A Time of Novelty

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Wright
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Philosophical Community

This book argues that a philosophical community emerged in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India that crafted an intellectual life on the basis of intellectual and emotional responses to novelty in Sanskrit logic (nyāya-śāstra). As the book demonstrates, novelty was a primary concept used by Sanskrit logicians during this period to mark the boundaries of a philosophical community in both intellectual and emotional terms. This concept was expressed in their texts through the use of terms such as “old” and “new” when discussing certain philosophical opinions, signaling that periodization was a major component of their philosophy. By retaining space for emotion when studying intellectual thought, this book recovers not only what it means to “think” novelty but also what it means to “feel” novelty. Studying little-known essays by Sanskrit logicians in early modernity, the book explores the contours of what is termed “intellectual novelty” and “affective novelty” in Sanskrit logic—expressions of novelty in which is contained both cognitive and emotional content that, taken together, constitute intellectual life. As these expressions ultimately collapse into each other, the book argues that what emerges is an imaginative process that brings into being a new philosophical community.

Conclusion: A Time of Novelty

2021 ◽  
pp. 209-218
Author(s):  
Samuel Wright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Primary Element ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophical Community

The Conclusion explores how novelty functions as the primary element through which intellectual and emotional responses to nyāya philosophy are generated and how they define intellectual life in early modern India. As these responses ultimately collapse into each other, it argues that what emerges is an imaginative process that brings into being a new philosophical community. It draws on certain theories in Sanskrit hermeneutics and literary theory as well as offers concluding thoughts on how novelty is able to alter the direction of the history of philosophy.

Confession as Encounter with Early Modernity

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-58
Author(s):  
Nadieszda Kizenko
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Practical Purpose ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Social Discipline ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Control

Chapter 1 examines confession in seventeenth-century Muscovy and Ukraine as part of the European ‘disciplinary revolution’. In their use of confession as a way of meeting challenges to religious and political harmony, seventeenth-century Russia and Ukraine resembled the broad European tendency to religious unification, social discipline, and control. First separately, and then together, Muscovite and Ukrainian clerics in the seventeenth century began to emphasize the sacraments in ways similar to that pursued in the Roman Catholic world. Their emphasis on confession created a new religious culture that brought Orthodox East Slavs into the religious and disciplinary framework of modern Europe. The Old Believer schism in the middle of the century gave confession a practical purpose: it was the most effective way of establishing who was Orthodox, and therefore broadly reliable, and who was schismatic, and therefore dangerous.

Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajeev Kinra
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Popular Memory ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
Cultural Historiography

Despite many advances in recent scholarship, a good deal of Mughal cultural historiography—not to mention the popular memory of the Mughal era—is still dominated by attention to the patronage and liberal outlooks of two figures, the Emperor Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and his great-grandson, Prince Dara Shukoh (1615–1659), both of whom are viewed as having been especially, even heroically, tolerant toward the non-Muslims in their midst. However, while both of these men are certainly worthy of the attention they have received, the emphasis on their individual contributions to the Mughal attitude of ‘universal civility’ (ṣulḥ-i kull) has in some ways obscured the broader cultures of everyday tolerance that pervaded Mughal life in the seventeenth century. This article aims to present a preliminary—though far from exhaustive—survey of evidence for this broader and continuing Mughal approach to handling India’s diversity in the post-Akbar period and to try and connect it, via the suggestive comments of several influential European commentators of the early Enlightenment, to the larger connected histories of tolerance in global early modernity.

Emotional Content in Wikipedia Articles on Negative Man-Made and Nature-Made Events

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Greving ◽  
Aileen Oeberst ◽  
Joachim Kimmerle ◽  
Ulrike Cress
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Negative Events ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Events Study

Wikipedia emphasizes the objectivity of content. Yet, Wikipedia articles also deal with negative events that potentially elicit intense emotions. Undesirable outcomes (e.g., earthquakes) are known to elicit sadness, while undesirable outcomes caused by others’ actions (e.g., terrorist attacks) are known to elicit anger. Internet users’ emotional responses are likely to end up in Wikipedia articles on those events as characteristics of Internet users spill over to Wikipedia articles. Therefore, we expected that Wikipedia articles on terrorist attacks contain more anger-related and less sadness-related content than articles on earthquakes. We analyzed newly created Wikipedia articles about the two events (Study 1) as well as more current versions of those Wikipedia articles after the events had already happened (Study 2). The results supported our expectations. Surprisingly, Wikipedia articles on those two events contained more emotional content than related Wikipedia talk pages (Study 3). We discuss the implications for Wikipedia and future research.

scholarly journals Custom and the Social Organisation of Writing in Early Modern England

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 257-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Wood
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
English Society ◽  
Mind Set

Social historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have tended to see literacy as a modernising force which eroded oral tradition and overrode local identities. Whereas the increasing literacy of the period has long appeared an important constituent element of Tudor and Stuart England's early modernity, custom has been represented as its mirror image. Attached to cumbersome local identities, borne from the continuing authority of speech, bred within a plebeian culture which was simultaneously pugnacious and conservative, customary law has been taken to define a traditional, backward-looking mind-set which stood at odds to the sharp forces of change cutting into the fabric of early modern English society. 1 Hence, social historians have sometimes perceived the growing elite hostility to custom as a part of a larger attack upon oral culture. In certain accounts, this elite antipathy is presented as a by-product of die standardising impulses of early capitalism. 2 Social historians have presented the increasing role of written documents in the defence of custom as the tainting of an authentic oral tradition, and as further evidence of the growing dom-nation of writing over speech. Crudely stated, orality, and hence custom, is seen as ‘of the people’; while writing was ‘of the elite’. In this respect as in others, social historians have therefore accepted all too readily John Aubrey's nostalgic recollections of late seventeenth century that Before printing, Old Wives tales were ingeniose and since Printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civil warres, the ordinary Sort of people were not taught to reade & now-a-dayes Books are common and most of the poor people understand letters: and the many good Bookes and the variety of Turnes of Affaires, have putt the old Fables out of dores: and the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder have frighted away Robin-good-fellowe and the Fayries.

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