The Writing of Spirit

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Pourciau
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
The Real ◽  
Single Moment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Jacob Grimm

Contemporary thought has been profoundly shaped by the turn toward synchronic models of explanation, which analyze phenomena as they appear at a single moment, rather than diachronically as they develop through time. Nowhere, however, has this transformation unfolded more influentially than in the domain of language science, where the terminology of synchrony and diachrony first explicitly emerges. The Writing of Spirit sets out to demonstrate, via a new history of language science, that we do not know what we think we know about this pivotal juncture in our intellectual past. Twentieth century linguistic structuralism, it argues, does not replace the historicist approach of the 19th century with a more modern, more systematic perspective, as has long been assumed, because the relationship between history and system is the point. The real revolution consists, not in a turn away from language time, but in a turn toward time’s absolutely minimal conditions, and thus also: toward a theory of diachrony, boiled down and distilled. The book arrives at this surprising and powerful conclusion via the analysis of language scientific theories over the course of two centuries, associated with thinkers from Jacob Grimm to the Russian Futurists and from Richard Wagner to Roman Jakobson, in domains as disparate as historical linguistics, phonology, acoustics, opera theory, philosophy, poetics, and psychology. The result is a novel contribution to one of the most pressing questions of our current intellectual moment, namely: the question of what role the study of history should play in the interpretation of present-tense states.

Marry Me?

Love, Inc. ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Laurie Essig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
The Real ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Real Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Diamond Ring

Getting engaged now requires more emotional and financial resources than ever before. Here Essig traces the history of engagements from the birth of companionate marriages in the nineteenth century to the invention of rituals like the bended knee and fetish items like the diamond ring in the early twentieth century. But the real change happened at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as engagements became “spectacular,” requiring not just highly staged events but also highly produced videos and images that could then be disseminated to the larger world.

On the Heels of Juan Moreira: Lessons for the Cultural History of Reading

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-163
Author(s):  
William G. Acree
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Real Life ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Río De La Plata ◽  
The Real ◽  
La Plata ◽  
History Of

Between November 1879 and January 1880, the argentine author Eduardo Gutierrez published a serialized narrative of the life of Juan Moreira in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Patria Argentina. Titled simply Juan Moreira, the heroic tale of the real-life outlaw went like this: Moreira was a good gaucho gone bad, who fought to preserve his honor against the backdrop of modernizing forces that were transforming life in this part of South America. His string of crimes and ultimate downfall resulted from his unjust persecution by corrupt state officials. The success of the serial surpassed all expectations. The paper's sales skyrocketed, and the melodramatic narrative soon appeared in book form. Enterprising printers produced tens of thousands of authorized and pirated editions to sell in the Rio de la Plata (Argentina and Uruguay), making Juan Moreira a leading example of everyday reading for the region's rapidly growing literate population and one of Latin America's pre-twentieth-century bestsellers (Acree, Everyday Reading; Gutiérrez, The Gaucho Juan Moreira).

scholarly journals Tolstoy’s argument: realism and the history of science

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stathis Psillos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Current Science

In his intervention to the ‘bankruptcy of science debate’, which raged in Paris in the turn of the twentieth century, Leo Tolstoy was one of the first to use the past record of science as a weapon against current science. It is not inductive. It does not conclude that all current scientific theories will be abandoned; nor that most of them will be abandoned; not even that it is more likely than not that all or most of them will be abandoned. Its conclusion is modest: some of presently accepted theories will have the fate of those past theories that once dominated the scene but subsequently were abandoned.

scholarly journals “The Real Victim of Lynch Law Is the Government”: American Protestant Anti-Lynching Advocacy and the Making of Law and Order

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 116
Author(s):  
Aaron Griffith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Early History ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
The Real ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
War On Crime ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

This article examines American Protestant anti-lynching advocacy in the early twentieth century. In contrast to African American Protestants, who framed their anti-lynching efforts in ways that foregrounded the problem of racism and black experiences of suffering, white mainline Protestant critiques of lynching regularly downplayed race and framed the crime in terms of its threat to American civilization and national law and order. This article connects these latter concerns to the national war on crime of the 1930s and 40s and the early history of the modern carceral state.

scholarly journals Dennett and Scientific Realism: Pessimistic Meta-Induction and the Argument from Error

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-60
Author(s):  
N. V. Golovko
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Fundamental Concept ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Skeptical Argument ◽  
The Real ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
History Of

The paper aims to show that the interpretation of D. Dennett’s concept of real patterns as a fundamental concept of existence makes it possible to offer a new conception of the development of scientific knowledge containing: (a) L. Laudan’s conclusion that the real history of science contradicts the idea of convergence of scientific theories, and (b) the problem of pessimistic meta-induction will not be decisive in refuting scientific realism for a given historical period of time. Within the framework of the accepted ontology, the problem of pessimistic meta-induction is presented as one of the variants of the skeptical argument – argument from error, and the notion of «projectivity in respect to a given physically possible perspective» (D. Ross) fully reveals the notion of «additional information» that a «new» theory should have over the «old one», in order to refute the skeptic's reasoning.

A New Image for Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 194-208
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Theory Change ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Acceptance ◽  
Practice Of Science

Thomas Kuhn subverted the image of science that had become entrenched by the mid-twentieth century, that science was a body of knowledge produced by logical reasoning about objective facts. Kuhn argued that a new approach to the history of science revealed that the process of discovery was integral to the practice of science and that nonlogical factors played a role in theory acceptance and theory change. Insofar as they entered into the reasoning leading to the formulation of a theory, facts were not objective but interpreted consistent with contingent assumptions on which the theory rested. Kuhn himself believed that scientific knowledge was about reality. His theory of how scientific knowledge was produced, however, strongly supported the view that scientific theories were contingent interpretations of experience.

Europe Before and After Munich: Random Notes on Recent Publications

1939 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-228
Author(s):  
Sigmund Neumann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
World War ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Road ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War

Munich marks the end of an epoch, a “turning point in history,” as Arnold J. Toynbee recently states in a most suggestive article. In fact, these decisive events were foreshadowed long before September 1938, by actions almost necessarily leading the road to Munich. If one can speak of the end of a period, one might better say: Hitler's march into the Rhineland, March 7, 1936, was the real water-shed between two political continents. Indeed what had been said about the World War, that it merely precipitated a development of political and social forces which were moulding the twentieth century, could be repeated of this greatest diplomatic upset of our time too. It had its roots in the history of post-War Europe, and it may be that even the more we win distance from this “water-shed of Munich” the clearer it will become that the currents of history are running in the same old beds and in the same directions as before September, 1938.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

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