Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Lang ◽  
Joy Damousi ◽  
Alison Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Western World ◽  
Critical Juncture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Case Writing

This volume delineates the changing forms of the case study across disciplines and decades, mapping circuits of knowledge through which the sexed and gendered human subject became a persistently urgent topic of enquiry in the Western world. A History of the Case Study presents an analysis of case writing about the human subject from a critical juncture in its formation in the second half of the nineteenth century, when, as claimed by Michel Foucault, sexuality came to be regarded as a conceptual part of human nature. According to Foucault’s famous dictum, notions of sexuality ‘organized sex as a “fictitious unity”’ of distinct parts and functions, feelings and behaviours; new categories for describing and policing sex produced a new object of enquiry....

scholarly journals VIRTUE LANGUAGE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ORIENTALISM: A CASE STUDY IN HISTORICAL EPISTEMOLOGY

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 689-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
HERMAN PAUL
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Historical Epistemology ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Thought Pattern ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dependency Relations

Historical epistemology is a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation” (Lorraine Daston). Under this umbrella, historians have been studying the changing meanings of “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and other virtues believed to be conducive to good scholarship. While endorsing this historicization of virtues and their corresponding vices, the present article argues that the meaning and relative importance of these virtues and vices can only be determined if their mutual dependencies are taken into account. Drawing on a detailed case study—a controversy that erupted among nineteenth-century orientalists over the publication of R. P. A. Dozy'sDe Israëlieten te Mekka(The Israelites in Mecca) (1864)—the paper shows that nineteenth-century orientalists were careful to examine (1) the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, (2) the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, (3) the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. Consequently, this article argues that historical epistemology might want to abandon its single-virtue focus in order to allow balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices to move to the center of attention.

Lam Time

Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 185-216
Author(s):  
David Wills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Past History ◽  
Criminal Defense ◽  
History Of ◽  
Court Proceedings ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Multiple Homicide ◽  
Time Frames

This chapter puts the instant of execution into contrast with the different time frames of the crime itself and of court proceedings. The analysis works through a particular nineteenth-century multiple homicide in France—studied by a team led by Michel Foucault—committed by Pierre Rivière. The case is distinguished by the memoir that Rivière wrote as a justification for his crime but that, in various ways, became part of the crime itself. The murders occurred when “extenuating circumstances” were being accepted as a criminal defense and when psychological testimony was finding its way into proceedings. Both those tendencies extend the crime into the past history of the criminal mind and show how the moment of committing a crime becomes part of a longer narrative—or even literary—fantasy that is in some respects indistinguishable from what we understand as a motive. The chapter ends with a discussion of Kafka’s “death penalty” fiction.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Lang ◽  
Joy Damousi ◽  
Alison Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Human Case ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Construction Of Knowledge ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Case Writing ◽  
Critical Intervention

A History of the Case Study represents a critical intervention into contemporary debate concerning the construction of knowledge which – after Michel Foucault’s elaborations on modern discourses of power – considers the medical case study in particular as an expression of new forms of disciplinary authority. This volume scrutinises the changing status of the human case study, that is, the medical, legal or literary case study that places an individual at its centre. With close reference to the dawning of ‘sexual modernity’ during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to ideas about sexual identity in the period immediately before and after the fin de siècle, the following chapters examine the case writing practices of selected pioneers of the case study genre....

Ireland and the Black Atlantic in the eighteenth century

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (126) ◽  
pp. 174-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nini Rodgers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Actual Operation

In the second half of the twentieth century few subjects have excited more extensive historical debate in the western world than black slavery. American investigation has centred upon the actual operation of the institution. An impressively wide range of historical techniques, cliometrics, comparative history, cultural studies, the imagination of the novelist, have all been employed in a vigorous attempt to recover and evaluate the slave past. In Britain, the first great power to abolish the Atlantic trade and emancipate her slaves, the emphasis has been on the development of the anti-slavery movement, described by W. E. H. Lecky in 1869 as ‘a crusade’ to be rated ‘amongst the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations’, and therefore an obvious candidate for twentieth-century revision. Any discussion of black slavery in the New World immediately involves the historian in economic matters. Here the nineteenth-century orthodoxy launched by Adam Smith and developed by J. S. Mill and his friend J. E. Cairnes, author of The slave power (1862) and professor of political economy and jurisprudence in Queen’s College, Galway, saw slavery as both morally wrong and economically unsound, an anachronism in the modern world. Since the 1970s this view has been challenged head-on by American historians arguing that, however morally repugnant, slavery was a dynamic system, an engine of economic progress in the U.S.A. Such a thesis inevitably revives some of the arguments used by the nineteenth-century defenders of slavery and has equally inevitably attracted bitter anti-revisionist denunciation.

South Africa and the International Community

1966 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Dale
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Western World ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Boer War ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Ever since the discovery there of gold and diamonds in the last half of the nineteenth century, South Africa has engaged the rapt attention of the Western world. The saga of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, perhaps the last of the “gentlemen's wars,” and now the refurbished accounts of the gallant defense of Rorke's Drift in the AngloZulu War of 1879 have been fascinating material for both novelists and film scriptwriters. In addition, the history of South Africa is replete with titanic figures who rank with, or perhaps even above, those from the rest of the continent: the aggressive architect of empire, Cecil J. Rhodes; the redoubtable Zulu warrior, Chaka; the dour, stern-willed President of the South African Republic, “Oom” (Uncle) Paul Kruger; the world-renowned statesman and philosopher, Field Marshal Jan C. Smuts; the founding father of Indian independence, Mohandas K. Gandhi; the compassionate and courageous writer, Alan S. Paton; and the dignified, modest Zulu Nobel Laureate, Albert J. Luthuli. By any standard, South Africa and its leaders of all races have made far-reaching and impressive contributions to the continent, the British Empire, and the world at large.

scholarly journals Fagged out: overwork and sleeplessness in Victorian professional life

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20190088 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Shuttleworth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sleep Problems ◽  
William Gladstone ◽  
Sleeping Pills ◽  
Lack Of Sleep ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth Century Medicine ◽  
Current Concerns ◽  
Social Causes

The paper sets current concerns with insomnia in our 24/7 society in the context of nineteenth-century anxieties about the pressures of overwork and sleeplessness in professional culture. Following a case study of a sleepless prime minister, William Gladstone, it explores the early history of sleep research, including the first recordings of a brain pulse during sleep by Angelo Mosso. In parallel with current problems with addiction to sleeping pills, it explores accounts of addiction to choral, a sleeping remedy, and considers the forms of diet and regimes recommended for combatting insomnia. These are surprisingly similar to current advice, including a form of mindfulness breathing. Medical findings also anticipated recent research in arguing that sleeplessness could cause heart problems and what was termed ‘premature mental decay’. Concerns about overwork and lack of sleep were also extended to school children, with campaigns to reduce homework and examinations, in order to improve mental and bodily health. Nineteenth-century medicine offered a broad-based model for understanding the physiological, psychological and social causes of sleep problems from which we can still learn.

Foucault

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Core Identity ◽  
The Right

This chapter examines how Michel Foucault reformulated the philosophical issue of the Enlightenment by moving from a deliberate rereading of the Hegelian Centaur to an advocacy of the “death of man”—the extinction of a rational platform of knowledge along the lines developed by Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century. It considers Foucault's genealogical historiography, a new and original tool for the analysis of history, and his arguments against the idea of a necessary and defining connection between knowledge and virtue, which had been the core identity of the Enlightenment, the link between power and knowledge, and the rise of disciplinary violence in the history of the Western world. Finally, it explores Foucault's view that “critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its exercise of power, and to question power on its discourses of truth.”

How to Benefit from Received Ideas (2001)

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wiktor Stoczkowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Molecular Genetics ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Western World ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Renaissance Medicine

Like Gulliver, the intrepid explorer depicted in Samuel Butler’s novella Erewhon visits an odd country whose image, inverted as its name, is evidently that of the Western world. Throughout his travels, the adventurer converses with the eccentric scholars of Erewhon who devote themselves to singular enterprises, such as the formation of the ‘Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge’ (Butler 1985). If somebody were to suppress useless knowledge in this day and age, there could be a substantial number of victims. Fortunately, no one finds it necessary to question the raison d’être of institutionally established knowledge, provided that sufficient funds are available to ensure its survival. The question of usefulness is only raised where marginal knowledge is concerned. The fact that we question whether the history of archaeology is useful or not testifies to its marginality. For it is marginal, despite belonging to the history of science, a domain in which all disciplines should theoretically inspire historians’ interest to the same extent. This, however, is not the case. Historians seem to prefer studying either sciences considered as the greatest conquests of Western rationality (such as modern physics, Darwinism, molecular genetics, etc.) or theories supposed to be excessively irrational (such as Renaissance medicine, Stalinist genetics, Nazi biology, astrology, etc.). It is commonly believed that archaeology does not belong to either of these categories. The history of archaeology is as marginal to archaeologists as it is to historians. This is particularly apparent in France, where most archaeologists would not hesitate to respond in the negative to the question of whether disciplinary history matters to current scientific practices. Since the nineteenth century, certain French archaeologists and prehistorians have indeed written on the history of their discipline, but this activity was a task usually reserved for emeritus scholars who took it up in a somewhat nonchalant manner, as if to crown their archaeological œuvre, and probably motivated by the same reasons which prompt certain people, at the same point in their lives, to write their memoirs. There are some notable exceptions, of which are the works of Alain Schnapp, particularly his monumental The Discovery of the Past (Schnapp 1996).

How German Theologians Read and Edited Luther for the Public: Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider’s Luther for Our Time

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206
Author(s):  
Zachary Purvis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Actual Use ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
History Of Scholarship ◽  
Conservative Protestants

Abstract Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Entstehung und die Wirkung von Luther an unsere Zeit (1817), Karl Gottlieb Bretschneiders vielgelesenes Buch der Auszüge, als Fallstudie darüber, wie moderne wissenschaftliche Theologen und Herausgeber Luther gelesen, kommentiert und anderen Lesern vorgestellt haben: in diesem Beispiel als Rationalist. Das Buch war umstritten. Der Beitrag befasst sich auch mit zwei konkurrierenden Auswahlen von Luthers Schriften, die von den konservativeren Protestanten Friedrich Perthes und Hans Lorenz Andreas Vent sowie den ultramontanen Katholiken Nikolaus Weis und Andreas Räß als Antwort verfasst wurden. Es deutet darauf hin, dass eine stärkere Berücksichtigung solcher Zusammenstellungen und der Arbeitsmethoden der Compiler selbst – als Teil der kritischen Geschichte der Wissenschaft – sowohl unser Verständnis des tatsächlichen Einsatzes der Reformer und ihrer breiten Rezeption durch verschiedene Leser bereichern als auch neues Licht werfen wird über die Polemik des frühen neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. This article examines the creation and impact of Luther for Our Time (1817), Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider’s much-read book of excerpts, as a case study of how modern scientific theologians and editors read, annotated, and introduced Luther to other readers: in this instance as a rationalist. The book was controversial. The article also looks at two competing selections of Luther’s texts prepared in response by the more conservative Protestants Friedrich Perthes and Hans Lorenz Andreas Vent and the ultramontane Catholics Nikolaus Weis and Andreas Räß. It suggests that greater consideration of such compilations and the working methods of the compilers themselves – part of the critical history of scholarship – will both enrich our understanding of the actual use of reformers and their broad reception by various readers, as well as shed new light on the polemics of the early nineteenth century.

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