Locke's review of the Principia

1965 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-161 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Political Exile ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
Independent Account

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).

scholarly journals O CONCEITO DE “INFÂNCIA” NO CONTEXTO DA MODERNIDADE EUROPEIA (SÉCULOS XVII-XIX)

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dulce Regina Baggio Osinski ◽  
Amanda Siqueira Torres Cunha
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
John Locke ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Education History ◽  
Port Royal ◽  
Friedrich Froebel ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts

Este artigo analisa o conceito de “infância” a partir de formulações que marcaram a modernidade, inserindo-se no campo das pesquisas em história intelectual da educação e relacionando-se de modo mais específico com a história dos conceitos. A investigação tratará do contexto europeu, definindo como recorte temporal o período entre os séculos XVII e XIX. As reflexões de Reinhart Koselleck a partir do campo da história dos conceitos serão cotejadas com as de autores como Ariès, Becchi, Herrero, Levin e Kohan, que discutem a infância em perspectiva histórica. Como fontes, serão analisados os discuros de intelectuais envolvidos com a infância e sua formação, tais como os mestre de Port-Royal, Immanuel Kant, John  Locke, Denis Diderot, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi e Friedrich Froebel, os quais evidenciam a construção, manutenção ou ressignificação do conceito de infância no decorrer do tempo, graças a movimentos de circulação e apropriação. Foi possível perceber, no período analisado, que o conceito de infância em circulação no século XVII e início do século XVIII, relacionado a um número maior de aspectos negativos e concebido como um momento da vida imperfeito, pecaminoso e separado da vida adulta, cedeu paulatinamente lugar, até meados do século XIX, à ideia de um período com características próprias e relevante para a concretização do projeto de homem moderno.Palavras-chave: História da educação; história dos conceitos; conceito de infância; infância e modernidade.THE CONCEPT OF "CHILDHOOD" IN THE CONTEXT OF EUROPEAN MODERNITY (XVII-XIX CENTURIES)AbstractThis article analyzes the concept of "childhood" from formulations that marked modernity, inserting itself in the field of research in the intellectual history of education and relating more specifically to the history of concepts. The research will deal with the European context, defining as temporal cut-off the period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Reinhart Koselleck's reflections from the field of concept history will be compared with authors such as Ariès, Becchi, Herrero, Levin and Kohan, who discuss childhood in historical perspective. As sources, the discourses of intellectuals involved with childhood and its formation, such as the Masters of Port-Royal, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel and Jean Jacques Rousseau, will be analyzed, which put in evidence the construction, maintenance or re-signification of the concept of childhood in the course of time, thanks to movements of circulation and appropriation. It was possible to perceive, in the analyzed period, that the concept of childhood in circulation in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, related to a greater number of negative aspects and conceived as a moment of imperfect, sinful life separated from adult life, gradually gave place, until de nineteenth century, to the idea of a period with its own characteristics and relevant to the realization of the modern man project.Key-words: History of education; history of concepts; concept of childhood; childhood and modernity.EL CONCEPTO DE "INFANCIA" EN EL CONTEXTO DE LA MODERNIDAD EUROPEA (SÉCULOS XVII-XIX) Resumen Este artículo analiza el concepto de "infancia" a partir de formulaciones que marcaron la modernidad, insertándose en el campo de las investigaciones en historia intelectual de la educación y relacionándose de modo más específico con la historia de los conceptos. La investigación tratará del contexto europeo, definiendo como recorte temporal el período entre los siglos XVII y XIX. Las reflexiones de Reinhart Koselleck a partir del campo de la historia de los conceptos serán cotejadas con autores como Ariès, Becchi, Herrero, Levin y Kohan, que discuten la infancia en perspectiva histórica. Como fuentes, se analizarán los discursos de intelectuales involucrados con la infancia y su formación, como los maestros de Port-Royal, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel y Jean Jacques Rousseau, que evidencian la construcción, el mantenimiento o la resignificación del concepto de infancia en el transcurso del tiempo, gracias a movimientos de circulación y apropiación. En el período analizado, el concepto de infancia en circulación en el siglo XVII y el inicio del siglo XVIII, que se relacionó con un número mayor de aspectos negativos, siendo concebido como un momento de la vida imperfecto, pecaminoso y separado de la vida adulta, cedió paulatinamente lugar, hasta el siglo XIX, a la idea de un período con características propias y relevantes para la concreción del proyecto de hombre moderno.Palabras clave: Historia de la educación; historia de los conceptos; concepto de infancia; la infancia y la modernidad.   

The Historical Background

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svend Brinkmann
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Modern Natural Science ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This chapter presents a selected history of Western philosophy from the Greeks to modern times, arguing that the very idea of qualitative research is a child of modernity’s split between the objective and subjective, quanta and qualia. This split became significant with the birth of modern natural science (Galilei, Newton, and Descartes), giving rise to the question of how to study those aspects of the world that do not seem to fit the perspective of the physical sciences. This question was answered in different ways by the British empiricists from John Locke onwards and also by Immanuel Kant in Germany.

Hayden White

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karyn Ball ◽  
Ewa Domańska
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hayden White ◽  
The French Revolution

Hayden White (b. 12 July 1928–d. 5 March 2018) was a groundbreaking critic of conventional historiography whose emphasis on the moral, rhetorical, aesthetic, and fictive valences of narrative as a mode of figuration unsettled professional historians’ tendency to disavow the role of the imagination and form in the selective arrangement of evidence. Despite Metahistory’s manifest affinity with structuralist approaches, White’s 1973 monograph is widely viewed as having inaugurated a “postmodernist” critique of narrative historiography that resonated with the growing influence of a postwar, anti-positivist “linguistic turn” stressing the figural dynamics of texts as objects of discourse. In grasping the implications of referential fragility, White articulated a quintessentially Nietzschean antipathy toward naively mimetic notions of “truth” that govern history treated as an objective mirror rather than as an imaginative construction of the past. In consonance with Roland Barthes, White recognized that narrative historiography shared stylistic ground with realist fiction in adhering to poetic conventions that shore up the “referential illusion,” or the reader’s feeling that descriptive writing bears an intimate relationship with a sometimes arbitrary and disordered reality. Insisting upon historical narrative’s status as a verbal structure, White additionally demonstrated that history’s figural operations are irreducible to a rigorously logical methodology and “science” as such insofar as history’s form reflects choices that cannot be evaluated on epistemological grounds. For this reason, while traditional historians continue to disavow the import of White’s interventions, scholarship in the humanities and social sciences attests to his abiding influence beyond the critique of historiography. Before the appearance in 1973 of the textbook The Greco-Roman Tradition and his monograph Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White translated Carlo Antoni’s From History to Sociology: The Transition in German Historical Thinking from Italian (with a foreword by Benedetto Croce) (1959); co-authored two textbooks respectively entitled The Emergence of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, Vol. 1: From the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution (1966) with Willson H. Coates and J. Salwyn Schapiro; and, again with Coates, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, Vol. 2: Since the French Revolution (1970). White also edited The Uses of History: Essays in Intellectual and Social History (1968) and co-edited Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium with Giorgio Tagliacozzo (1969). With his wife, Professor Margaret Brose, White co-edited Representing Kenneth Burke in 1982, but following Metahistory, he primarily published essays, some of which reappeared in four collections: Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978); The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987); Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999); and The Practical Past (2014). The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007, an anthology of White’s essays, co-edited and introduced by Robert Doran, appeared in 2010.

Sources of the Self From the Renaissance to the 20th Century

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elwin Hofman
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
John Locke ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Self ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Absence Of Power

The history of the self studies continuities and changes in ideas about and experiences of the individual mind through time, attending to questions of individuality, identity, stability, self-possession, and interiority. Traditionally, this subject has often been approached as an intellectual history, analyzing philosophers’ explicit writings about the self. Through the work of people such as René Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, scholars have traced a growing sense of individuality and self-possession since the 16th century, and an increasing feeling of inner depth since the 18th century. The focus on intellectual sources of the self has been criticized, however, by scholars who stress the importance of practices and of social differences. They have broadened the scope of the field by looking at cultural sources, such as autobiographical writing, literature, art, rituals, and festivities. Still other historians have criticized the absence of power in many accounts of the history of the self and stress the institutional and political sources of the self, including religious institutions, schools, and legal systems. Throughout these different approaches, debates continue about whether a “modern self” can be traced, and when such a modern self can be situated. While many recent scholars stress the need to examine different cultures of the self at any given time in their own right, others argue that it remains important to trace grand shifts in this history.

Contexts (I)

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-94
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
William James ◽  
History Of ◽  
Franz Brentano ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

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.

scholarly journals TH. HOBBES’ VISIBLE RHETORIC: A CASE STUDY OF HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS / T. HOBBESO VIZUALIOJI RETORIKA: POLITINIŲ IDĖJŲ ISTORIJOS ATVEJO ANALIZĖ

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-107
Author(s):  
Béla Mester
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Cambridge School

In the topic of this article, it is the early modern intellectual history; it will be offered at first an overview of the approaches of the parallelism between the researches of words, pictures, and gestures, based on the author's personal experiences as a researcher of this epoch. The first examples will be several loci of English classics, John Milton, and John Locke; then it will be mentioned the significance of the methodology of the “Iconic Turn,” with the concept of “pictorial (speech) act”, and with the history of religious art. At the end of this overview it will be mentioned briefly the methodological contribution of the Cambridge school of intellectual history, and that of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe of Reinhart Koselleck. Second part of this article will offer a historical example from the early modern age. The first one is an analysis of several details of Thomas Hobbes’ ambivalent relationship with the antique tradition of rhetoric, and their consequences for the visual sphere. Šio straipsnio tema – moderniųjų laikų pradžios intelektualinė istorija. Pirmoje jo dalyje pateikiama tarp mokslinių tyrinėjimų, skirtų žodžiams, vaizdams ir gestams, susiklostančių paralelių traktavimo bendroji samprata. Vienoks ar kitoks jų traktavimas priklauso nuo autoriaus, kaip toje epochoje gyvenančio tyrėjo, asmeninių patirčių. Pirmieji pavyzdžiai – tai keletas anglų klasikų, tokių kaip Johnas Miltonas ir Johnas Locke'as. Paskui pabrėžiama „vaizdinio posūkio“ metodologijos „vaizdavimo (kalbėjimo) akto“ koncepto, religinio meno istorijos svarba. Galiausiai trumpai paminimas Kembridžo mokyklos indėlis į intelektualinę istoriją ir Reinharto Kosellecko Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Antroje straipsnio dalyje pateikiamas istorinis pavyzdys iš ankstyvosios moderniosios epochos. Pirmiausia imamasi Thomaso Hobbeso ambivalentiško santykio su antikine retorikos tradicija keleto detalių analizės, o paskui aptariama šio santykio įtaka vizualumo sričiai.

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