scholarly journals Pierre Monbeig and the Formation of Geography in Brazil (1925-1957): Geohistory of Knowledge, Intellectual History and the Insertion of Brazilian Geography into the World-Science

Author(s):  
Larissa Alves de Lira

This paper aims to present the exemplarity of an intellectual meeting between a French intellectual, trained in history and geography at the Sorbonne, France (before spending time in Spain during the beginning of his doctorate), and the “Brazilian terrain”. From his training to his work as a university professor in Brazil, what I want to characterize is a transnational intellectual context in the domain of the history of science, using geographical reasoning as a reference. However, before becoming aware of these intellectual processes, it should be said that at the base of this context lies the Brazilian space. This kind of reasoning as a proposed methodology is named here the geohistory of knowledge. In this paper, I seek to present this methodology and its theoretical and empirical results, focusing on how the construction of contextualization can be related to space.

Author(s):  
Mary Harlow ◽  
Lawrence Schmidt

Examples of digitization projects in the history of science are understood to have lasting consequences for the intellectual history of their fields (Petersen, 2005; Roes 2001). Following this trend, herbarium collections around the world are beginning to be digitized with positive results for their institutions (Begnoche, 2002; Ong, 2002). Librarians, with their long history of making collections accessible, are participating in this trend (Foster, 2005). This project expands the University of Wyoming Libraries work in the digitizing of a unique collection of plant specimens.


Author(s):  
Mary Harlow ◽  
Lawrence Schmidt ◽  
Paula Munoz

Examples of digitization projects in the history of science are understood to have lasting consequences for the intellectual history of their fields (Petersen, 2005; Roes 2001). Following this trend, herbarium collections around the world are beginning to be digitized with positive results for their institutions (Begnoche, 2002; Ong, 2002). Librarians, with their long history of making collections accessible, are participating in this trend (Foster, 2005). The University of Wyoming Libraries encourage Librarians to develop and maintain collections in a variety of subjects, and the Libraries are pursuing opportunities in digital collections. This project expands the University of Wyoming Libraries work in the digitizing of a unique collection of plant specimens.


2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 49-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Stearns

The intellectual history of the Muslim world during the post-formative period is poorly understood compared to the centuries in which the initial development of the principal Islamic intellectual traditions occurred. This article examines the legal status of the natural sciences in the thought of the Moroccan scholar al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī (d. 1102/1691) and his contemporaries, both in terms of the categorization of knowledge and in terms of developments in conceptions of causality in post-formative Ashʿarī theology. In the latter respect, al-Yūsī’s writings on causality are compared to those of his contemporary in Damascus, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, with attention to the broader historiographic perils in comparing intellectual developments in the Early Modern period to those occurring in Europe. By placing al-Yūsī’s views in intellectual context, I seek to demonstrate how a more productive history of the natural sciences in the post-formative Muslim world might be written.



Author(s):  
Scott Huler

This chapter retraces Huler’s thoughts about Lawson’s book, including Lawson’s collection of plants and insects that benefitted the history of science. Huler does not fail to mention his admiration for Lawson’s voyage with the Indians and their tradition. Lawson provides his opinion of slaves and considers Indians the freest People in the World. Lastly, Huler makes his last stop in Grifton listening to lectures and learning of traditional crafts. Huler closes his book with thoughts about Lawson’s death and reminiscences about the beauty of nature.


Author(s):  
William Ghosh

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most internationally acclaimed twentieth-century writers from the Caribbean region. Yet it is usually assumed that he was neither much influenced by the Caribbean literary and intellectual tradition, nor very influential upon it. This chapter argues that these assumptions are wrong. It situates Naipaul’s life and work within the political, social, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century Caribbean. Naipaul’s work formed part of a larger historical debate about the sociology of slavery in the Caribbean, the specificity of Caribbean colonial experience, and the influence of that historical past on Caribbean life, culture, and politics after independence. The chapter closes with a reading of Naipaul’s late, retrospective book about Trinidad, A Way in the World.


2019 ◽  
pp. 262-279
Author(s):  
Igor Bascandziev ◽  
Paul L. Harris

The “child as scientist” metaphor has been a source of many important insights about how children learn about the world. Extensive research has shown that, like scientists, children construct and test theories about the world through observation, exploration, and experimentation. What is not known, however, is whether children are similar to scientists in their employment of thought experimentation and other rationalistic processes when trying to learn about the world. Although the history of science has documented many instances of thought experiments being central to conceptual revolutions, there have been no empirical studies that ask the same question within developmental psychology. Such empirical studies are needed and warranted. Contrary to popular belief, children’s imagination is not fanciful or poorly disciplined. Instead, their imagination is constrained by knowledge of causal principles across different domains. Thus, engaging children in thought experiments should not produce unrealistic or impossible outcomes; rather, it should produce outcomes consistent with the causal structure of the world. Indeed, the consideration of hitherto unacknowledged implications of such outcomes may teach children something new about the world. This chapter reviews evidence from several studies that were not originally designed to test whether children can benefit from thought experiments but which nonetheless provide encouraging preliminary evidence of such benefit. Somewhat surprisingly, they hint that at least under some circumstances, the benefit from thought experiments may be greater than the benefit from direct observations of the world.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker

How did “reading for the message,” a mark of shame among literary critics, yet in many ways an ordinary reading practice, become so marginalized? The origins of this methodological commitment ultimately are intertwined with the birth of literary studies itself . The influential aestheticist notion of “art for art’s sake” has several implications crucial for understanding the intellectual history of literary criticism in the twentieth century: most important was the belief that to “extract” an idea from a text was to dismiss its aesthetic structure. This impulse culminated in the New Critical contention that to paraphrase a text was a “heresy.” Yet this dominant tradition has always co-existed with practical interpretation that was much less formalist in emphasis. A return to the world of American literary criticism in 1947, when Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn was published, shows this clearly: many now-forgotten critics were already practicing a form of criticism that emphasized literary content, and often overly rejecting Brooks’s insistence that reading for the content or meaning of a poem betrayed its aesthetic nature.


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