and Religion. Much new light is also cast on Pocock's personality, family life, relations with colleagues, and political beliefs.

This article analyzes the published testimonies of French shipwreck survivors to trace the emergence of a settler colonial ideal in nineteenth-century France. Emerging from the encounters of French survivors with the men of the Anglo-World, this ideal encouraged compassionate, paternalist authority as a solution to the ongoing conflict of paternal despotism and disorderly fraternal freedom in France. The community of sentiment imagined in shipwreck testimonies was gendered and racialized, cultivating white compassion across colonial empires. These transimperial affective ties allowed the settler colonial ideal to persist in the early twentieth century, despite the abandonment of further projects for French settlement.

This article contributes to the genealogy of the concept of academic freedom with a focus on the English universities in the middle of the seventeenth century. It argues that libertas scholastica (the corporate freedom of the universities) and libertas philosophandi (liberty of philosophizing, within and without the universities) were distinctive guiding concepts, sometimes in opposition but occasionally complementary, in debates over the universities in this period. If these two notions together constitute the antecedents of the modern concept of academic freedom, their conjunction must be recognized as a much more contingent and irregular phenomenon than has been previously understood.

The early twentieth-century American neo-realists' approach to consciousness is historically reconstructed and critically discussed. With reference to the relevant works of Ralph Barton Perry, William Pepperrell Montague, and Edwin B. Holt, it is argued that Montague and Holt, in particular, struggled with the problem of error and disagreed strongly on their solutions to it. Finally, a line is drawn to related discussions in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Abstract:

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the study of Roman remains led to the questioning of many local traditions, including those that associated the episcopal see of Tournai with the valiant Nervii. The rediscovery of ancient Itineraries and the absence of vestiges in Tournai led scholars to question this association: they preferred to locate the city of the Nervii in Bavay. This new thesis irritated several Tournaisian authors who defended the illustrious past of their city. This scholarly controversy illustrates the new role that the material evidence played in the construction of historical discourses and local identity at that time.