European Intellectual History Research Articles

After Sir William Jones: British Linguistic Scholarship and European Intellectual History

After Sir William Jones: British Linguistic Scholarship and European Intellectual History

Lucy Hutchinson in her fifth century

ABSTRACT This essay introduces papers delivered at a conference on Lucy Hutchinson, Nottingham, June 2022. While Hutchinson’s ‘Elegies’ and Order and Disorder are discussed, the majority focus on Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, of which the manuscript was freshly on display in a special gallery in Nottingham Castle. I discuss the interdisciplinary range of the papers, from local and military history to European intellectual history, from gender theory to the study of manuscript collations, which together throw much light on Hutchinson’s writings, and will open the way to further study.

Derrida hat Nietzsches Regenschirm verloren. Zu Philipp Felschs Buch Wie Nietzsche aus der Kälte kam

Abstract Derrida Has Lost Nietzsche's Umbrella: On Philipp Felsch's Book Wie Nietzsche aus der Kälte kam. This essay discusses the story of the critical edition of Nietzsche’s complete works by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari as presented in Philipp Felsch’s book Wie Nietzsche aus der Kälte kam. The book, which is based on biographical material of the two editors, takes up an important episode in European intellectual history in its political, cultural historical context. However, it often presents a questionable use of these sources. A closer examination of that the same source material would situate the history of the edition and its editors in a different context. Likewise, Felsch’s account of the history of Nietzsche’s reception in France, and his reception in the neighboring countries, lacks nuance and reveals some remarkable examples of misreading. Like in other genres of history, scholars of discourse history and intellectual history need to read sources closely and critically. When we talk of dealing with primary sources, the work that editors have done in commentaries and editions should be taken into account. Finally, I argue that we should not dismiss recent innovations in editing methods as confusing or “vulcano-like,” but we would do well to appreciate the opportunities offered by the digital humanities, both for a professional readership and a wider audience.

The Multiplied Mind

Abstract This article examines a dramatic aporia in modern European intellectual history, involving what it calls “perspectival thinking”—a way of thinking in which an individual assumes and thinks from the perspectives of others. This paradox appears in the work on totalitarianism of Europe's three foremost thinkers on totalitarianism—Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell. Examining their explorations of perspectival thinking, this article argues that, taken together, they are strikingly discordant. While Arendt exalts it, Koestler and Orwell problematize perspectival thinking, and Orwell even sees it as evil. The three thinkers thus articulate a dramatically polyvocal understanding of perspectival thinking, creating a remarkable dissonance in modern European thought.

European Intellectual History after the Global Turn

Abstract The globalization of modern European intellectual history is long overdue. It is also still in its early stages. This essay distinguishes four paths historians have followed so far. First, there has been the attempt to recover the global contexts and sources of the canon of “European thought.” A second approach has been to recapture the global imaginations of modern European thinkers. A third and more difficult possibility has been to track how European concepts and traditions were received and remade as they traveled the globe, and to examine the complex feedback mechanisms that have blurred the line between the European and the extra-European. Finally, a fourth and most controversial mode is to insist that the modern European canon is of prime significance in understanding historical and contemporary global relations—and that part of its value lies in helping undo the exclusions that its own historians have visited on that canon by misrepresenting European thought as a merely European affair.

Knowledge of art versus artistic knowledge. I. The GAKhN “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” in the context of European intellectual history

In this first of two articles, I look at the project for the “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” in connection with the idea of a synthesis of the “artistic sciences” as the principal task of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN, 1921–1930) in Moscow. The most important feature of the Academy was the unity of its epistemological conception (the system of artistic sciences) and the institutional structure of the Academy (its “departments,” “sections,” and “laboratories”), which embodied the interdisciplinary intention of uniting the philosophy of art, the artistic sciences, and artistic experimentation. I analyze the connection of the project with the task of “concept formation” in the artistic sciences, which was recognized in European philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century as the main criterion for scientificity in the human sciences. I also investigate how the Encyclopedia project, developed by Gustav Shpet, took into account previous attempts to systematize aesthetic terminology (in nineteenth-century dictionaries). I show that the project of the “Encyclopedia of Artistic Terminology” was not the sole attempt to create a new dictionary of aesthetic concepts and of the cultural sciences. Similar projects were being developed in the 1920s and 30s in Germany (Erich Rothacker planned to produce Handwörterbuch der gesamten gemeingeisteswissenschaftlichen und kulturphilosophischen Grundbegriffe) and in France (Étienne Souriau published Vocabulaire d’esthétique; see Souriau 2010).

Ernst Bloch on Nazism or Joachim Florsky against the Third Reich (Comment on the translation of E. Bloch’s article “On the Original History of the Third Reich”)

The article considers the views of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch on the problem of the evolution of the idea of the “Third Reich” in the European Christian tradition of the Middle Ages and New Times, as well as its actualization by German Nazism. The author of the paper is the translator of many texts by E. Bloch. He attempts to understand the origins of the popularity of Nazism from a culturological and historical-philosophical point of view E. Bloch in a series of works turns, for the first time in 1924, to the European Christian tradition, to those images and figures that have defined the mental landscape for many centuries. The image of the Third Reich occupies an essential place in the intellectual history of Europe and the European Christian tradition. The influence of this image on the consciousness of the masses cannot be underestimated. Bloch reveals the inconsistency of the concept of the Third Reich and the figure of the savior (“Kaiser-liberator”, “leader”), which contains both the origins of the junction of Christianity and anti-fascism, and the grounds for inversion in favor of Nazism. The author also focuses on E. Bloch’s views on the legacy of the theologian Joachim Florsky (12th century), who created a historiosophical scheme that had an impact on many philosophical and religious concepts of history. Bloch enters Joachim Florsky into the historical and philosophical tradition, analyzing the mythologeme of the Savior in the cultural history of Europe. The paper presents an overview of modern research on the legacy of I. Florsky by Russian and foreign scientists, which prove the relevance of the ideas of E. Bloch, who revealed the connection between medieval religious movements and Nazism, opening a discussion with opposing points of view. The author examines the relationship between chiliasm and revolution, the influence of mysticism on the consciousness of German society at the beginning of the 20th century and on intellectuals. The article characterizes the position of E. Bloch, who believed that German Nazism committed an ideological theft of theological Christian concepts. The article highlights Bloch’s call to change the attitude to medieval chiliasm and mysticism in connection with the revolutionary potential existing in these currents.

Лукиан, модернизм и интертекстуальность. К прагматической теории культуры

The paper considers the issues of modernist and pragmatic discourses in the works of the Ancient Greek writer of the 2nd century AD. Lucian of Samosata. His fa­mous work The Passing of Peregrinus is placed in the conceptual field of “Theory of the avant-garde” by Renato Poggioli, terminologically close to the conception of the menippea of Mikhail Bakhtin. Ancient modernism and pragmatism are ana­lyzed in connection with the modern European intellectual history and general the­ory of culture. The author comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to separate the elements of modernist aesthetics and pragmatic theory in the work of Lucian. In addition, the author insists on the identification of several proper modernist dis­courses competing with Lucian (and the corresponding classification of conno­tations): primitivist (populist) and intellectualist (elitist). Lucian's philosophical instrumentalism becomes an ideal background for the collage (intertextual) aes­thetics of novelty and shock, the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere. At the same time, the rejection of ontologism and metaphysics by Lucian leads to a situation of considering artistic, political and philosophical problems within the framework of a kind of unified media theory, which also anticipates contemporary conceptual approaches.

On how not to write about being colonized

The objective of this essay is to assess the impact of Jan Vansina’s and Cheikh Anta Diop’s work on how African history has been constructed since 1960. This is only the beginning of a longer project related to framing “history” as such through “African history”. The intellectual framework (or starting point) of the essay is provided by Fanon’s call to arms in his conclusion to The Wretched of The Earth. His call to arms was not violence, for the sake of violence. It was a call for “stopping to pay tribute to Europe”. In the name of humanity, he called for moving away from imitation. Fanon’s understanding of Africa did not come from a study and/or understanding of African psychiatry. African history, as seen by Jan Vansina and his students, has been constructed in the manner of “paying tribute to Europe”, as if there was no other way to understand African history but through the intellectual and theoretical lenses borrowed from European intellectual history. This can be seen by looking at the work of two major figures: Jan Vansina , on the one hand, and, on the other, Cheikh Anta Diop. The title of this essay has been inspired by the title of Vansina’s latest book: Being Colonized (2010) that provides clues to how he understood colonization through his own research among the Bakuba. Besides using research data that had been collected in the 1950s (during Belgian colonial rule), Vansina assumes that his familiarity with the Bakuba puts him in a privileged position to understand colonization from their perspective. This is not different from the perspective of the missionaries and/or goodhearted Europeans who, as Fanon pointed out, speaks about humanity wile slaughtering it wherever they met it.

Sapiens Dominabitur Astris: A Diachronic Survey of a Ubiquitous Astrological Phrase

From the late thirteenth through late seventeenth centuries, a single three-word Latin phrase—sapiens dominabitur astris, or “the wise man will be master of the stars”—proliferated in astrological, theological, philosophical, and literary texts. It became a convenient marker denoting orthodox positions on free will and defining the boundaries of the scientifically and morally legitimate practice of astrology. By combining the methodology of a diachronic historical survey with a microhistorical focus on evolving phraseology, this study argues that closely examining the use of this phrase reveals how debates about the meanings of wisdom, free will, determinism, and the interpretation of stellar influence on human events changed radically across four centuries of Western European cultural and intellectual history. The first half of this article charts the scholastic response to theological criticisms of astrology and the reconciliation of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology with Catholic theology, paying special attention to its implications for astrology as viewed through scholarly uses of the phrase. The second half of the article shows how the phrase developed a multitude of idiosyncratic meanings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fracturing its late medieval scholastic unity, as new forms of philosophical, socio-political, religious, and scientific critiques upended astrological beliefs and practices. Ultimately, this paper argues that examining the theory and praxis of astrology through the changing phraseological meanings of “sapiens dominabitur astris” allows historians and cultural anthropologists to better discern the dialectical (as opposed to binary) relationships between free will and determinism in the West.

Natural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism

Natural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism

Parent-Child Resemblance in Literature Before the Age of Genetics: A Physiognomic Interpretation of the Novels of Zsigmond Kemény and Miklós Jósika

Although Zsigmond Kemény (1814-1875) and Miklós Jósika (1794-1865) inevitably figure among the most significant writers of nineteenth-century Hungarian literature, the interpretation of their novels is embedded within international historical contexts that are often inaccessible to the present-day reader. This study examines the physiognomic meanings of parent-child similarity in nineteenth-century novels and thus situates the examined works within the context of European literary and intellectual history. Such an interpretation of the novels reveals the diverse and strong current in the history of European ideas with which the analyzed texts engage in a lively dialogue.

Americanism in France: institutions and current trends

The study of the Americas, or “Americanism”, appeared as a specific area or specialty in French universities from the middle of the 19th century. It built on deep-going roots about the specificity of the American continent and on the importance of its “discovery” in the intellectual history of Europe, providing a kind of anti-model of what was considered “civilization” and a general interrogation about models of “nature” and “society”. After a slow start, which included however very important...

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Melancholy, gender, and genius in the art of Thomas Eakins

ABSTRACT This essay analyses the visual representation of melancholy and related themes in the work of American artist Thomas Eakins (1844–1916). Its particular focus is Home Scene (1870–1871), an intimate portrait of two of the artist’s sisters in the parlour of their family home in Philadelphia. Through a close examination of Home Scene in relation to later portraits by and of the artist, my analysis sheds new light on how and why Eakins reshaped ideations of melancholy based in European art and intellectual history within the context of nineteenth century American culture. While representing both the appearance and effects of melancholy in Home Scene and many other of his portraits, Eakins also constructed aspects of his own artistic identity in accordance with this theme. Analysing the ideas and practices that impacted these processes, this study shows how the artist’s life-long fascination with the intertwined subjects of melancholy, mental illness, and the trope of the misunderstood artist-genius informed his personal and professional lives as it intersected with prominent discourses on women, gender, and medicine in post-Civil War America.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Botánica en las misiones jesuíticas de américa española y el pacífico y las contribuciones de jesuitas centroeuropeos, siglos XVII y XVIII

The present text focuses on the problem of European intellectual history and history of science, in relation to the conquest and colonization of overseas regions, especially America. The various problems of intellectual development and cultural transfers, brought about by the general opening of new horizonts, are discussed on the basis of documentation produced by the missionaries from the Central European provinces of the Society of Jesus, active in the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries. The text summarizes the opinions and stereotypes about the American flora formulated by the Jesuits, as well as their efforts to understand not only the laws of nature, but laws of universe through its study; and, at the same time, hints at the specific features of the Central European gaze upon the New World.

Isaac Satanow (1732–1804) on Moral and Intellectual Perfection

Abstract Isaac ben Moshe Halevi (Isaac Satanow, 1732–1804) serves as an interesting example of how Jewish intellectuals offered alternative ways of entering the new era. Unlike other authors, Satanow does not explicitly concentrate on secularization or assimilation in his writing, but instead intends to revive traditional values and writing by putting them into a new cultural and intellectual framework. Satanow combines relevant topics from Jewish tradition with scientific discoveries, philosophical reasoning, and kabbalistic thought. An analysis of Satanow’s unique combination of literary and intellectual corpora from various periods and backgrounds offers a more nuanced picture of European Jewish intellectual history and challenges the grand narratives of scholarship. Furthermore, an awareness of the deep impact of German philosophy and natural science on Satanow’s thought provides insight into his relationship with the majority culture and his Eastern European background and also shows how his concept of modernity seeped in via complex networks.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

La Correspondance d’Émilie Du Châtelet ed. by Ulla Kölving, Andrew Brown

MLR, .,   itself strikes a good balance between faithfulness to the text and a pleasing modern readability. It is a shame that there is still no English translation of èbes that includes the original text in a facing-page arrangement, as, for example, there is with the modern French translations. However, the fact that Ferrante and Hanning have maintained the verse structure of the original text, and that this text was edited in a widely available edition (Roman de èbes, ed. by Francine Mora-Lebrun (Paris: Livre de Poche, )), means that readers wishing to make comparisons will find it relatively easy to cross-reference. Overall, this translation is a welcome addition to the field, and will be particularly valued by students and non-specialists looking for an introduction to èbes’s characters and stories. H-U  B S H La Correspondance d’Émilie Du Châtelet. Ed. by U K and A B.  vols. Ferney-Voltaire: Centre International d’Étude du e Siècle. .  pp. (vol. );  pp. (vol. ). €. ISBN –––– (set). is new critical edition of Émilie Du Châtelet’s correspondence is a scholarly compendium of the highest value. Replacing the carefully edited, but sparsely annotated and partly outdated Besterman edition (Voltaire’s Correspondence,  vols (Geneva : Institut et Musée Voltaire, –); Les Lettres de la Marquise Du Châtelet,  vols (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, )), the new edition gives Du Châtelet the outstanding place she deserves in early eighteenth-century European intellectual history. Whereas her enduring fame is mostly attached to the Institutions de physique () and her posthumously published annotated translation of Newton’s Principia (), Du Châtelet was not only deeply engaged with metaphysics and natural philosophy, but also with moral philosophy, religious criticism, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the fine arts. e new edition includes a number of new correspondents (mostly belonging to Du Châtelet’s private entourage) and a considerable number of unknown letters from and to the marquise’s illustrious correspondents, such as Algarotti, Mairan, Madame de Graffigny, Frederick II of Prussia, and Christian Wolff. e editors had to grapple with a number of irremediable lacunae—such as, first and foremost, the loss of the complete correspondence with her companion Voltaire; the major part of the correspondence with her second important tutor and, later, intellectual antagonist, Maupertuis; the entire scientific correspondence with Christian Wolff (repeatedly referred to in the Wolff–Manteuffel correspondence, available online at