Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy

Summary

The issue which I wish to address in this paper is the widespread tendency in Anglophone philosophy to insist on a separation between the history of philosophy and the history of ideas or intellectual history. This separation reflects an anxiety on the part of philosophers lest the special character of philosophy will be dissolved into something else in the hands of historians. And it is borne of a fundamental tension between those who think of philosophy's past as a source of ideas and arguments of interest to the present, and those who hold that the philosophy of the past should be studied on its own terms, in relation to its immediate context, without reference to the present. The challenge, then, is to re-historicise the history of philosophy, and to keep the philosophers onside.     

大历史与历史研究

大历史是历史研究与教学的新领域,它是指从各种可能的规模甚至宇宙的规模来探究一切事物的历史。大历史也是一种跨学科研究。它与世界史存在关联,也是对传统史学的一种补充。大历史探究也满足了人们的精神、心灵和社会需求,有利于人们更好地认识自我。     

Brief reflections on the journal Italianists keep

Abstract

The following three papers were given at a Round Table held at New York University's Casa Italiana in October 2005, chaired by Ruth Ben-Ghiat. As part of the events held to mark the tenth anniversary of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, we asked our three invited speakers – Raymond Grew, Elizabeth Krause and Paolo Macry – to comment on the directions taken by the JMIS in its first decade and to set out some objectives for the future.     

History and the Scientific Worldview

Worldviews affect human behavior, and how we behave affects the world around us. Animism and so-called higher religions remain influential worldviews; but the scientific worldview is comparably significant, and has undergone drastic change during the twentieth century. The physical science ideal of mathematical precision and predictability, as elaborated by Galileo, Newton, and their heirs, underwent an amazing transformation in the twentieth century when Big Bang cosmology substituted an expanding, unstable universe for the Newtonian world machine. As a result, a grand convergence of the sciences seems to be emerging around an evolutionary vision of how new aspects of reality emerge locally from new levels of complexity, like the heavier atoms, forged in stellar furnaces, the living molecules that arose in earth's primordial seas, and the symbolic systems invented by human societies perhaps as recently as forty thousand years ago. History, once a hopelessly inexact laggard among the sciences, might even become something of a model for other disciplines, since it deals with the most complex levels of reality we are aware of, that is, the world of agreed-upon meanings that guides our interaction with one another and with the biological, chemical, and physical worlds around us.     

严复社会史观的建构与近代史学转向

严复对社会史观的建构颇有“西方史学本土化”、“中国传统史学近代化”这一近代史学转向的特征。以往学术界探究严复社会史观的理论建构的专文鲜见,笔者从思想与社会互动的层面对此作探索,既在横向层面关注严复社会史观的理论源头,即斯宾塞社会进化论、甄克思宗法制度论、西莱政治史学等学术思想与本土学术资源中苟子的社群观、杨朱之自利、墨子之兼爱及佛教的“心境之说”等思想,又从中西文化会通的社会语境中分析严复社会史观的嬗变及其昭示的理论得失。     

Projectors and learned projects in early modern England

Commenting in 1692 on the “Projecting Humour that now reigns” in England, Daniel Defoe nicknamed the period the “Projecting Age.” He dated its start to c. 1680, even as he conceded that “it had indeed something of life in the time of the late Civil War” as well. Defoe was wrong. Decades earlier both Elizabethan and Jacobean commentators had inveighed against the rampant passion for schemes, a perception increasingly documented by scholars. For the most part, however, the appraisal of early modern projects has been confined to the domain of economic and social history. Monopolies, inventions, plans to ameliorate the condition of the poor and infirm, and schemes guaranteeing the enrichment of the nation, have drawn the attention of historians; only sporadic attention has been paid to the numerous scholarly projects that also proliferated during the same period. My intention here is not to be exhaustive, but to offer a snapshot of the large number of proposals that sought to establish new institutions of higher learning, usually through substantial outlays of public capital.     

History in Journalism and Journalism in History: Anthony Lewis and the Watergate Crisis

Let me plunge right into a Lewis column to convey his marvelous craft in weaving the past into a contemporary moment. This one is from July 8, 1974. The column is about the oral argument before the Supreme Court in the Executive Privilege case, which was to enter the constitutional canon as United States v. Nixon . ¹ Lewis writes as both eyewitness and commentator. He begins with constitutional history by invoking the legendary case of Marbury v. Madison :