Dignity

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Greek Thought ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Locus Classicus

The concept of dignity typically brings to mind an idea of moral status that supposedly belongs to all humans equally, and which serves as the basis of human rights. But this moralized meaning of dignity is historically very young. Until the mid-nineteenth century, dignity suggested an idea about merit: it connoted elevated social rank, of the sort that marked nobility or ecclesiastic preferment. What explains this radical change in meaning? And before this change, did anything like the moralized concept of dignity exist, that is, before it was named by the term “dignity”? If so, exactly how old is the moralized concept of dignity? In this volume, leading scholars across a range of disciplines attempt to answer these questions by clarifying the presently murky history of “dignity,” from classical Greek thought through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment to the present day. In the process, four platitudes about the history of human dignity are undermined: (1) the Roman notion of dignitas is not the ancient starting point of our modern moralized notion; (2) neither the medieval Christian doctrine of imago Dei nor the renaissance speech of Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, was a genuine locus classicus of dignity discussion; (3) Immanuel Kant is not the early modern proprietor of the concept; (4) the universalization of the concept of dignity in the postmodern world (ca. 1800–present) is not the result of its constitutional indoctrination by the “wise forefathers” of liberal states like America or France.

Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects: A Study in the Solomonic Tradition. The Magic in History Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, xi, 235 pp., 19 b/w images, 2 tables.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 252-254
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
State University ◽  
Eastern Culture ◽  
Historical Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Objects ◽  
The Middle Ages

Throughout times, magic and magicians have exerted a tremendous influence, and this even in our (post)modern world (see now the contributions to Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2017; here not mentioned). Allegra Iafrate here presents a fourth monograph dedicated to magical objects, primarily those associated with the biblical King Solomon, especially the ring, the bottle which holds a demon, knots, and the flying carpet. She is especially interested in the reception history of those symbolic objects, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, both in western and in eastern culture, that is, above all, in the Arabic world, and also pursues the afterlife of those objects in the early modern age. Iafrate pursues not only the actual history of King Solomon and those religious objects associated with him, but the metaphorical objects as they made their presence felt throughout time, and this especially in literary texts and in art-historical objects.

La Storia dell’Età Moderna nelle „Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Biblioteken“: lo specchio di un secolo di ricerche

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-46
Author(s):  
Irene Fosi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Papal Court

AbstractThe article examines the topics relating to the early modern period covered by the journal „Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken“ in the hundred volumes since its first publication. Thanks to the index (1898–1995), published in 1997 and the availability online on the website perpectivia.net (since 1958), it is possible to identify constants and changes in historiographical interests. Initially, the focus was on the publication of sources in the Vatican Secret Archive (now the Vatican Apostolic Archive) relating to the history of Germany. The topics covered later gradually broadened to include the history of the Papacy, the social composition of the Curia and the Papal court and Papal diplomacy with a specific focus on nunciatures, among others. Within a lively historiographical context, connected to historical events in Germany in the 20th century, attention to themes and sources relating to the Middle Ages continues to predominate with respect to topics connected to the early modern period.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
J. V. Fesko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

This chapter introduces the topic of the history of the early modern Reformed doctrine of the covenant of works. It first defines the doctrine and then provides a state of the question through a survey of relevant secondary literature. After the state of the question, the chapter states the book’s main aim, which is to present an overview of the origins, development, and reception of the covenant of works. In contrast to critics of the doctrine, this book stands within another strand of historiography that sees the covenant of works as a legitimate development of ideas present in the early church, middle ages, and Reformation periods. The chapter then lays out the topics of each of following chapters: the Reformation, Robert Rollock, Jacob Arminius, James Ussher, John Cameron and Edward Leigh, The Westminster Standards, the Formula Consensus Helvetica, Thomas Boston, and the Twentieth Century.

Violence and Masculinity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Eibach
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Violent Crimes ◽  
Grand Theory ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
Shed Light

A consistent overrepresentation of men in recorded violent crimes and thus a certain disposition of male aggressiveness has been evident from the late Middle Ages to today. However, we can also detect several major shifts in the history of interpersonal male violence from the eighteenth century onward. From a cultural historical perspective, violent actions by men or women cannot be interpreted as contingent, individual acts, but rather must be seen as practices embedded in sociocultural contexts and accompanied by informal norms. Because one grand theory cannot account convincingly for the history of violence and masculinity, an array of approaches is more likely to shed light on the issue. Interestingly, shifts in the history of violence have often corresponded with changes to prevailing notions of masculinity. This essay delineates the relevant historical shifts from the early modern “culture of dispute” to the different paths of interpersonal violence over the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Eli Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Last Ice Age ◽  
The City

The essays in this special issue all focus on the city of Berlin, in particular, its relationship with its margins and borders over thelongue dureé. The authors—Kristin Poling, Marion Gray, Barry Jackisch, and Eli Rubin—all consider the history of Berlin over the last two centuries, with special emphasis on how Berlin expanded over this time and how it encountered the open spaces surrounding it and within it—the “green fields” (grüne Wiesen) referred to in the theme title. Each of them explores a different period in Berlin's history, and so together, the essays form a long dureé history of Berlin, although each of the essays in its own way explores the roots of Berlin's history in deeper time scales, from the early modern period, to the Middle Ages, and even to the very end of the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.

scholarly journals The Rhetoric of Hobbes's Translation of Thucydides

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Chris Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Modern Project ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Right Reason

Abstract In several key passages in Thomas Hobbes's understudied translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, Hobbes's Pericles directs audiences to distrust rhetoric in favor of calculative self-interest, inward-focused affective states, and an epistemic reliance on sovereignty. Hobbes's own intervention via his translation of Thucydides involves similar rhetorical moves. By directing readers to learn from Thucydides, Hobbes conceals his own rhetorical appeals in favor of sovereignty while portraying rhetoric undermining sovereignty as manipulative, self-serving, and representative of the entire category of “rhetoric.” Hobbes's double redescription of rhetoric is an important starting point for an early modern project: appeals that justify a desired political order are characterized as “right reason,” “the law of nature,” or “enlightenment,” while rhetoric constituting solidarities or publics outside the desired order is condemned. Hobbes's contribution to this project theorizes rhetoric as a barrier to individual calculations of interest, placing a novel constraint on political life.

The Actual and the Possible

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Baruch Spinoza ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Range ◽  
Selection Of

This volume offers a selection of essays by leading specialists on modality and the metaphysics of modality in the history of modern philosophy, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It revisits key moments in the history of modern modal doctrines, and illuminates lesser-known moments of that history. With this historical approach, the book aims to contextualize and even to offer alternatives to dominant positions within the contemporary philosophy of modality. Hence the volume contains not only new scholarship on the early-modern doctrines of Baruch Spinoza, G. W. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Immanuel Kant, but also work relating to less familiar nineteenth-century thinkers such as Alexius Meinong and Jan Łukasiewicz, together with essays on celebrated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Bertrand Russell, whose modal doctrines have not previously garnered the attention they deserve. The volume thus covers a variety of traditions, and its historical range extends to the end of the twentieth century, since it addresses the legacy of Willard Van Orman Quine’s critique of modality within recent analytic philosophy.

Augustine

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Augustine Of Hippo ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Doctrine Of Creation ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Mind ◽  
First Time

Augustine of Hippo (Thagaste, b. 354–Hippo, d. 430 ce) brings the very person of the thinker onto the philosophical scene for the first time in the history of philosophy, with his existential vicissitudes, his spiritual travails, and his incessant search for truth. Augustine is the ancient figure we know better than anyone else, thanks to the fact that he himself has narrated in the Confessions the external and internal events of his life, from his childhood spent in Roman Africa to his conversion to a radical and demanding form of Christian existence in 386. His conversion also marks the moment in which faith is consciously and programmatically assumed as the starting point of a rational itinerary that aims at understanding the most important truths about God and the human being. Augustine’s contribution to philosophical and theological thought is broad and manifold, from the theory of knowledge and language to the conception of evil and freedom, from the doctrine of creation and time to the analysis of the mind and its acts, from the most difficult questions concerning divine grace and the Trinity to the reading of human history as the interweaving of two mystical ‘cities’. Fundamental terms of the intellectual language of the West—such as ‘sign’, ‘free will’, ‘original sin’, ‘predestination’, ‘relation’—bear the indelible imprint of Augustine’s reflection. Especially sensitive to the influence of Plotinian and Porphyrian Neoplatonism, the gigantic work of this Father of the Church—an essential link between Antiquity and the Middle Ages—has in turn influenced Western Christianity like few others, and through it European culture, right up to modern and contemporary times. Although in Augustine’s thought one cannot clearly distinguish between philosophy and theology, in this article only his works and themes that have greater philosophical prominence today are considered. Therefore, purely theological topics such as the doctrine of divine grace are excluded. Only books published or republished after 1970 are cited, with a few rare exceptions. The remaining bibliography (earlier books, essays contained in collective volumes, and journal articles) can be found by consulting the section Bibliographies.

Aḥmad Yasavī and the Ismāʿīlīs of Badakhshān: Towards a New Social History of Sufi-Shīʿī Relations in Central Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 643-681
Author(s):  
Daniel Beben
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This article examines how a text attributed to the renowned Central Asian Sufi figure Aḥmad Yasavī came to be found within a manuscript produced within the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī community of the Shughnān district of the Badakhshān region of Central Asia. The adoption of this text into an Ismāʿīlī codex suggests an exchange between two disparate Islamic religious traditions in Central Asia between which there has hitherto been little evidence of contact. Previous scholarship on Ismāʿīlī-Sufi relations has focused predominately on the literary and intellectual engagement between these traditions, while the history of persecution experienced by the Ismāʿīlīs at the hands of Sunnī Muslims has largely overshadowed discussions of the social relationship between the Ismāʿīlīs and other Muslim communities in Central Asia. I demonstrate that this textual exchange provides evidence for a previously unstudied social engagement between Ismāʿīlī and Sunnī communities in Central Asia that was facilitated by the rise of the Khanate of Khoqand in the 18th century. The mountainous territory of Shughnān, where the manuscript under consideration originated, has been typically represented in scholarship as isolated prior to the onset of colonial interest in the region in the late 19th century. Building upon recent research on the impact of early modern globalization on Central Asia, I demonstrate that even this remote region was significantly affected by the intensification of globalizing processes in the century preceding the Russian conquest. Accordingly, I take this textual exchange as a starting point for a broader re-evaluation of the Ismāʿīlī-Sufi relationship in Central Asia and of the social ‘connectivity’ of the Ismāʿīlīs and the Badakhshān region within early modern Eurasia.

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