Heidi Ravven. The Self beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will. New York: The New Press, 2013. 528 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 500-502
Author(s):  
Ben Stahlberg
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Free Will ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
History Of

KARL POLANYI AT THE MARGINS OF ENGLISH SOCIALISM, 1934–1947

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-346
Author(s):  
TIM ROGAN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Human Person ◽  
The Self ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Karl Polanyi ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
History Of

Growing interest among historians and social scientists in the work of Karl Polanyi has yet to produce detailed historical studies of how Polanyi's work was received by his contemporaries. This article reconstructs the frustration of Polanyi's attempts to make a name for himself among English socialists between his arrival from Vienna in 1934 and his departure for New York in 1947. The most obvious explanation for Polanyi's failure to find a following was the socialist historians’ rejection of his unorthodox narrative of the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution inThe Great Transformation(1944). But this disappointment was anticipated in earlier exchanges revealing that Polanyi's social theory, specifically his conception of the self and its social relations, differed markedly from the views prevailing among socialists of R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole's generation. As well as casting new light on the intellectual history of English socialism and variegating our understanding of the contexts in which conceptions of the human person were invoked in the interwar period, this article seeks to illuminate by example the importance of deep-seated, often tacit, commitments to particular conceptions of the self and its social relations in structuring mid-century intellectual life.

scholarly journals Not Just an Inferior Virtue, nor Self-Interest: Adam Smith on Prudence

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleonora Viganò
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Dialectical Tension ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Dimensions ◽  
Sense Of Justice ◽  
The Relationship

This paper focuses on the treatment of prudence by Adam Smith. Smith was one of the few philosophers to conceive of it as a moral virtue. Smithian prudence is the care of one's own happiness that is limited and ennobled, respectively, by the sense of justice and that of self-command. A reconstruction of Smith's view of prudence helps to clarify three central points in his thought: the interaction between the agent's economic and moral dimensions, the relationship between the self and the other, and the dialectical tension between partiality and impartiality. Furthermore, Smithian prudence is important, in itself, as an approach to the above-mentioned points that is still viable. These three points are recurrent crucial issues in the history of ethics.

Diedrich Knickerbocker, Regular Bred Historian

2018 ◽  
pp. 29-55
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Insko
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Self ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
History Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chronological Sequence ◽  
Alter Ego ◽  
Rip Van Winkle

Chapter 1 analyzes the self-consciousness—and uncanny postmodernity—of Washington Irving in the various works attributed to his historian alter ego Diedrich Knickerbocker, particularly A History of New York and “Rip Van Winkle.” I argue that Irving’s Knickerbocker writings inaugurated an under-recognized tradition of antebellum writing devoted less to the creation of a coherent national past than to theorizing “history” itself. Irving’s A History of New York (1809) forms a kind of practical illustration of the dismantling of history writing in our own time. Irving’s metahistorical discourse, I claim, cannot be adequately accounted for by conventional historicist contextualization, by confining his works to a particular moment in time, much less one that has been superseded by or that is irretrievably distant and distinct from the critical present. Working in tandem with A History of New York’s disquisition on the mutability of historical knowledge is the experience of history “Rip Van Winkle” offers to its readers. A story of temporal dislocation, “Rip Van Winkle” exploits and critiques Rip’s—and the reader’s—desire to settle upon an orienting present and locate that present within a chronological sequence (before, during, and after the war).

The history of the brain and mind sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 145-154
Author(s):  
Alfred Freeborn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Interdisciplinary Collaboration ◽  
Review Article ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Neuroscience ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of The Neurosciences ◽  
Cerebral Subject ◽  
The Brain ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

This review article critically surveys the following literature by placing it under the historiographical banner of ‘the history of the brain and mind sciences’: Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Katja Guenther, Localization and its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis & the Neuro Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Stephen Casper and Delia Gavrus (eds), The History of the Brain and Mind Sciences: Technique, Technology, Therapy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2017); Jonna Brenninkmeijer, Neurotechnologies of the Self: Mind, Brain and Subjectivity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). This framework highlights contemporary attempts to historicize the integrative project of neuroscience and set the correct limits to interdisciplinary collaboration. While attempts to critically engage with the ‘neuro’ rhetoric of contemporary neuroscientists can seem at odds with historians seeking to write the history of neuroscience from the margins, it is argued that together these two projects represent a positive historiographical direction for the history of the neurosciences after the decade of the brain.

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