Intellectual Climate Research Articles

Urdu, Persian, and (Even) English: Triangulating Postcolonial Literary History with The Making of Persianate Modernity

ABSTRACT This article highlights the advantages of taking a triangulated approach to colonial and postcolonial literary history as modeled by Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India. Jabbari’s reconsideration of literary modernity through the synchronous and multilingual exchange between Persian, Urdu, and English letters softens some of the assumed hierarchies that dominate Persianate and Anglophone studies, particularly. It furthermore underscores the unique perspective that Urdu writing on literary modernity offers scholars of world literature in light of the former’s associations with Persian in an intellectual climate that chiefly valued indigenized historiographies of linguistic origin.

Úvahy o pokroku

Using the form of an essay, the author gives an account of historical-philosophical thought on the idea of progress in the 20th century with the emphasis on its methodological grounding. He takes as his starting point John B. Bury´s theory, which defined the idea of progress in terms of secular intellectual climate. In opposition to this approach, he then looks with a critical overview at the contrary or polemic concepts put forward by Robert Nisbet, Karl Acham, Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner or Johannes Rohbeck, which rehabilitate the history of philosophy and seek to identify the evaluative criteria of progress, one of the basic obstacles in thinking about the reality of progress. The author also devotes great attention to attempts to disconnect progress from subjective or culturally-based value judgements by using terms like "development" or "modernisation", while also considering critiques of these attempts at detail.

The history of episodic memory.

Over the course of his research, Endel Tulving offered a number of somewhat different characterizations of episodic memory. Do they indicate that he changed his mind over time as to what episodic memory is, or did his core understanding of the nature of episodic memory stay the same? In this article, we offer some support for the latter claim, and in particular for thinking that, throughout his life, Tulving took as a defining feature of episodic memory the distinctive awareness of the self in time it involves. We argue that it is easier to see the continuities rather than the discontinuities in Tulving's writings once their historical context is taken into account, where this involves both the authors who influenced his thinking, as well as the intellectual climate at the different times he was writing. We also discuss two recent bodies of work on episodic memory that take aspects of Tulving's writings as their point of departure, but try to factor out into separate ingredients what he arguably saw as a unitary phenomenon. Considering aspects of the dialectic between them and Tulving's view might shed further light on some of the motivations behind the latter.This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

Modern Architecture and the Pioneers: Paul Pascoe and the New Zealand House, 1933–1950

The publication of the Group Manifesto, “On the Necessity of Architecture,” in 1948 is widely regarded as a defining moment in New Zealand architectural history. The Group’s ideal of a modern architecture shaped by the environment of their own country was, however, anticipated in the pre-war writings and subsequent buildings of the Christchurch architect, Paul Pascoe (1908–1976). Although unacknowledged by the younger generation of modernists, Pascoe highlighted unexpected parallels between colonial primitivism and modernist functionalism and helped to shape the intellectual climate in which architectural modernism developed in New Zealand during the post-war period.

Muḥammad Hilāl Effendi: An Arab Intellectual and Bureaucrat in the Late Ottoman Period

Muḥammad Hilāl Effendi (1840–?) was an important Ottoman bureaucrat and intellectual. However, despite his prominence, comparatively little is known about his life and works. Muḥammad Hilāl was a graduate from al-Azhar University, which enabled him to serve as a judge in both in Sharia and the then-newly established Tanzimat courts in various provinces of the Ottoman Empire. During his professional tenure, he authored three memoranda addressed to Sultan Abdülhamid II, as well as several religious treatises in Arabic. Significantly, Muḥammad Hilāl does not appear in standard Arabic biographical compilations of his era. Instead, he is mentioned only as the father of Sāṭi‘ al-Ḥuṣrī, who was one of the most prominent theorists of Arab nationalism. However, Hilāl’s memoranda are discussed in the Turkish secondary literature and there, inexplicably, the fact that he was the father of Sāṭi‘ al-Ḥuṣrī has gone largely unnoticed. One, therefore, could claim that Muḥammad Hilāl became a victim of the nationalist fragmentation of post-Ottoman historiography. This paper proposes to serve as a starting point for a re-evaluation of Muḥammad Hilāl Effendi's identity, career, and writings. In doing so, it sheds light on the intellectual climate of the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century, challenging commonly held notions of intellectual stagnation and decline in this period.

Academic Freedom and Patterns of Self-Censorship in Psychology Education in Turkey

Background The recent academic purge in Turkey eventuated by a twin wave starting in January 2016 was unprecedented. Two years of statutory rule after the July 2016 failed coup further damaged the rule of law. Even the legal authorities did not respect fundamental human rights. Psychology faculty had to keep a low profile to avoid further encroachments. Objective The purpose of this study was to assess the extent to which psychology faculty discerned research and teaching-bound sociopolitical risks and exercised mitigation strategies. Method Sixty-three faculty responded to a questionnaire assessing risk appraisals and mitigation appeals countering threats to their research and teaching. Results Faculty remained inactive against high-risk appraisal in research and appealed to avoidance or vagueness when their risk appraisals were moderate. By contrast, avoidance was the primary strategy, compared to vagueness or inaction, in risk-bearing teaching. Conclusion Faculty try to cope with the adverse negative intellectual climate by being highly selective in their research and teaching. They appeal to differential strategies in either domain. Teaching Implications Research in risk apprehension and mitigation along with studies highlighting shared experiences may inform psychology departments on how to proceed under antagonistic circumstances.

Journeys without End: Narrative Endings and Implied Readers in Acts of the Apostles and Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana

This contribution compares the final sections of Acts of the Apostles and Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Through this comparison, I aim to show that these two writings resemble one another in their attention to travel as a literary theme. Both Acts and Life employ this theme to communicate their message and, in their narrative endings, set up their implied readers as travelers who are meant to continue the journeys of the protagonists in these writings. At the same time, Acts and Life differ in how exactly they envision their readers to continue the journeys of their protagonists. I will argue that these similarities and differences can be explained by the shared social and intellectual climate that Acts and Life inhabit: both writings result from discourses on travel and self that were rife among intellectuals in the Roman Empire in the first three centuries of our era, irrespective of their ethnic, legal, or cultural affiliations.

‘That golden sentence of Tacitus’: Tacitean quotation as the medium of political knowledge in Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso

ABSTRACT Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612) provides us with a satirically inflected view of how Tacitean quotation was used throughout the sixteenth century as a medium of political knowledge. A detailed analysis of some Tacitean scenes in Ragguagli will help us to elicit some of the issues underlying the turn to Tacitus in the intellectual climate of the period: the search for truth in a new era of moral relativism; debates about the applicability of ancient maxims to contemporary realities; and the connection between externally acquired techniques and internalized wisdom. In both Ragguagli and Comentarii Tacitus’ characterization of the emperor Galba becomes emblematic of the gulf that can open up between theoretical knowledge and practical understanding. When the same model is used to measure Tacitus’ own unsuccessful tenure of power over Lesbos in Ragguagli, Boccalini presents a case study of how ‘properly’ to make use of Tacitean political insight.

The Ming state and neo-confucian thinking behind Kaifeng Jewry’s biculturalism

ABSTRACT Based on a fresh reading of the 1489 and 1512 kehillah stelae, this article contextualizes Kaifeng Jewry’s acculturation in the political agendas and intellectual climate of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century China. It argues that the Ming court, Neo-Confucian discourses of beliefs and Ming administration of religions and ethnic minorities drove Kaifeng Jewry towards biculturalism – adopting Confucian cultural norms while maintaining their sectarian identity. With the religious tolerance led by Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, the Ming state administered Judaists, Muslims and other religious practitioners not as religious groups but as ethnic groups who needed to settle down in a highly secular and centralized sociopolitical order dominated by the Confucian elite. Without the state’s intervention in their beliefs, Kaifeng Jewry’s religious integrity and survival had heavily relied on Jewish elite reproduction; when the Jewish elite declined, the kehillah began to disintegrate.

EDUCATION SYSTEM IN MEDIEVAL PERIOD - THE IMPACT OF SCHOLASTICISM ON MEDIEVAL LEARNING

This study explores the impact of scholasticism on medieval learning, focusing on its influence within the educational landscape also it investigates how scholastic methods, epitomized by the works of thinkers such as teaching methodologies, shaped curriculum, and intellectual climate of medieval institutions. Scholasticism, characterized by its importance on hard dialectical reasoning and the reconciliation of reason and faith, became a dominant intellectual force in medieval education. One sample test and ANOVA has been used for this research to analyse the impact of scholasticism on medieval learning. The medieval period, roughly spanning from 5th to 15th century, was characterized by a unique set of political, social, and cultural dynamics. In terms of education, this time witnessed the dominance of system deeply rooted in religious institutions and influenced by the attitude of scholasticism. The medieval period saw the traditional Indian educational systems with the introduction of Islamic influences. Islamic rulers established madrasas, centers of learning that focused on religious studies. The gurukul system continued, emphasizing disciplines such as literature, mathematics, philosophy and science. The government need to undertake initiatives to expand access to education, resulting in establishment of schools, colleges, and universities. The focus on science, technology, and vocational training became pronounced, aiming is to meet the demands of a fast changing global landscape. The Indian education system reveals the continuous effort to build a more flexible, and responsive educational framework for the diverse needs of the country.

Schools of clerks, schools of knights: John Grandisson and Hugh de Courtenay’s French correspondence, 1329–40

Abstract The private letters within the Register of John Grandisson (bishop of Exeter, 1327–69) provide a fascinating insight into the intellectual climate of his episcopate, and attest to his strained relationship with the immensely important local magnate Hugh de Courtenay. Based on a re-examination of the manuscript Register (now held at the Devon Heritage Centre), this article offers the first modern edition and translation of a series of exchanges between the two men during Grandisson’s episcopate. Grandisson’s replies represent an assertion of clerical authority, as the two men fought over what was – in one case, literally – contested terrain.

Transatlantic LatinX studies, Iberian studies, and the Global South

More than a special issue, this endeavor serves as a sourcebook and provocation amplifying embryonic but interlinked sites of inquiry: LatinXness in Spain and its vital conversation with US LatinX studies as well as Iberian studies. LatinXs share historical and cultural connections to the Spanish and American empires. The contemporary period marks a significant moment on both sides of the Atlantic, as Spain now houses Europe’s largest LatinX population and the shifting ground of LatinXness exceeds the United States as well as a North-South axis of analysis. With an eye toward being wide-ranging, bringing forward fresh insights, and offering a crucial reference for an expanding area of interest—transatlantic LatinX studies—this undertaking provides historical contexts, defining moments, conceptual parameters, and critical approaches that appraise how Spain’s sociocultural and intellectual climate has fully entered a LatinX epoch. The exploration faces a cluster of questions: What do current characterizations of Spanishness invigorate when it admits a long ignored—and inseparable—LatinX foundation? What constitutes Spanish national currency when animated by LatinX bodies and imaginations? What is Spain—and what is Europe—to LatinXness and the Global South? What kind of new Spain—and new Europe—emerge from LatinXness and Global Southness? Collected here are original arguments and contributions—academic articles, think pieces, critical conversations, poetry, and creative nonfiction—orienting us on central thematic concerns that include: new directions and perspectives in transatlantic LatinX studies; the idea of Europe and Europeanness from Spain’s southernmost archipelago, the Canary Islands; LatinX nonhuman origins at the Royal Botanical Garden in the Spanish capital; the history, uses, and dissemination of the Panchito/Panchita racial slur; Madrid’s twenty-first century LatinX Spanish language, migration, and culture; present-day brown drag performance and practices; Afro-Spanish-Colombian poetry and politics; rurality, depopulation, and LatinX repopulation in Aguaviva, Spain; diasporic bodies and expressions of identity through movement; and movement in translation, X equivalencies across bodies, geographies, and languages. The volume, as a whole, is an entry point into LatinX studies and Iberian studies marshaling ideas and thinking tools that may be veering toward a new field of study.

CORPUS HERMETICUM i meta-prostor tekuće svetske krize

Newspapers, magazines and publishing houses, bookstores, public forums, institutes, discussions and conversations characteristic of the local public scene during the seventies and eighties of the 20th century, were the most vital part of the intellectual climate of that time; the real events were articles, books or public, as a rule polemical, performances of the protagonists of critical theory. Today’s absence of the public scene and the entire infrastructure without which neither the public scene nor the critical public are possible - specialized papers, magazines, publishing houses, institutes, associations, public forums - testifies to the depth of the radical change that has taken place and is ongoing. How and why it happened is the subject of the following paper

A climate of optimism? EU policy-making, political science and the democratization of Central and Eastern Europe (2000–2015)

Democratic erosion in the EU’s Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states has confounded EU policy-makers. In this paper, we investigate the assumptions behind the climate of optimism about CEE democratization that prevailed in EU decision-making before and after the 5th and 6th enlargements, and the extent to which political science participated in this intellectual climate. Based on a qualitative analysis of EU decision-making in the early twenty-first century and a quantitative analysis of 500 randomly sampled papers published between 2000 and 2015, we find that both policy makers and the most influential research in political science shared a bias towards optimism structured by common assumptions: A procedural understanding of democracy, a rational institutionalist belief in the EU’s capacity to bring these procedures about with the use of incentives and the related assumption that sociocultural dimensions of democracy would eventually follow institutions. We argue that these common assumptions help to explain both the EU’s failure to pre-empt and respond proportionately to democratic erosion, and the failure of our discipline to check that optimism.

Thoughts after translating Takeuchi Yoshimi’s Ro Jin 鲁迅 (Lu Xun)

ABSTRACT Despite the ups and downs in their relationship, China and Japan have been engaged in a process of cultural exchange for nearly two millennia. A recent outcome of this interaction has been the discourse surrounding the founder of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881-1936), his foremost exponent in 20th century Japan, the writer and thinker Takeuchi Yoshimi 竹内好 (1910-1977) and the effect of their interaction ever since on intellectuals in both countries. This is an interaction which had substantial influence on the intellectual climate in post-war Japan and still plays a role in intellectual discourse in contemporary China, particularly in the debates surrounding modernity and nationalism. I have worked with Joshua Fogel in making the first translation into English of Takeuchi’s classic monograph Ro Jin (1944) into English from the Japanese. In the process, we have attained new insights into historical and contemporary intellectual developments in both countries, as well as a deepening understanding of “Takeuchi’s Lu Xun”. I have also examined two rival translations into Chinese by Li Xifeng 李心峰 (1986) and Li Dongmu 李冬木 (2005) from the angle of fidelity to the original and readability.

„Wiadomości Brukowe” (1816–1822) – From Satire to Absurdity. Some Comments

At the beginning of the 19th century, the absurd as a term functioned primarily in the Latin version,and in the colloquial meaning it was understood as ‘nonsense’. The article discusses itsuses in „Wiadomości Brukowe”, one of the most important and most representative periodicalsof the early 19th century for the intellectual climate of Vilnius. Its authors, embracing the traditionsof Enlightenment satire and early Romantic irony, linked absurdity with the observation of reality,as exemplifi ed by three texts analyzed in the article: an advertisement of the sale of Honestyand Conscience, a criticism of the Pacanowska Academy, and an advertisement of a subscriptionto the project of developing a machine for beating peasants. The absurd becomes here a significant element of journalistic description. The use of the absurd was not a staple in „WiadomościBrukowe”, but it was visible enough to help establish a tradition of the magazine and to allow itsauthors to gain important social and aesthetic experience.

A Turkish Mayor Goes to Moscow: Vedat Dalokay and Development Politics in the 1970s

In 1975, the mayor of Ankara requested Soviet assistance to build a public transportation system and affordable housing in the Turkish capital. This article uses Vedat Dalokay's appeal as a window into international development politics during a transformative decade. The 1970s saw growing leftism in Turkey, and Dalokay hoped that progressive urban planning would solidify voting trends among rural-to-urban migrants. He sought to introduce a new ideological element into Soviet–Turkish exchange, but politicians and academics in Moscow dismissed Dalokay's class-oriented projects. Instead, they increased their investments in the steel mills and electricity plants that were hallmarks of Soviet economic exchanges with the Third World. Whereas Dalokay's aspirations emerged from a Turkish intellectual climate that was being reshaped by dependency theory and by disillusionment in the possibilities for growth within boundaries defined by the political borders of nation-states, Soviet economists and bureaucrats remained wedded to the idea of development defined in terms of the territorial economy. The Ankara municipality eventually turned to Western Europe, but the Turkish government continued to negotiate gas pipelines and nuclear power plants with the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian governments. This article explores the ideological assumptions that have shaped economic exchange across the Black Sea.

G. HICKES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF GERMANIC STUDIES IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE END OF THE 17th AND THE BEGINNING OF THE 18th CENTURIES

The article analyses the contribution of G. Hickes (1642–1715), the author of an Anglo-Saxon grammar and Linguarum vett. septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus, into the intellectual life of his time. Gathering around him the group of ‘Oxford saxonists’, he promoted the study of the AngloSaxon language and culture, the publication of texts in ancient Germanic languages and their translation into Late Modern English. In the context of the history of comparative linguistics, his works, in which Anglo-Saxon was considered alongside other Germanic languages, testify, in spite of their deficiencies, to the emergence in that early period of such important concepts as a parent language and a family tree. His achievements include the first description of Anglo-Saxon dialects and poetry. Taking into consideration Hickes’ attainments, one might find it strange that many of his contemporaries viewed his research and that of other Oxford saxonists in a critical light. The first reason lay in the intellectual climate of his time. In an age when most British intellectuals saw their historical roots in the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome, the scholars suggested a principally different interpretation of the roots of the British nation. In fact, they contributed to the emergence of a new AngloSaxon identity. Secondly, their contemporaries found strange and pedantic their scholarly methods of textological analysis, which, actually, were quite close to modern ones, and the dry style of their works, the abundance of terms and complicated syntactic structures. The third explanation is the practical bias of most prescriptive grammars of the 18th century, which looked for criteria of correctness not in historical records, but in contemporary usage.

Confronting a Source of Contemporary Student Disengagement

The author teaches undergraduate seminars on problems of justice arising historically from the freedom of expression clause of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. He began this instruction before the present fraught intellectual climate, with its ideological polarization and its claims, Left and Right, against the traditional arguments for tolerance for opinions different from one’s own. He has long favored confronting what Ken Bain, the author of What the Best College Teachers Do, has called “the big questions,” and in these seminars asks: is it possible for a democratic society to achieve simultaneously the desirable ends of justice and order? Recently he has taught students with strong responses to big questions. The campus is often characterized by vigorous expression of the progressive student consensus but quiescence on the part of the not inconsiderable number of conservative students and students less secure in their opinions. This seminar has maintained proactive conversations, with generally broad participation. In this article, he explains how, through structured discussions, simulations, and the study of judicial processes, historical lawsuits and court decisions have provided frameworks for classes that are explicitly less divisive and more productive of analytical thinking. The article concludes, however, with a discussion of an abiding problem within this generally successful model: the disengaged student whose opinions lie outside the abidingly liberal-progressive campus consensus and who seeks to avoid participation.

The introduction and current status of the multidimensional model of pain neurobiology.

Conceptual models are useful because they guide our practical actions related to whatever is represented by the model; this includes research that reveals the limitations of these actions and the potential for their improvement. These statements apply to many aspects of daily life and especially to pain as a challenge for both clinical practice specifically and neurobiology generally. In the first half of the 20th century, our conceptual model of pain, to the extent that it existed at all, was based on evidence supporting the proposition that pain emerged from activity within a very spatially limited set of central nervous system (CNS) structures located within the cerebral cortex and it's oligosynaptic connections with the thalamus. This CNS activity was strongly associated with the activation of physiologically distinct and specialized somatovisceral afferent fibers. All, or nearly all, aspects of the pain experience were thought to arise from, and be modified by, changes in that localized CNS activity. There was no compelling and widely accepted reason to consider an alternative model. However, neurophysiological, neuroanatomical, behavioral, and clinical evidence emerging in the late mid-20th century prompted a reconsideration of the prevailing model of pain neurobiology. Based on this new evidence and the perceived limitations of the prevailing model, pain could then be reasonably conceived as a multidimensional experience arising from the conjoint activation of physiologically and anatomically distinct but interacting CNS structures each separately mediating sensory discriminative, affective, and cognitive aspects of pain. This brief historical review describes the intellectual climate at the time this multidimensional model was proposed, the dispositions for resisting or accepting it, and concludes with a comment on the current status of the model as a fusion of distributed activations that create a unified perception of pain.