Contexts (I)

Author(s):  
John Scholar

Chapter 2 begins the book’s intellectual history of the impression from the seventeenth century to the twentieth (which continues in Chapter 3). These contexts come from two movements, empiricism and aestheticism. Chapter 2 explores empiricist contexts, arguing that James’s impression owes much to empiricist philosophy (John Locke, David Hume), and nineteenth-century empiricist psychology (James Mill, J. S. Mill, Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, William James). By tracking the word ‘impression’, we can see that Locke and Hume’s stress on first-hand observation, and on thought as a kind of perception, are contexts for James’s conception of the imaginative but observant novelist, for the epistemological demands he makes on his readers, and for the way he represents his characters’ consciousnesses, especially in recognition scenes. Nineteenth-century empiricists’ divergence as to the agency of the subject in consciousness is reflected in James’s characters whose impressions by turns assault them from the exterior, or are partly fictions of their own making.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 515-516
Author(s):  
John Vasquez

When the intellectual history of international relations in- quiry is written for our time, War and Peace in International Rivalry may very well be seen as a seminal book. Along with Frank Wayman, Diehl and Goertz have been at the forefront of a major conceptual breakthrough in the way peace and war are studied. This book is their major statement of the subject and presents their most important findings.


Author(s):  
John Scholar

Henry James and the Art of Impressions examines the concept of the ‘impression’ in the essays and late novels of Henry James. Although Henry James criticized the impressionism which was revolutionizing French painting and French fiction, and satirized the British aesthetic movement which championed impressionist criticism, he placed the impression at the heart of his own aesthetic project, as well as his narrative representation of consciousness. This book tries to understand the anomaly that James represents in the wider history of the impression. To do this it charts an intellectual and cultural history of the ‘impression’ from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, drawing in painting, philosophy (John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J.L Austin), psychology (James Mill, J.S. Mill, William James, Ernst Mach, Franz Brentano), literature (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde), and modern critical theory (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). It then offers close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872–88), his prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). It concludes that the term ‘impression’ crystallizes James’s main theme of the struggle between life and art. Coherent philosophical meanings of the Jamesian impression emerge when it is comprehended as a family of related ideas about perception, imagination, and aesthetics—bound together by James’s attempt to reconcile the novel’s value as a mimetic form and its value as a transformative creative activity.


1991 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 21-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Reynolds

The history of mentalities has now become so widely accepted that even British historians sometimes refer to it: one hardly needs to talk aboutmentalitésany more, though the French word still sounds more modish. But the subject goes back at least to Vico. AlthoughWeltanschauungandZeitgeistsound old hat by comparison withmentalitésthe words remind us that nineteenth-century German historians were interested in the different ways past societies may have viewed the world, while F. W. Maitland and Henry Adams are obvious examples of Anglophones who in their different ways tried to understand medieval ways of thought. In 1933 Jean Guitton, a Frenchman, it is true, but one who presumably came out of that older tradition of intellectual history against which Lucien Febvre set himself, wrote about the need to study thementalitéof an age and summed up what he meant by this as ‘the totality of those implicit assumptions which are imposed on us by our environment and which rule our judgements.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.


2009 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Baki Tezcan

AbstractA short chronicle by a former janissary called Tûghî on the regicide of the Ottoman Sultan Osman II in 1622 had a definitive impact on seventeenth-century Ottoman historiography in terms of the way in which this regicide was recounted. This study examines the formation of Tûghî's chronicle and shows how within the course of the year following the regicide, Tûghî's initial attitude, which recognized the collective responsibility of the military caste (kul) in the murder of Osman, evolved into a claim of their innocence. The chronicle of Tûghî is extant in successive editions of his own. A careful examination of these editions makes it possible to follow the evolution of Tûghî's narrative on the regicide in response to the historical developments in its immediate aftermath and thus witness both the evolution of a “primary source” and the gradual political sophistication of a janissary.


1997 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-436
Author(s):  
Chris H. Knights

AbstractThis article is the third in a series of studies on The History of the Rechabites. The first, "The Story of Zosimus or The History of the Rechabites?,"1 established the independent identity of this text within the Christian monastic work, The Story of Zosimus, and was a sort of prolegomena to the study of this text. The second, "Towards a Critical-Introduction to The History of the Rechabites,"2 sought to address the standard introductory issues, such as date, original language, provenance and purpose. The present paper seeks to examine the text verse-by-verse, and to offer a commentary on it. Or, rather, an initial commentary. No commentary of any sort has ever been offered on the Greek text of HistRech before, and it would be foolhardy to claim that any one scholar could perceive all the allusions and meanings in a particular text at a first attempt. This commentary, then, is offered in the same spirit as my two previous studies on HistRech: as a step along the way towards unravelling the meaning of this pseudepigraphon about the Rechabites, not as the last word on the subject.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-115
Author(s):  
Roberto Breña

This article provides an overview of some prominent aspects of intellectual history as practiced today in Latin America, especially regarding conceptual history. It delves into the way this methodology arrived to the region not long ago and discusses the way some of its practitioners combine it with the history of political languages, often ignoring the profound differences between both approaches. Therefore, the text stresses some of the most significant contrasts between them. In its last part, the article is critical of the purported “globality” of global intellectual history, an issue that is inextricably linked with the pervasive use of the English language in the field. Throughout, the text poses several of the challenges that lie ahead for intellectual history in Latin America.


The publication in July 1687 of Newton’s Principia mathematica gave rise to only four reviews in the European periodical press. The first was Edmond Halley’s pre-publication notice in the Philosophical Transactions (1). Then a year elapsed before the Bibliothèque Universelle (2), the Acta Eruditorum (3), and the Journal des Sçavans (4), approached the book. Of these reviews that which appeared in Jean Leclerc’s widely read Bibliothèque Universelle has received least attention from historians. This is unfortunate because, of several merits, two in particular are important for the intellectual history of the period: it was written specifically for the large and growing intellectual class (5) of western Europe who for the most part were interested in the new physical sciences, but were untrained in the mathematics necessary to understand many of the newest advances in them. And the author of this review, which was the first independent account of Newton’s book to reach this Continental (largely French-speaking) audience, was John Locke, then a voluntary political exile in Holland (6).


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