JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS最新文献

The first treatise written by Plotinus, On Beauty (Enn. 1.6), was admired among those Christian authors who were open to the influence of Platonic philosophy, in particular the Cappadocian Fathers. This could be due to a possible publication of the treatise before Porphyry's editorial work for the Enneads. The presence of concepts of the treatise in their works is a sign of their interest in its rhetorical qualities and, at a deeper level, in the theoretical support that Plotinus's thought could give to theological reflection. A possible reference to Plotinus's treatise in Augustine, Conf. 10.6.8 is also discussed.

The History of Political Thought is a discipline which is very closely aligned with the Anglophone liberal political tradition. It has not, consequently, ever had very much to say about warfare. Richard Tuck's important research marks an exception in this field, but Tuck's work is marked by significant omissions. He defined Catholic scholasticism too narrowly, omitting the Franciscan followers of John Duns Scotus, and excluded Protestant scholasticism (except the work of Hugo Grotius) entirely from consideration. Remedying these omissions leaves us with an early modern theorization of war that appears much less ripe for secularization than scholars have previously supposed.

A photograph depicts the anthropologist Franz Boas posing as an Indigenous youth in search of human flesh. It looks like an icon of cultural appropriation, but behind the picture is a history of Indigenous influence. The archive of body knowledge-memories encapsulated in the motions of dance and indexed in images-reveals that the Kwak'wala-speaking peoples civilized the white man who came to study them, converting him to the Host-Guest logic of "potlatch" encoded in their Hamatsa dance. Seeing Boas as a host body of Indigenous knowledge radically reconfigures our understanding of influence, compelling us to ask who creates modernity.

This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between Catholic and Protestant theories of mission by examining the influence of the Jesuit José de Acosta on the De conversione Indorum et gentilium (1669), one of the first comprehensive handbooks of Protestant missiology, written by Johannes Hoornbeeck. It is demonstrated that Acosta's Thomist emphasis on the willing acceptance of a new faith made his ideas particularly attractive to Hoornbeeck and are the reason why the latter preferred Jesuit sources to Franciscan thinkers and writings, since these were more Scotist in their outlook.

Early modern efforts to justify warfare entailed serious reflection on the relationship between Christianity and nature or natural law. Those working in a Thomist tradition could draw on a concept of natural law as an ethical system distinct from Christianity; others rejected that concept, working instead to show that warfare could form part of the duties of Christians. All sides recognized the tension between the words of Christ and the demands of human political life, especially when it came to defending military activity. That tension produced creative discussions of natural law, political thought, and theology, in the universities and beyond.

Gustav III's royal coup in 1772 reestablished strong monarchy and ended the Age of Liberty (Frihetstiden) in Sweden. The event attracted much interest and commentary across Europe. The most detailed account of the episode and sophisticated analysis of its causes was Charles Francis Sheridan's now forgotten History of the Late Revolution in Sweden (1778). Sheridan used Enlightenment history and political science to argue that the reasons for the Swedish revolution went beyond its flawed constitution and could be traced to the Swedish national character and the circumstances of its orders, determined by its longue durée history, laws, geography, and climate.

"Bolshevism as a Moral Problem" and "Tactics and Ethics" were discussions of political ethics closely related to Max Weber's contemporaneous "Politics as a Vocation." They diverged from one another in their historical assessments of possibilities for ethically responsible revolutionary action. They are best understood as developments of an approach to political judgment originally forged by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose concerns were associated by Weber with Realpolitik and which continue to animate discussions of "political realism." Overwriting these concerns as transitional moments in personal conversion narratives or the history of political thought has an inhibiting effect on historical and political judgment.

This article is an effort to examine the discourses of French identity in crisis by four disparate New Right and "neo-reactionary" intellectuals (Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Renaud Camus, and Alain Finkielkraut) whose work contributes to the anti-immigration, anti-Islam and identity-based thought of twenty-first-century France. It argues that shared discourse of French identity in crisis as a result of Muslim immigration provides a common ground for these intellectuals despite their diverse origins, their disagreement over how to define French identity, and their prescriptions for its salvation.