Tensions and Challenges of Intellectual History in Contemporary Latin America

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-115
Author(s):  
Roberto Breña
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

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.

Tensions and Challenges of Intellectual History in Contemporary Latin America

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-115
Author(s):  
Roberto Breña
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Abstract 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.

Invisible Bodies

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Lan A. Li
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Material Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis essay explores the ways in which Lu Gwei-djen (1904–91) served as a gatekeeper for interpreting medicine in China in the second half of the twentieth century. After retiring from science in 1956, Lu set out to write one of the first comprehensive English-language histories of medicine in China. Through a close study of Lu’s work notes and marginalia from later in her life, this essay examines how she carefully articulated the material characteristics of a “Chinese” medicine that gave rise to jingluo, or therapeutic paths often known as “meridians.” I argue that at the heart of this uneasy comparison was the difficult process of translating across multiple expressions of physiology. By placing Lu Gwei-djen at the center of a feminist intellectual history of medicine, this essay further shows how Lu’s translations were influenced by the social hierarchies in which she was embedded, including cultural, gender, and temporal dualities.

What the Hell, English?

2021 ◽  
pp. 2-38
Author(s):  
Arika Okrent ◽  
Sean O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Word Order ◽  
English Language ◽  
Native Language ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dutch Language ◽  
Orderly System ◽  
The Way

This chapter provides an overview of the oddities of the English language. It begins by looking at the poem of Dutch writer Gerard Nolst Trenité and how he spent his career nitpicking defense of his own native language. Nolst Trenité saw that the Dutch language had its own inconsistencies. His complaints about the way his fellow citizens butchered the Dutch language were different from his complaints about English, but they came from the same expectation that language should be a logical, orderly system. The patterns are often overshadowed by what looks like randomness, and there are irregularities everywhere, not just in the spelling system. At every level of language, from spelling to vocabulary to grammar to word order to meaning there are violations of harmony and order. This book is thus a collection of answers to questions about English. It also presents a history of English that explores the tension between logic and habit in language development.

War and Peace in International Rivalry. By Paul F. Diehl and Gary Goertz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 319p. $49.50.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 515-516
Author(s):  
John Vasquez
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
International Rivalry ◽  
Ann Arbor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Peace And War ◽  
The Way

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.

THE INFLUENCE OF GERMAN STATE-THEORY ON THE DESIGN OF THE AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION

2010 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 669-699
Author(s):  
Nicholas Aroney
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
State Theory ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
German State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Political Scientist ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article draws attention to an important but neglected story about the dissemination of German and Swiss state-theories among English-speaking scholars in the second half of the 19th century and the influence of these ideas on those who designed and drafted the Australian Constitution. In particular, the article focuses upon the theories of federalism developed by the Swiss-born scholar, Johann Caspar Bluntschli, and the Saxon-born Georg Jellinek, and explains their influence, via the British historian, Edward A Freeman, and the American political scientist, John W Burgess, upon the framers of the Australian Constitution. The story is important because it illustrates the way in which constitutional ideas can be transmitted from one social and political context into a very different one, undergoing significant, though often subtle, modifications and adaptations in the process. The story is also important because it sheds light on the way in which the framers of the Australian Constitution came to conceive of the kind of federal system that they wished to see created. The story seems to have been overlooked, however, not only due to a general neglect of the intellectual history of the Australian Constitution, but also due to the assumption that prevailing Australian political and legal ideas were of Anglo-American provenance. While this assumption generally holds true, a closer examination of the intellectual context of Australian federalism reveals a surprisingly significant German influence on the framers of the Australian Constitution.

Nathanael Vincent and Confucius's ‘great learning’ in restoration England

2005 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Jenkinson
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
English Language ◽  
Great Learning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
First Time

This paper outlines the sinological activities of Nathanael Vincent (d. 1722), an obscure and elusive fellow of the Royal Society (1683–7; readmitted 1694) who was also fellow of Clare Hall in Cambridge and chaplain in ordinary to Charles II. An amateur scientist operating in the shadow of the great fellows of the early Royal Society, Vincent's involvement ranged from investigating the work of Denis Papin to presenting a manuscript of Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica . However, his greatest contribution to the intellectual history of the Restoration is located in his 1685 translation of Confucius's ‘Great Learning’, which seems to be the first time that a Confucian book began to be printed in the English language. Hitherto unnoticed, hidden away in an appendix to a court sermon, it nonetheless represented part of the interest in Chinese culture in the circles of the early Royal Society. This paper places Vincent in the context of the activities of the early Royal Society and offers an overview of this interest in sinology. It then considers how Vincent gained access to Confucian texts, how he was able to ‘translate’ from them, and what ramifications the philosophy had for an Anglican divine in Restoration England.

European Intellectual History as Contemporary History

2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 574-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Werner Müller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Third ◽  
German School ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Intellectual History ◽  
Cambridge School

The first part of this essay examines the peculiar role European intellectual history played in coming to terms with the twentieth century as an ‘Age of Extremes’ and the different weight it was given for that task at different times and in different national contexts up to the 1970s. The second part looks at the contemporary history of politically focused intellectual history — and the possible impact of the latter on the writing of contemporary history in general: it will be asked how the three great innovative movements in the history of political thought which emerged in the last fifty years have related to the practice of contemporary history: the German school of conceptual history, the ‘Cambridge School’, and the ‘linguistic turn’. The third part focuses on recent trends to understand processes of liberalization — as opposed to the older search for causes of political extremism. It is also in the third part that the so far rather Euro-centric perspective is left behind, as attempts to create an intellectual history of the more or less new enemies of the West are examined. Finally, the author pleads for a contemporary intellectual history that seeks novel ways of understanding the twentieth century and the ‘newest history’ since 1989 by combining tools from conceptual history and the Cambridge School.

Origins

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-61
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S

This chapter offers a conceptual history of the modern study of ancient Indian sex. It traces the intellectual history of how the philology of Sanskrit erotics, particularly through concepts of deviant female sexuality, shaped the modern study of social life. In doing so, the chapter reveals a history of how modern philological inquiry produced deviant female sexuality, as found in premodern Sanskrit text, as an originary object for the study of modern Indian society. What was lost in these new fixed structures of knowledge was the multiplicity of interpretations of different texts on premodern social life. Thus, this chapter examines the transregional rise of the field of Indological erotics in the period between the 1880s and the 1950s and beyond.

Charles Martin Robertson 1911–2004

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN A. SPARKES
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Comprehensive Treatment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Greek Art ◽  
The Way

Martin Robertson published the History of Greek Art in 1975, which has continued to hold its place in English language scholarship. It was the culmination of years of patient research that had started when he embraced the teaching of the history of the subject nearly thirty years earlier. Reviewers remarked on the way in which the book was both a personal study of Greek art and also a comprehensive treatment of the whole field. Through its measured structure and the grace and power of its style, it shows the author at the peak of his talent.

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