Anthropology and Original Sin

2019 ◽  
pp. 216-234
Author(s):  
Constance Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Development ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Evolutionary Anthropology ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Primitive Society

The legacies of rejected nineteenth-century models of evolutionary anthropology remain influential. Nineteenth-century founders of the discipline such as E. B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan aspired to study human societies, including morals and religion, as natural phenomena, reflecting a natural order. In the context of shared assumptions about race and empire they postulated a trajectory from primitive society to civilization, identifying ‘primitive’ societies as remnant populations arrested at early stages of evolutionary development—the ‘childhood of the race’. Rejecting the racial and teleological implications of this trajectory, Franz Boas argued that anthropology and other historical sciences differed fundamentally from the nomothetic, law-giving physical sciences. Naturalism has become problematic for some anthropologists—not in the sense that the ‘God hypothesis’ has returned as methodology, but manifested in an uneasiness about definitions of culture and of human nature in naturalistic, deterministic, reductionist, and biological terms.

The Modernity of Kinship

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Building Block ◽  
Darwinian Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Development ◽  
European Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
Elemental Form

Chapter 1 explores the modern values that have animated kinship studies since their emergence in the nineteenth century. It examines the sudden invention of kinship by Johann Bachofen, Henry Maine, John Ferguson McLennan, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and Lewis Henry Morgan in the 1860s, and the internal and external developments in the West that prompted their discoveries: revolutionary agitation, the engagement with “primitives” around the globe, industrialization and the disintegration of old solidarities, and intellectual revolutions in the study of prehistory, especially Indo-European studies and Darwinian evolution. Social theorists transformed kinship into an elemental form of human sociality and evolutionary development, and a building block of the emerging liberal order as the West coped with the ontological sea change wrought by the desacralization and industrialization of society.

scholarly journals The Devil, Superstition, and the Fragmentation of Magic

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-80
Author(s):  
Sean Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Philosophie Naturelle ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Witch Hunt ◽  
Expanded Concept

Using mostly English sources of the witch hunt era, this article demonstrates that the “fragmentation of Renaissance occultism” argued by John Henry and others involved redefining the term “superstition.” At the start of the witch hunt era, superstition was the antonym to religion; by the 1620s, when the witch hunt peaked, Francis Bacon was presenting his new philosophy as the antonym to superstition and its twin idolatry. This change in the signification of superstition was causally linked to the devil, who was both master and goal of all superstition and idolatry. Superstition was redefined and the devil was rethought as aspects of the same process, as critics of the witch hunt concluded that it was superstition to believe the devil could affect the natural order. The early stages of this redefinition drew on a concept from early classical natural philosophy that has been labelled “double determination” by G. E. R. Lloyd. Eventually the expanded concept of superstition became the counterfoil to the new philosophy. Employant principalement des sources de la période de la chasse aux sorcières, cet article démontre que la « fragmentation de l’occultisme de la Renaissance », soutenu par John Henry et d’autres, impliquait une redéfinition du terme « superstition ». Au début de la période de la chasse aux sorcières, superstition était antonyme de religion. Dès les années 1620, au summum de la chasse aux sorcières, Francis Bacon présentait sa nouvelle philosophie comme l’antonyme de la superstition et de l’idolâtrie qui lui associée. Ce changement dans la signification de la superstition était lié au diable, qui était à la fois maître et objectif de toute superstition et idolâtrie. La superstition est redéfinie et le diable repensé comme aspects du même processus, les critiques de la chasse aux sorcières ayant conclu qu’il était superstitieux de croire que le diable pouvait influencer l’ordre naturel. Les premières étapes de cette redéfinition s’inspiraient d’un concept de la philosophie naturelle antique intitulée « double determination » par G. E. R. Lloyd. Finalement, le concept élargi de superstition est devenu la souche de la nouvelle philosophie.

From New Anarchism to Post-anarchism

Kropotkin ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Kinna
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Political Theorist ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines contemporary anarchist critiques of Kropotkin, especially post-anarchist analysis. It argues that science has become a byword to describe Kropotkin's political theory, providing an exemplar for classical anarchism. This theory is described as teleological, based on a particular concept of human nature and linked to a form of revolutionary utopianism that promises the realisation of anarchy. Post-anarchists dissolve the distance between Kropotkin and Bakunin that advocates of his evolutionary theory invented in the 1960s in order to rescue anarchism from its reputation for violence. This repackaging of historical traditions underpins judgments about the irrelevance of anarchism to contemporary politics and political theory. In response, critics of post-anarchism have sought to defend nineteenth-century revolutionary traditions. The result of this argument is that Kropotkin emerges as a political theorist of class struggle. This defence raises significant questions about the coherence of Kropotkin's position on the war in 1914.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Matthew Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Future Study ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
The World ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Narrative Thread ◽  
The Relationship

This introduction considers the ‘environmental turn’ taken in the humanities, and particularly in historical study, suggesting ways in which these developments might animate the future study of nineteenth-century Ireland. Question of agency and the relationship between human and non-human nature are addressed. Also considered is how current environmental concerns, and climate change in particular, should lead us to think anew about the past, rendering familiar subjects unfamiliar. Particular attention is paid to how Ireland’s past might be located within larger global processes, attracting the interest of scholars from throughout the world. It then introduces the individual contributions in the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate how a change in optic can significantly change how we think about Ireland’s recent past.

Scientific History and Experimental History

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolph Roth
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Natural Experiments ◽  
Comparative Analyses ◽  
Experimental History

The promise of scientific history and scientifically informed history is more modest today than it was in the nineteenth century, when a number of intellectuals hoped to transform history into a scientific mode of inquiry that would unite the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and reveal profound truths about human nature and destiny. But Edmund Russell in Evolutionary History and Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson in Natural Experiments of History demonstrate that historians can write interdisciplinary, comparative analyses using the strategies of nonexperimental natural science to search for deep patterns in human behavior and for correlates to those patterns that can lead to a better, though not infallible, understanding of historical causality.

Ali Sedad Bey’s (d. 1900), ()

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nazif Muhtaroglu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Working Mechanism ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
First Time ◽  
Late Ottoman

This chapter presents and evaluates Ali Sedāt’s (d. 1900) Principles of Transformation in the Motion of Particles. In this work, Ali Sedad gives a detailed description of the working mechanism of the whole universe, including topics that range from the interaction of atoms to the emergence of animate bodies and the motion of heavenly bodies. In doing this, he introduces thermodynamics and Darwin’s theory of evolution for the first time to the Turkish-speaking community in a detailed way and discusses the laws behind natural phenomena in a philosophical way. Ali Sedāt’s Principles of Transformation is a unique work introducing the basic principles of the natural sciences in nineteenth-century European circles to the Ottoman world and interpreting them from an Ashʿarite perspective. It shows how an Ashʿarite scholar from the late Ottoman era followed modern science thoroughly but interpreted it critically from its own philosophical point of view.

Graphing Jane Austen

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Carroll ◽  
John A. Johnson ◽  
Jonathan Gottschall ◽  
Daniel Kruger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Dominance Behavior ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Web

Building on findings in evolutionary psychology, we constructed a model of human nature and used it to illuminate the evolved psychology that shapes the organization of characters in nineteenth-century British novels. Characters were rated on the web by 519 scholars and students of Victorian literature. Rated categories include motives, criteria for selecting marital partners, personality traits, and the emotional responses of readers. Respondents assigned characters to roles as protagonists, antagonists, or associates of protagonists or antagonists. We conclude that protagonists and their associates form communities of cooperative endeavor. Antagonists exemplify dominance behavior that threatens community cohesion. We summarize results from the whole body of novels and use them to identify distinctive features in the novels of Jane Austen.

SELF AGAINST CHILDHOOD: THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ALICE MEYNELL TO A PSYCHO-PHYSIOLOGY OF MEMORY

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-268
Author(s):  
Linda M. Austin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
David Hume ◽  
The Self ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
Spinal Chord ◽  
Metaphysical Notion ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Brain

THE IDEA OF THE SELFin its various constructions–political, economic, psychological–has always been shadowed by an English tradition of skepticism about the persistence of a conscious and stable identity. Voiced most disconcertingly by David Hume in his section, “Of personal identity” fromA Treatise of Human Nature(1739–40; I.iv.vi), this attitude was significantly advanced during the second half of the nineteenth century by a group of physiological psychologists who argued for the corporeal basis of mental functions, including memory. Henry Maudsley and George Henry Lewes, among others, challenged the metaphysical notion of a mind and drew instead from controversial and often suppressed theories of neuroscience to describe the physiological operation of memory. These theories, which located impressions and sensations in the brain or spinal chord, produced a form of identity that could endure alterations of consciousness. They offered, in addition, a new understanding of an adult's physical connection to the personal past.

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