The Age of Revolutions

Author(s):  
Conrad L. Donakowski

A variety of economic, ideological, aesthetic, and nationalist forces shape Christian worship in its varied manifestations today. Historical perspectives and areas of knowledge which are too often discussed in compartmentalized fashion are presented here as acting with and on each other and often serving each other’s purposes. Liturgical, musical, artistic, and architectural expressions are shown to be inextricably bound not only to theology, philosophy, and ecclesial hierarchy but also to political and socioeconomic structural change, technological innovation, and—not least—the culture and the human need for authentic spiritual experience. The Enlightenment “Age of Reason,” Romanticism, the nation-state, and the Industrial Revolution from the 17th through the 19th centuries affected religious practices that were the only mass medium that reached into every town, house, and heart. Connections are established with not only overtly religious events such as urban Evangelism, preservation of old architecture, the Oxford movement, and tradition versus innovation but also socialistic communal experiments and ethnic conflict among US immigrants.

Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a moment when scholars and thinkers across Europe reflected on how they saw their relationship with the past, especially classical antiquity. Many readers in the Renaissance had appreciated the writings of ancient Latin and Greek authors not just for their literary value, but also as important sources of information that could be usefully applied in their own age. By the late seventeenth century, however, it was felt that the authority of the ancients was no longer needed and that their knowledge had become outdated thanks to scientific discoveries as well as the new paradigms of rationalism and empiricism. Those working on the ancient past and its literature debated new ways of defending their relevance for society. The different approaches to classical literature defended in these debates explain how the writings of ancient Greece and Rome could become a vital part of eighteenth-century culture and political thinking. Through its analysis of the debates on the value of the classics for the eighteenth century, this book also makes a more general point on the Enlightenment. Although often seen as an age of reason and modernity, the Enlightenment in Europe continuously looked back for inspiration from preceding traditions and ages such as Renaissance humanism and classical antiquity. Finally, the pressure on scholars in the eighteenth century to popularize their work and be seen as contributing to society is a parallel for our own time in which the value of the humanities is a continuous topic of debate.


Author(s):  
Claude Markovits

This chapter deals with the question of innovation in Indian business from a historical perspective. After a brief survey of the literature, emphasizing how divided scholarly opinion was regarding the existence of forms of innovation in Indian business prior to the colonial era, the focus shifts to the British period. It is shown that Schumpeter’s definition of innovation equating it with technological innovation cannot be fruitfully applied to the Indian business scene. Two case studies are then proposed: Tata Iron & Steel, the largest Indian industrial firm, is shown to have been innovative in the specific context of India’s backward industrial scene, while the Sindwork merchants of Hyderabad are an instance of an Indian trading network which extended its range to the entire world. Concluding remarks interrogate post-Independence developments and stress the limits of the innovativeness of Indian business, prior to the recent liberal reforms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Dag Herbjørnsrud ◽  

The Age of Enlightenment is more global and complex than the standard Eurocentric Colonial Canon narrative presents. For example, before the advent of unscientific racism and the systematic negligence of the contributions of Others outside of “White Europe,” Raphael centered Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in his Vatican fresco “Causarum Cognitio” (1511); the astronomer Edmund Halley taught himself Arabic to be more enlightened; The Royal Society of London acknowledged the scientific method developed by Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen). In addition, if we study the Transatlantic texts of the late 18th century, it is not Kant, but instead enlightened thinkers like Anton Wilhelm Amo (born in present-day’s Ghana), Phillis Wheatley (Senegal region), and Toussaint L’Ouverture (Haiti), who mostly live up to the ideals of reason, humanism, universalism, and human rights. One obstacle to developing a more balanced presentation of the Age of the Enlightenment is the influence of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and methodological nationalism. Consequently, this paper, part II of two, will also deal with the European Enlightenment’s unscientific heritage of scholarly racism from the 1750s. It will be demonstrated how Linnaeus, Hume, Kant, and Hegel were among the Founding Fathers of intellectual white supremacy within the Academy. Hence, the Age of Enlightenment is not what we are taught to believe. This paper will demonstrate how the lights from different “Global Enlightenments” can illuminate paths forward to more dialogue and universalism in the 21st century.


1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Fetzer

Perhaps no technological innovation has so dominated the second half of the twentieth century as has the introduction of the programmable computer. It is quite difficult if not impossible to imagine how contemporary affairs—in business and science, communications and transportation, governmental and military activities, for example—could be conducted without the use of computing machines, whose principal contribution has been to relieve us of the necessity for certain kinds of mental exertion. The computer revolution has reduced our mental labors by means of these machines, just as the Industrial Revolution reduced our physical labor by means of other machines.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Scott

This chapter concerns the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution involved the transformation of organic economies by means of a complex of changes which gave birth to the modern world. In Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere those economies were agricultural. Thus the chapter discusses the replacement of an economy 80 per cent of the output of which might have been agricultural by another in which manufacturing became the dominant sector. This involved a transition in the scale of manufacturing from artisanal to large-scale workshop and then factory production. In Britain, that entailed technological innovation, but it would not have been possible in the first place without prior sustained changes in the rest of the economy and society.


2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Clark

The British Industrial Revolution is the key break in world history. Yet the timing, location, and cause of this Revolution are unsolved puzzles. Joel Mokyr's book is one of a number of recent attempted solutions. He explains the Industrial Revolution through the arrival of a particular ideology in Britain, associated with the earlier European intellectual movement of the Enlightenment. This review considers how Mokyr's “idealist” approach fares as an account of the Industrial Revolution, compared to the spate of recent proposed “materialist” explanations. (JEL N13, N63)


Author(s):  
Rajashree Chaurasia

Human beings are the only mammals to be able to utilize high-level cognitive functions to build knowledge, innovate, and communicate their complex ideas. Imagination, creativity, and innovation are interlinked in the sense that one leads to the other. This chapter details the concepts of imagery, imagination, and creativity and their inter-relationships in the first section. Next, the author discusses the historical perspectives of imagination pertaining to the accounts of famous philosophers and psychologists like Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Sartre, Husserl, and Wittgenstein. Section 3 and 4 present the neuro-biological correlates of imagination and creativity, respectively. Brain regions, neuronal circuits, genetic basis, as well as the evolutionary perspective of imagination and creativity are elicited in these sections. Finally, creativity and innovation are explored as to how they will contribute to knowledge build-up and advances in science, engineering, and business in the fourth industrial revolution and the imagination age.


Author(s):  
Idris Olayiwola Ganiyu ◽  
Ola Olusegun Oyedele ◽  
Evelyn Derera

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has resulted in the disruption of the world of work whereby technological innovation such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. These disruptions may be creative in that as some jobs are lost due to the development of artificial intelligence, new ones are created. This chapter explored the impact of disruptive technological innovations on the future of work. The skill gaps brought about by the emergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution was also explored in this chapter.


Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa

This book is a sequel to A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the new discipline, of a major paradigm shift. The nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the traditional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s discovery of monotheism. This model was largely discarded during the Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postulated family of the Aryan, or Indo-European religions, while Judaism and Islam were identified as Semitic religions....


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