Towards a new philosophy of history. European Vichianism and Neapolitan Hegelianism (1804–48)

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Hegel’s reception among nineteenth-century Neapolitan authors went hand-in-hand with a renewed interest in Giambattista Vico’s philosophy of history. It considers the mechanisms of circulation and reception that shaped responses to Hegelianism within the broader context of European debates on La Scienza Nuova. These developments largely directed Neapolitans’ understanding of Hegel’s ideas and encouraged the merging of local thought with wider European currents. Neapolitan Hegelians engaged very extensively with the works of French and northern Italian authors, such as Jules Michelet and Carlo Cattaneo, who had understood Vico as a proponent of an absolute concept of historical time that neatly dovetailed with the philosophical preoccupations common among German idealists. The article makes a case for a transnational understanding of Neapolitan Hegelianism, arguing that this current of thought did not merely stem from the passive absorption of Hegel’s ideas, but emerged as the synthesis of a local and a European dimension of philosophy.     

The enlightened narrative in the age of liberal reform: William Robertson’s View of the Progress of Society in Hungary

This article examines a translation of the Scottish historian William Robertson’s probably most famous text (based on a previous German edition) in the journal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the 1830s, as a case study on continuity between the Enlightenment and the era of liberal reform in Central Europe. It underlines the benefits of the comparative study of Scotland in Robertson’s time and Hungary in the Reform Age as partners in composite polities at the opposite ends of Europe, where patriotic projects of overcoming limitations of political sovereignty via cultural and economic improvement were pursued. The belated reception of Robertson in Hungary took place within a larger initiative of progress and refinement, associated with the liberal Count István Széchenyi, in an environment where many potential sympathizers with his programme were ambivalent about the values of cosmopolitanism and commerce promoted by Robertson, indebted as they remained to more archaic modes of patriotism. In view of the peculiarities of translation, and selection the Hungarian rendering of the View of the Progress was attuned to the sentiments of this constituency, and may be interpreted as a set of discursive gestures aimed at conquering it for the cause of ‘liberalism as refinement.’     

Contesting Marshall Sahlins on Kinship

In a recent two‐part article on the nature of kinship, Marshall Sahlins maintains that performative criteria for kin‐reckoning are at least as salient as procreative ones, and that, at conception, an individual is endowed with a wide circle of kin, including the ancestral dead. For both reasons, he argues, there is no warrant for granting privileged status to what anthropologists have called ‘primary’ kinship. The contentions here are that performative criteria are modeled upon procreative ones; that ties to ancestral figures are seen as antithetical to procreative ties; and that, therefore, all kinship constructs are derived from nuclear family relationships. Evidence in support of these contentions is provided from the Mae Enga, Fiji, the Trobriands, and Aboriginal Australia.     

‘Not Like the Stories I am Used to’: East German Film as Cinematic Memory in Contemporary Chile

This paper is concerned with East German films which deal with the subject of Chile in the aftermath of the 1973 coup d’état in a contemporary Chilean cultural framework. Conceived in the charged political atmosphere of the Cold War, this material is valuable in Chile today because it reflects East Germany as a cultural and social environment for Chilean émigré artists during the 1970s and 1980s. The author explores the films’ potential as a form of cinematic postmemory for younger Chilean audiences, focusing on two feature films, Die Spur des Vermißten (1980) and Blonder Tango (1985). Do young Chileans accept these images as truthful and do they inspire a rethinking of the controversial subject of the Pinochet regime? The results suggest that the DEFA films, due to their narrative and aesthetic textures, present this audience with challenging perspectives, uncover misconceptions and evoke empathy with antagonistic social and political agents. Based on this case study, the author argues that the DEFA films are audio-visual materials which can be highly productive in cultural and educational contexts and can complement efforts to revive collective memory in Chile.     

The Poison and the Spider's Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Epicureanism

This article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some critics focused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution against essentialising claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance, however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful to investigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in Johan Jakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god.     

The Reception of ‘That Bigoted Silly Fellow’ James Beattie's Essay on Truth in Britain 1770–1830

This article examines the Scottish philosopher James Beattie's (1735–1803) controversial work of moral philosophy An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), noted for its pugnacious attack on the sceptical philosophy of David Hume. Usually treated only as an ephemeral success in the early 1770s, the Essay actually had two distinct periods of enormous popularity that account for its contemporary significance in the period between 1770 and 1830. The prominence of the Essay is demonstrated by its widespread positive reception, evinced in both published and private responses, in both England and Scotland, by the high estimation in which it was held within pedagogical circles as an anti-sceptical philosophical primer, and by its continual use as a textbook in both university and dissenting academy logic and moral philosophy classes. In these senses, Beattie's Essay was arguably the most significant work of the Common Sense School of Scottish philosophy.     

The ages of man. A study in medieval writing and thought

It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century—drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sources, and Wollstonecraft scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present—this article applies a revised Rezeptionsgeschichte approach to tracing her intellectual influence on the woman question and organised feminism in Europe. Although the Memoirs and post-revolutionary politics everywhere dampened and even drove underground the reception of her persona and ideas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft's reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe, like the United States, was more positive and sustained in comparison to the public backlash she faced as a ‘fallen woman’ in her homeland of Britain through the bulk of the Victorian era.     

Maps and Memory: Readings of Cartography in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Song China

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the early history of the genre of the empire map in China, examines twelfth-century steles and printed maps of the Chinese territories, and analyses contemporary viewings and readings of maps in this genre. It argues that such maps reached a much broader readership of literate elites over the course of the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and acquired new political significance as maps became powerful symbols in debates concerning the pros and cons of negotiated peace.     

Readers-in-conversations: a politics of reading in literary geographies

While the role of readers in literary geographies has been theoretically acknowledged, the methodological practice of engaging with multiple readers is little and far between. This gap between theory and practice has perpetuated understandings of texts as static representations and of readers as passive and homogeneous. Such problematic notions urgently need to be contested and this paper is one such attempt. Using a case study of Singapore poetry and its resistance to state-driven landscape change, I engage with twenty-one Singaporean readers through an online, asynchronous forum to demonstrate the challenging but rich process of studying reader reception. In doing so, I show how the dynamic co-enactment of responses by multiple readers-in-conversations leads to both complementarities and clashes. This not only reveals a more nuanced understanding of the author–text–reader(s) interactions, but also points to an inevitable politics of reading present in the study of all textual representations.