Approaches to the History of Philosophical Concepts

It is always difficult to explain what one does for a living; still more so when one is asked in so crisp a manner, and with such apparent expectation of definitive response, as in the question ‘What is intellectual history now?’ I cannot hope to be comprehensive, and my answer will necessarily reflect my own particular specialism and interests. However, I shall attempt to be at least articulate in my reply; and I shall begin by saying that the question seems to me to involve in fact two questions: one, ‘What is intellectual history now?’ (as opposed to then); and two, ‘What is intellectual history now?’ (as opposed to any other kind of history). As we shall see, these two questions cannot be disentangled; for the very same history of intellectual history over the past few decades which has seen such a reinvigoration of the field has at the same time brought into question the distinctive boundaries of that field.KeywordsCultural HistoryLinguistic ContextLanguage GameIntellectual HistoryText ProducerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Introduction - Christl M. Maier and Carolyn J. Sharp 1. Challenges and Opportunities for Feminist and Postcolonial Biblical Criticism - Judith E. McKinlay 2. Mapping Jeremiah as/in a Feminist Landscape: Negotiating Ancient and Contemporary Terrains - Carolyn J. Sharp 3. Commentary as Memoir? Reflections on Writing/Reading War and Hegemony in Jeremiah and in Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy - Louis Stulman 4. After the One-Man Show: Multi-authored and Multi-voiced Commentary Writing - Christl M. Maier 5. Jeremiah the Womb: On Fathers, Sons, and the Telos of Redaction in Jeremiah 1- Yosefa Raz 6. Stain of Your Guilt is Still Before Me (Jer 2:22): (Feminist) Approaches to Jeremiah 2 and the Problem of Normativity - Else K. Holt 7. Like a Woman in Labor: Gender, Postcolonial, Queer and Trauma Perspectives on the Book of Jeremiah - L. Juliana Claassens 8. God's Cruelty and Jeremiah's Treason: Jer 21:1-10 in Postcolonial Perspective - Christl M. Maier 9. Buying Land in the Text of Jeremiah: Feminist Commentary, the Kristevan Abject, and Jeremiah 32 - Carolyn J. Sharp 10. The Prophet and His Patsy: Gender Performativity in Jeremiah - Stuart Macwilliam 11. Exoticizing the Otter: The Curious Case of the Rechabites in Jeremiah 35 - Steed Vernyl Davidson 12. The Silent Goddess and the Gendering of Divine Speech in Jeremiah 44 - James E. Harding 13.A Response by Walter Brueggemann 14.A Response by Irmtraud Fischer Bibliography Author Index Scripture Index

ABSTRACTThe main objective of this study is to demonstrate the advantages of combining the concept of hegemonic masculinity with a postcolonial perspective when analysing the identity formations of first and second-generation postcolonial migrants, whose gendered identities are formed by narratives of transnational memories of decolonization, war and violence. The results expand approaches to the analysis of masculinity, not only by combining masculinity with a postcolonial approach, but also by a methodological intervention into narratives of transnational memories. By including transnational and postcolonial perspectives, this study also contributes to calls to rethink masculinity from global, transnational and postcolonial perspectives (Connell, R. (2016). Masculinities in global perspectives. Theory and Society, 45, 303–318; Messerschmidt, J. (2015). Masculinities in the making. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield; Hearn, J., Blagojević, M., & Harrison, K. (eds.). (2014). Rethinking transnational men: Beyond, between and within nations. New York, NY: Routledge; Beasley, C. (2008). Rethinking hegemonic masculinity in a globalizing world. Men and Masculinities, 11, 86–103). I illustrate the argument with examples of the identity formations of postcolonial migrants from Indonesia to the Netherlands and from narratives of transnational memories of events of mass violence and human rights abuses during the Indonesian war for independence from the colonial power of the Netherlands (1945–1949). I retrieve these examples by means of a biographical narrative analysis of the Dutch autobiographical and multimodal novel ‘The interpreter from Java’ by Alfred Birney (2016).

Wending Through the Way of War James Jay Carafano (bio) For starters, we ought to be speaking of "ways of wars." There is an underlying premise to this viewpoint for military history. How both state and non-state actors fight reflects their national character. Combatants enter conflict with assumptions, perceptions, and preferences that shape the way they intend to engage in warfare. These are shaped before the battle. They are unique to the competitor. They change over time. The three papers here argue for the utility of thinking about "ways of wars," though they all find problems with past efforts at mastering this approach. To me, weighing the good and the bad suggests at least three principles for applying the ways of wars perspective to the study of conflict. A first principle of war ways should be: think big and broadly. As Rob Citino points out, it would be too much to speak of the study of the ways of wars as a historiographical school. That said, what often purports to serve as the guiding idea for determining how militaries wage warfare looks mostly at doctrine and tradition. The more I study military history the more I have come to believe that that perspective is far too narrow. Click for larger view View full resolution From Berthold Laufer, Chinese Clay Figures: Prolegomena on the History of Defensive Armor, Part 1 (Field Museum of Natural History, 1914). The dynamic relationships between the civilian and military spheres of society can dramatically affect ways of going to war. This is not to suggest that New Military History is a good idea. In fact, I think that approach has turned into a historian's dead end. In 1991 Peter Paret heralded its arrival. "The New Military History," he wrote, "stands for an effort to integrate the study of military institutions and their actions more closely with other kinds of history." He saw it as a potent weapon that military historians could use to "fight the indifference or hostility of their colleagues on the one hand, and against the narrowness of much of military history on the other."1 Unfortunately, rather than enriching our understanding of warfare by studying issues of gender, culture, and social structures, it has for the most part done anything but. University departments continue to push military studies to the margin. Meanwhile, New Military History cranks out monographs that only tangentially inform our understanding of the conduct of warfare. New Military History's first cousin is national identity theory, which claims that cultural traits influence how nations act.2 Political scientists mimicked historians with their promises. The results, however, have generally been similar, with studies that tell us more about the authors' cultural assumptions and political and social axes to grind than how and why enemies confront one another. My favorite example is Natalie Bormann's National Missile Defense and the Politics of U.S. Identity: A Poststructural Critique (Manchester University Press, 2008). She starts out assuming that the desire for missile defenses is irrational. She dismisses all the feasibility and cost issues in two pages, citing only the opinions of outspoken missile defense critics. She then spends one hundred plus pages "creating" a national identity that explains why Americans would try doing something so stupid as to protect themselves from nuclear attack. If the study of ways of wars is going to better it will have to integrate the study of military operations [End Page 25] and activities with the wider world—not push them to the sidelines. This story can only be told by bringing together disparate brands of history that hardly ever get mentioned in the same breath: military history, the story of battle, blood, and bugles; the history of science and technology; and social, economic, business, cultural, and intellectual history, the exploration of how changes in beliefs and relationships among individuals and communities shape the way humans respond to the world around them. A second principle could be: don't think deterministically. No right thinking person would axiomatically assume that an economic historian would be the best person to give advice on a good 401K or predict the next move in the Dow Jones. Yet many, including...

A few years ago, French historians began using the expression of to characterize their work in the field of intellectual history. While awkward in French and infelicitous in English translation, the phrase has survived; for it expresses a need to assign autonomy to a kind of historical inquiry which offers new perspectives on the civilizing process. Briefly stated, the history of considers the attitudes of ordinary people toward everyday life. Ideas concerning childhood, sexuality, family, and death, as they have developed in European civilization, are the stuff of this new kind of history. Work in the history of is closely identified with the long-standing investigations of the Annales school, which portrays the history of as but one dimension of the total history it is their ambition to write.1 But the history of mentalities, even among its Annales practitioners, does have its own specific concerns. While Annales historians are most likely to address the material realities conditioning man through economic processes, social structures, and environmental influences, those historians investigating prefer to consider the psychological realities underpinning human conceptions of intimate relationships, basic habits of mind, and attitudes toward the elemental passages of life. The history of mentalities, moreover, has obvious affinities with approaches to intellectual history developed before the arrival of the French school. In effect, mentalities is a code name for what used to be called culture. It takes up again themes pursued by idealist historians such as Burckhardt in the nineteenth century and Huizinga early in the twentieth. For these historians, problems of culture were essentially problems of world-views and their interpretation. They took pains to evaluate these in their social and political context. But the history of ideas served as their basic frame of reference. Culture in this historiographical tradition meant high culture, and for this reason these historians directed their attention toward the role of valueforming elites. Though they did not treat culture as the exclusive preserve of

R.G. Collingwood sees intellectual history (or the history of thought) as the only kind of history there is. Such a formulation was once highly influential, but it also attracted criticism. However, we might perhaps sympathize with this inevitably exaggerated description if we interpret it to mean that only the traditions in the history of thought still continue to this day and age. What is history? If we say that history is constituted by the people, things and events that have once appeared in previous times, then it has indeed vanished with the passage of time. It has been a long time since the iron horses and bronze axes of the past became broken halberds and arrowhead shards, and only the bitter autumn wind remains of the glories of high summer. The only traces left today of the various conspiracies and plots, whether hatched beneath the eastern window or within the screen walls, are a few pages in a book or lines on a page. Only a few scripts for play-acting and some stories are all that is achieved in the present, whether a man was the object of public wrath or shelter for a multitude, despite the differences between the wise and the foolish, the loyal and the treacherous. These remnants of the past appear in the museums, on archaeological sites, in ancient texts, in history textbooks, and narrate the past for us; we can choose to listen attentively to them and read them, or we can turn our backs and walk away. This kind of "history" is not tangled up with the "immediate present." However, I do believe that there are still at least two things that truly exist from the past to the present in unbroken links, and which constantly influence our lives even today. One is the body of knowledge and technical skills that has grown without cessation over the past few thousand years. The intelligence and effort of our forebears led to the accumulation of a great amount of knowledge and a great number of skills in the matters concerning their lives, which their descendants could instantly put to use, because ready-made. The latter could also take their ancestors' terminal points as their own starting points—it is precisely at this juncture that history continues moving forward without pause. The other thing are the issues that have been considered over and over again during the past few thousand years, and the ideas that have been derived from this process. Generation after generation of men have painstakingly pondered over the significance of the cosmos and that of human life, and generation after generation have plumbed the depths of the human intellect in order to conceptualize the issues of cosmos, society, and human life, and to find ways to deal with them. These issues and conceptions still influence the way we think today, so that present-day men frequently follow the same paths of thought in pondering these intractable questions. It is precisely here that history folds back on itself without pause. If we say that the former belongs to the history of technology, then the latter can only belong to intellectual history or the history of thought. Thought does not disappear along with the disappearance of tangible things, or the culmination of a limited life span. Thought is transmitted over time, generation after generation, through language and words, through submersion in an environment, through education in the schools and influences outside the schools. And men today are still able to rehearse the cogitation of ancient men because of this kind of "transmission," while these reflections still hold some significance for men today. Collingwood once said, "Historical knowledge is knowledge of what mind has done in the past, and at the same time it is the redoing of this: the perpetuation of past acts in the present."1 The issues that provide food for thought and the formats through which such cognitive activities occur, the words used to explain such activities and the means for putting them into action, repeat, change, form in a full circle and renew themselves generation after generation. Because there is temporal and spatial continuity, there is history.

This chapter discusses how to make space for Sámi feminist perspectives within both Sámi research and Nordic feminist research. The author explores how both patriarchal and colonial power continue to shape the lives of Sámi women, and argues that there is a need for a feminist decolonial critique that destabilises the taken-for-granted silencing of Sámi women’s perspectives in both Sámi research and Nordic feminist research. In order to do so, we need to move beyond the traditional ways of defining feminist perspectives, and include Indigenous perspectives on land, water, health, rights and identities, and through this highlight how it is possible to create a common ground for both Sámi and feminist perspectives. The relative lack of Sámi feminist perspectives is paradoxical, given the fact that both intersectional and postcolonial perspectives have made an impact on feminist research today, and contemporary Sámi women are increasingly educated and hold a strong position within academia, activism and the Sámi society as a whole.

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

Pluralizing energy justice? Towards cultivating an unruly, autonomous and insurrectionary research agenda

Extract We offer here an introduction to idealism in modern philosophy. We focus on idealism in epistemology and metaphysics, largely excluding idealism in moral and political philosophy and idealism as a broader social movement, and we focus on philosophical concepts, theses, and arguments for and against them rather than speculating on historical causes for the development, acceptance, or rejection of such philosophical content. In other words, this is a work in the history of philosophy, not intellectual history. We do talk about motives for idealism, however, but what we mean by that is chiefly arguments; that is, our topic is both full-blown and self-identified idealism in modern philosophy, meaning by that philosophical views according to which reality is ultimately mental in some form or other, but also approaches and arguments characteristic of idealism, particularly in epistemology, that have been adopted and accepted by philosophers and philosophies that do not identify themselves as idealist because they are not committed to the reduction of reality to the mental, or to idealism as metaphysics. Unlike some previous writers, we do not distinguish epistemological and metaphysical idealism as two species of idealism, but we do distinguish epistemological and metaphysical arguments for idealism, and argue that the former have been much more widely appropriated and accepted in modern philosophy, including the so-called analytic philosophy of the twentieth century, even though that originated in some good part as a critique of avowed idealism in late nineteenth-century Britain, than is often recognized.

Examination of issues related to the methodology of history is important in connection with discussions of the theoretical component of historical knowledge. We consider that the methodology of history is an aggregate of philosophical, historical, and universal scientific conceptions, which can be presented as an integrated system with aspects and levels. There are ontological, epistemological, and axiological aspects of historical methodology. From the ontological perspective, researchers are trying to define the historical reality and the way how this reality evolves. Ontological aspect consists of doctrines of being (low-level), universal scientific theories, including theories of evolution (mid-level), historiosophical conceptions of world history (top-level), special historiosophical and general historical conceptions (additional and special methodology). The aim of this article is to find what doctrines of being and what historiosaphical conceptions of the world history may be considered as constructive methodology of history in the framework of its ontological aspect nowadays. For this purpose, we examine ontological doctrines and historiosaphical conceptions of the world history and determine what kinds of them are consistent with the key principles of evolution of great open systems, established by synergetics as a modern theory of evolution. We prove that evolutionary version of neutral monism and conceptions of historiosothical synthesis collocate with the key principles of synergetics to the gratis extend. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n8p146

Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education: Southern Theory, Postcolonial Perspectives, and Alternative Epistemologies

The article analyzes the impact of methodological approaches of philosophical thought on the formation of historical anthropology as a modern philosophy of history. The methodology of this work is based on the principles of complementarity, structure, and dialogue. In the study of labor problems, methods were involved: philosophical hermeneutics, systemic- structural, interdisciplinary. Historical anthropology as a version of the philosophy of history, which explores the mental- cultural plane of causes, the essence of historical processes and their possible projection into the future, has a significant potential for understanding the global social- cultural dynamics in past eras through philosophical- historical concepts. An important condition for the implementation of this scientific task is the analysis of the formation of the theoretical foundations of historical- anthropological dimensions of philosophical- historical thought. The study of the specified problem field is based on the study of the philosophical theories of R. G. Collingwood, K. Lévi- Strauss, and M. Foucault. The main ideas of R. G. Collingwood, which are important for the formation of the concepts of historical anthropology as a modern philosophy of history, include the understanding of the philosophical potential of historical thought; the need to combine philosophical concepts and historical methodologies; the importance of understanding the mental and cultural horizon of the past through the philosophy of history. Among the factors influencing the structuralist concepts of K. Lévi- Strauss on the formation of the theoretical foundations of historical anthropology as a modern philosophy of history, it is possible to single out the analysis of mythological elements of perception of the world by proto- societies; identification and studies of unconscious components of psychology and culture of societies of the specified type, implementation of scientific interactions of historical knowledge and ethnology. Important concepts of M. Foucault, which influenced the formation of theoretical approaches of historical anthropology as a modern philosophy of history, includes the analysis of unconscious elements of the psyche of societies in different eras of the past; understanding the phenomenon of «otherness» in history; study of mental representations in European society about mental illnesses; research on the understanding of the phenomenon of madness in Western European art; studies of the mentality of doctors in the Early Modern Time. The theoretical foundations of historical anthropology as a modern philosophy of history, which were formed under the influence of philosophical concepts, include the ontological, epistemological and axiological planes. The ontological plane is manifested in the formation of the problem field of historical- anthropological studies, the mental- cultural horizon of the past. Its composition includes: analysis of the subconscious foundations of psychology and mythological systems of proto- societies and early- historian societies; understanding the communities’ perception of the specified types of various socio- cultural phenomena, in particular diseases and means of treatment; the attitude of societies to certain social groups, in particular to doctors; analysis of the perception of political power and the mechanisms of formation of its social- psychological foundations. The epistemological plane is revealed in the formation of historical- anthropological concepts of methods of analysis of deep, unconscious aspects of the psychological and cultural dimension of past eras; effective application of an interdisciplinary approach in the analysis of mental phenomena and social behavior; realization of cognitive interaction of methodological approaches of ethnology and historical anthropology. The axiological plane consists in stimulating the spread in the understanding of the mental- cultural horizon of historical processes of the values of humanism, pluralism and the equality of cultures and civilizations of the past and the present; dialogue of various cultures, worldview systems and intellectual traditions.

The 1951 Refugee Convention represents the legal cornerstone of today’s global refugee protection, which is supposed to apply to all refugees regardless of their origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation. But did the Convention’s drafters have such a complex approach in mind? This paper analyzes the Convention’s drafting at the United Nations and the final conference in the late 1940s and early 1950s from feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives. By drawing on subalternity and absence, and using interpretive analysis of historical sources, the paper focuses on politics—who was (not) involved in debates—and policy—who was (not) considered under the refugee definition. The analysis reveals pervasive asymmetries, with western androcentrism inherently shaping the drafting. The western, white, heterosexual man was the standard filter for the powerful decision-maker and the protection subject, whereas women, LGBTQ+ and colonized people were neglected in politics and policy. Their exclusion was not merely a side effect of the political landscape at the time but reflects the reproduction of western androcentric power, which ultimately invisibilized the subaltern Others in the creation of international refugee law.

Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay argues that, although the existence and significance of the science of religion has been barely visible to modern scholars of the Victorian period, it was a subject of lively and extensive debate among nineteenth-century readers and audiences. She shows how an earlier generation of scholars in Victorian Britain attempted to arrive at a dispassionate understanding of the psychological and social meanings of religious beliefs and practices a topic not without contemporary resonance in a time when so many people feel both empowered and threatened by religious passion and provides the kind of history she feels has been neglected. Wheeler-Barclay examines the lives and work of six scholars: Friedrich Max Muller, Edward B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, James G. Frazer, and Jane Ellen Harrison. She illuminates their attempts to create a scholarly, non-apologetic study of religion and religions that drew upon several different disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, the classics, and Oriental studies, and relied upon contributions from those outside as well as within the universities. This intellectual enterprise variously known as comparative religion, the history of religions, or the science of religion was primarily focused on non-Christian religions. Yet in Wheeler-Barclay's study of the history of this field within the broad contexts of Victorian cultural, intellectual, social, and political history, she traces the links between the emergence of the science of religion to debates about Christianity and to the history of British imperialism, the latter of which made possible the collection of so much of the ethnographic data on which the scholars relied and which legitimized exploration and conquest. Far from promoting an anti-religious or materialistic agenda, the science of religion opened up cultural space for an exploration of religion that was not constricted by the terms of contemporary conflicts over Darwin and the Bible and that made it possible to think in new and more flexible ways about the very definition of religion.