scholarly journals The metaphysical standing of the human: A future for the history of the human sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Fuller

I reconstruct my own journey into the history of the human sciences, which I show to have been a process of discovering the metaphysical standing of the human. I begin with Alexandre Koyré’s encounter with Edmund Husserl in the 1930s, which I use to throw light on the legacy of Kant’s ‘anthropological’ understanding of the human, which dominated and limited 19th-century science. As I show, those who broke from Kant’s strictures and set the stage for the 20th-century revolutions in science - from Hegel, to John McTaggart, to Max Weber - typically were pursuing crypto-theological questions about how a finite being can comprehend an infinite universe. This journey is about the ‘common measure’ of being human, which is what links Plato to Kuhn, but has been most consistently taken up by law. I suggest that in seeking this ‘measure of man’, we may discover that to be human is not necessarily to be Homo sapiens, which would suggest a radical reorientation of the history of the human sciences.

2017 ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Inna Põltsam-Jürjo

From “heathens’ cakes” to “pig’s ears”: tracing a food’s journey across cultures, centuries and cookbooks It is intriguing from the perspective of food history to find in 19th and 20th century Estonian recipe collections the same foods – that is, foods sharing the same names – found back in European cookbooks of the 14th and 15th centuries. It is noteworthy that they have survived this long, and invites a closer study of the phenomenon. For example, 16th century sources contain a record about the frying of heathen cakes, a kind of fritter, in Estonia. A dish by the same name is also found in 18th and 19th century recipe collections. It is a noteworthy phenomenon for a dish to have such a long history in Estonian cuisine, spanning centuries in recipe collections, and merits a closer look. Medieval European cookbooks listed two completely different foods under the name of heathen cakes and both were influenced from foods from the east. It is likely that the cakes made it to Tallinn and finer Estonian cuisine through Hanseatic merchants. It is not ultimately clear whether a single heathen cake recipe became domesticated in these parts already in the Middle Ages. In any case, heathen cakes would remain in Estonian cuisine for several centuries. As late as the early 19th century, the name in the local Baltic German cuisine referred to a delicacy made of egg-based batter fried in oil. Starting from the 18th century, the history of these fritters in Estonian cuisine can be traced through cookbooks. Old recipe collections document the changes and development in the tradition of making these cakes. The traditions of preparing these cakes were not passed on only in time, but circulated within society, crossing social and class lines. Earlier known from the elites’ culture, the dish reached the tables of ordinary people in the late 19th and early 20th century. In Estonian conditions, it meant the dish also crossed ethnic lines – from the German elite to the Estonian common folk’s menus. In the course of adaptation process, which was dictated and guided by cookbooks and cooking courses, the name of the dish changed several times (heydenssche koken, klenätid, Räderkuchen, rattakokid, seakõrvad), and changes also took place in the flavour nuances (a transition from spicier, more robust favours to milder ones) and even the appearance of the cakes. The story of the heathen cakes or pig’s ears in Estonian cuisine demonstrates how long and tortuous an originally elite dish can be as it makes its way to the tables of the common folk. The domestication and adaptation of such international recipes in the historical Estonian cuisine demonstrates the transregional cultural exchange, as well as culinary mobility and communication.


2006 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Egidio Nardi

This article aims to describe important points in the history of panic disorder concept, as well as to highlight the importance of its diagnosis for clinical and research developments. Panic disorder has been described in several literary reports and folklore. One of the oldest examples lies in Greek mythology - the god Pan, responsible for the term panic. The first half of the 19th century witnessed the culmination of medical approach. During the second half of the 19th century came the psychological approach of anxiety. The 20th century associated panic disorder to hereditary, organic and psychological factors, dividing anxiety into simple and phobic anxious states. Therapeutic development was also observed in psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic fields. Official classifications began to include panic disorder as a category since the third edition of the American Classification Manual (1980). Some biological theories dealing with etiology were widely discussed during the last decades of the 20th century. They were based on laboratory studies of physiological, cognitive and biochemical tests, as the false suffocation alarm theory and the fear network. Such theories were important in creating new diagnostic paradigms to modern psychiatry. That suggests the need to consider a wide range of historical variables to understand how particular features for panic disorder diagnosis have been developed and how treatment has emerged.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Sonia Santos Gómez

Tempera painting on canvas has played multiple functions throughout the history of painting. They were used to cover altars in Lent, to make canopies and ceilings for beds, to act as organ doors, etc. In the 19th century and in the earlier 20th century, they were used as adornment on walls of palaces and theatres, as well as sceneries in the latter ones. Generally, this kind of tempera painting shows large proportions, which demanded a specific methodology of execution. Treatises of the epoch display how the painter, provided with paintbrushes of long handles, as brooms, walked on the canvases while the execution lasted. At that time, pigments derived from the activity of modern industry were already in use, in combination with other materials traditionally used in the previous centuries. This article presents the working methodology and materials used in tempera painting on canvas, mainly during the 19th century, providing a knowledge base for this subject.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1020
Author(s):  
Richard Newton

This thought experiment in comparison ponders a Black man’s conviction that his Hebrew identity would make him immune to COVID-19. Surfacing the history of the claims and the scholar’s own suspicions, the paper examines the layered politics of identification. Contra an essentialist understanding of the terms, “Hebrew” and “Hebrews” are shown to be classificatory events, ones imbricated in the dynamics of racecraft. Furthermore, a contextualization of the “race religion” model of 19th century scholarship, 20th century US religio-racial movements, and the complicated legacy of Tuskegee in 21st century Black vaccine hesitancy help to outline the need for inquisitiveness rather than hubris in matters of comparison. In so doing, this working paper advances a model of the public scholar as a questioner of categories and a diagnostician of classification.


Diacronia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gheorghe Chivu

The history of the verbal forms sum and sunt, introduced into the literary writing by the Transylvanian Latinist School, reveals a winding process in the elaboration of certain cultured norms proper to the modern literary Romanian. Not at all linear, this process was concurrently influenced by two, often divergent, tendencies that were active from the end of the 18th century up to the beginning of the 20th century: the use of some cultured forms, borrowed from Latin or created according to Latin patterns; and the revitalization of certain linguistic forms with regional diffusion. Initially proposed as literary pronunciations, the two verbal forms were soon adopted and used as etymological graphic forms that corresponded to sîm and suntu from certain conservative patois. During the second half of the 19th century (sum), and during the first decades of the 20th century (sunt), the two graphic forms became orthoepic norms as well, due to the phonological tradition of the Romanian writing.


Author(s):  
Luidmila Pastushenko

The article presents the first attempt of a complete and systematic analysis of historic and theological publications of teachers and pupils of the Kyiv Theological Academy in the second half of the 19th – beginning of 20th century in the field of studying the history of relations of Catholicism and Protestantism with Orthodox on the Ukrainian lands. The specifics of Kyiv academic historians studies was determined by the social and-political circumstances in the middle of the 19th century and denoted by an attempt to comprehend this issue in the perspective of the history of interconfessional relations of two Western Christian traditions with the eastern tradition of Orthodoxy in the historical gap of the 16th – 17th centuries – the period of the largest confrontation in confessional relations in Ukraine. The author clarifies the characteristic features of researching the question of inter-confessional interaction in the 15th – 17th centuries, which are expressed in attempts to describe the coexistence of three denominations as multidimensional and provoking а variety of different interpretations. Historical studies present the attempt to show confessional interaction in the political and legal aspects and to provide historical interpretations to the ground of philosophy of history. The article proves the tendency of Kyiv academic researchers to move away from the established Russian historiography of the 19th century view at confessional relations in Ukraine through the prism of hard confrontation and outline in religious life Ukraine conditions and circumstances of inter-confessional dialogue. Also, historians in their studies repeatedly note the significant educational and outlook influence of Western Christian denominations on the formation of educational, cultural, theological, literary traditions in Ukraine.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 137 ◽  
Author(s):  
McRobert Lewis ◽  
Veronica Ponzio

This analysis seeks to examine the history and development of moral/character education in America during the 20th century providing structure for the character education movement in today’s educational context. The common denominator and key to character education for the future is community. The concept of community connects the three aforementioned themes and provides a roadmap for better implementation of character education. Careful consideration is given to the interaction and contributions of the school and society in terms of promoting and developing character education. Though there is generous support from politicians, educators, and parents, character education is still somewhat mired by its lack of scope. This examination proposes that current character education proponents can find new frameworks for implementation by observing the history of character education.


2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-224
Author(s):  
Jarosław Pacuła

The article presents the history of the student jargon. The author describes the vocabulary used in the period: second-half the 19th century – first half the 20th century; the lexis belongs to the thematic category „cheating”. In the text the reader gets to know theses: 1) the lexis discussed is the root cause of one of the most extensive lexical-semantic categories of the student jargon in the post-partition period (after the period of the Partitions of Poland); 2) in former student language a shared store of the vocabulary exists – this group is independent of the administrative dependence of schools; 3) we notice much former vocabulary in the contemporary jargon; 4) we will notice jargon words in the general Polish in the 19th century; 7) we can see the participation of criminal jargon from the 19th century.


Author(s):  
Agata Łuksza

The author recognizes Włodzimierz Perzyński’s comedy Aszantka as a meaningful remnant of „blackness” in the history of Polish theatre, and therefore she uses it as a point of entrance into a broader inquiry about the entanglement of Polish society into European colonial project, and the ideas, values, and cultural practices it entailed. That is why in the article the author attempts to reconstruct possible concepts and images of “blackness” which Warsaw dwellers might have shared at the end of the 19th century by analysing the reception of the performances of alleged representatives of Ashanti people in the Warsaw circus in 1888. From “Ashanti” performances on, the popularity of this type of entertainment – so called ethnographic shows or human zoos – grew in the colonized capital of the Kingdom of Poland. The author points to “savageness” and “nakedness” as constitutive traits of “blackness” which she understands as a specific human condition, experienced both by overseas colonized societies as well as subaltern social groups (to which “Aszantka” from Perzyński’s comedy belonged) in European societies.


Author(s):  
Ben Hutchinson

Seen from a Western perspective, the history of comparative literature can be divided into three categories: how European literatures have been compared inside Europe; how European literature has been compared with other cultures outside Europe; and how literatures outside Europe have been compared among themselves. ‘History and heroes’ explains how from the empire building of the 19th century, via the Jewish diaspora of the 20th century, to the postcolonial culture wars of the 21st century, the problems and prejudices of comparative literature have formed a cultural counterpart to the problems and prejudices of modernity. To understand its history, in this spirit, is to understand why it matters.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document