Joseph Levenson and the possibility for a dialogic history

In contrast to the criticism that his work represents a Euro-centric view of China, we argue that Joseph Levenson’s understanding of China involves a third dimension – Judaism – at the level of his historical perspective and methodology. Built on in-depth analysis of Levenson’s work, in particular his Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, as well as his unfinished yet profound writings on Judaism and Jewish history, we find that his understanding of Jewish tradition plays a crucial role in his analysis of the history of modern China. We argue that what Levenson practiced was a historical methodology that we name “dialogic history.” We believe that dialogic history provides us a potential answer to the question of how we can understand another culture without being imperialists, essentialists, or Orientalists. Dialogic history is also history in action because when this kind of dialogue is conducted, a new space can be created in which history is no longer a one-sided monologue.     

Franz Joseph Gall came to Copenhagen,and for a brief moment the brain was the talk of the town

ABSTRACT

When the inventor of phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall, came to Denmark in the fall of 1805, he was met with great enthusiasm and fascination among the general public, as well as within the scientific community. His visit was an event that was covered by the newspapers unlike any other scientific lecture. However, as soon as Gall left, public interest in phrenology almost instantaneously vanished. Different theories have been put forth in the attempt to answer the question as to why phrenology never found a audience in Denmark. The Danish phrenologist Carl Otto explained it by referring to the poor quality of the Danish phrenological publications. Danish historians have argued that phrenology was too incompatible with the dominant scientific paradigm, Natürphilosophie. This article argues that the newspaper coverage of phrenology was more about sensational news stories than about science, and ultimately phrenology was a fad that wore off when the newspapers shifted their focus to other news.     

Joseph Priestley and the Argument from Design

ABSTRACT

Although Joseph Priestley was notorious for rejecting much of orthodox Christianity and replacing it with a materialistic Unitarianism, in another respect he was an orthodox theist of his time in that he passionately upheld the Argument from Design. The Argument from Design was the heart of his “rational religion”. He contended that natural order, especially biological order, could only be successfully explained by intentional agency. At the time, however, the Argument was coming under attack, first from David Hume, then from Matthew Turner, and lastly from Erasmus Darwin. Priestley replied to each of these critics. This article surveys his replies. The three critics of the Argument contended that intelligent agency could offer only a weak explanation of natural order, that natural order is self-explanatory, or that natural mechanisms can explain biological order. Priestley in turn critiqued all three contentions, arguing that the Argument is a strong explanation; that natural order cannot be self-explanatory; and that the proposed natural explanations conflict with the empirical evidence.     

Priestley on materialism and the essence of God

ABSTRACT

The paper focuses on Priestley’s complex views on the essence of God in connection with his materialism, elaborated in the Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777/ 1782). This issue is crucial if one wishes to get a clear idea of what Priestley’s materialism amounts to; whether it is mainly a thesis about the material grounds of the human mind (“psychological materialism”), or a more far-reaching one about what kind of substances exist in the world (a version of “ontological materialism”). The claim that God may be material allows for the most radical version of ontological materialism according to which everything in the world is material, without altogether denying that God exists. In fact, Priestley considers and partially defends at least three different views on the potential materiality of God: (1) an agnostic stance that is his official view, (2) materialism about God based on his own theory of matter, and (3) “gross” materialism about God. The aim of the paper is to analyze these three views, in particular concerning what kind of materialism they support and whether they can contribute to the consistent Christian materialism Priestley envisaged.     

The Seventeenth-Century Terrestrial Globe by Morden,Berry and Lea

Throughout the early modern period, the intellectual and symbolic value of globes ensured these objects enjoyed a broad cultural appeal. Consequently, their design was subject to a wide range of social, commercial and intellectual pressures. The ways in which the intellectual and cultural concerns of seventeenth-century England became manifest in the cartographic design, resulting in a culturally specific product with broad appeal to an English audience, are highlighted in the case of a terrestrial globe constructed by Robert Morden, William Berry and Philip Lea, c.1683?1690, now in the Whipple Museum, Cambridge. Since this particular globe was produced at an early stage in the history of English globe making, light is shed on the emergence of a national globe-making tradition.     

Georg Büchner: Anatomist of the animal brain and the human mind

ABSTRACT

The writer Georg Büchner (1813–1837) is considered one of the giants of German literature. Comparatively less well known, however, is the fact that Büchner was also a gifted neuroanatomist who completed his medical studies with a dissertation on the nervous system of the barbel (a freshwater fish with a high incidence in the River Rhine) and gave a lecture on cranial nerves shortly afterward, hoping to secure a position at the University of Zurich. In the copious secondary literature on Büchner, it has often been discussed whether and how his poetic and scientific writings were interrelated. In this article, I compare Büchner’s anatomical and literary views of the brain and argue that two distinct perspectives on the organ were developed here. In the literary works, human behavior was linked to the brain in a manner that betrays the influence of Franz Joseph Gall’s organology. In the anatomical writing, the brain appeared as an exemplar of natural harmony and beauty. In the one case, the brain appeared as an aristocrat, in the other as a pariah. I take this stark contrast to mean that Büchner understood the brain as an epistemically slippery, contradictory object that could only be approached from different angles.     

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on phrenology: Debunking a fad

ABSTRACT

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894) was a Boston physician, a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and a writer of prose and poetry for general audiences. He was also one of the most famous American wits of the nineteenth century and a celebrity not bashful about exposing costly, absurd, and potentially harmful medical fads. One of his targets was phrenology, and the current article examines how he learned about phrenology during the 1830s as a medical student in Boston and Paris, and his head-reading with Lorenzo Fowler in 1858. It then turns to what he told readers of the Atlantic Monthly (in 1859) and Harvard medical students (in 1861) about phrenology being a pseudoscience and how phrenologists were duping clients. By looking at what Holmes was stating about cranioscopy and practitioners of phrenology in both humorous and more serious ways, historians can more fully appreciate the “bumpy” trajectory of one of the most significant medical and scientific fads of the nineteenth century.     

Heretic or Traitor? Spinoza’s Excommunication and the Challenge That Judaism Poses to the Study of Religious Diversity

ABSTRACT

When political theorists talk about “religious diversity,” they usually intend the multiplicity of “religions” in a given society. Yet we now know that the secular, liberal framing of the problematic presupposes a controversial definition of “religion.” My primary goal, in this paper, is to reorient scholarly discussion around what we might call “the critical religion conception of diversity” – not the multiplicity of “religions,” but the myriad ways that the sacred intersects with national and political identity, some of which resist assimilation to the “religious” paradigm. Toward this end, I relate a story about Spinoza’s Hebrew reception in the interwar period. For Zionist intellectuals, Spinoza symbolized the deformations that “religion” imposed on Judaism’s self-understanding and the constraints that it placed on Jewish intellectual horizons. Studying the Zionist critique of “religion” exposes the limitations of received theoretical frameworks, which cannot address the kinds of diversity that were politically consequential for twentieth-century Jews.     

Franz Joseph Gall on hemispheric symmetries

ABSTRACT

Franz Joseph Gall believed that the two cerebral hemispheres are anatomically and functionally similar, so much so that one could substitute for the other following unilateral injuries. He presented this belief during the 1790s in his early public lectures in Vienna, when traveling through Europe between 1805 and 1807, and in the two sets of books he published after settling in France. Gall seemed to derive his ideas about laterality independently of French anatomist Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), who formulated his “law of symmetry” at about the same time. He would, however, later cite Bichat, whose ideas about mental derangement were different from his own and who also attempted to explain handedness, a subject on which Gall remained silent. The concept of cerebral symmetry would be displaced by mounting clinical evidence for the hemispheres being functionally different, but neither Gall nor Bichat would live to witness the advent of the concept of cerebral dominance.