In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Early Modern Iberia, Indexed:Hernando Colón's Cosmography Seth Kimmel The aspiration to comprehensiveness that characterized early modern cosmography was inseparable from the humanist fantasy of a universal library. This was true not least because in seeking to fulfill their field's claim to knowledge about the cosmos as a whole, cosmographers

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Human Character and the Formation of the State:Reconsidering Machiavelli and Polybius 6 Jeffrey Dymond This article aims to contribute to a growing debate over the sources of a crucial opening chapter in Machiavelli's Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (1517)—a chapter widely regarded as foundational for the political theory developed

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: At the Bottom of the Soul:The Psychologization of the "Fundus Animae" between Leibniz and Sulzer Alessandro Nannini INTRODUCTION The concept of the ground of the soul—Grund der Seele or fundus animae—is well established within the theological tradition:1 for example, the "depths of a person's heart" (βάθος καρδίας ἀνθρώπου) is featured

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Not Six Million nor Thirty Thousand:From "Holocaust Revisionism" to "State Terrorism" Denial in Argentina, 1945–2016 Matías Grinchpun INTRODUCTION: "NOT SO MANY" In early 2016, Dario Lopérfido—then Buenos Aires city's minister of culture—made headlines when he claimed that "there were not thirty thousand desaparecidos (disappeared) in

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Notices Morris D. Forkosch Prize The Journal of the History of Ideas is pleased to announce the winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize ($2,000) for the best first book in intellectual history published in 2019: Lydia Barnett, for After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe, published by Johns Hopkins University

This article examines the role of psychiatry in the life and work of Frantz Fanon. It focuses on Fanon's relationship to institutional psychotherapy, which he discovered at the hospital of Saint-Alban through the figure of François Tosquelles. Institutional psychotherapy confirmed, on a clinical level, what Fanon had already intuited in his early work. If alienation was always political and psychic

By drawing from Schmitt's postwar notebooks, this article reconstructs Schmitt's criticism of utopian political thought as part of his broader critique of technicity. This paper begins with Schmitt's conceptual history of utopianism within the context of two "de-localizations" of space and human nature. It then unearths Schmitt's unique understanding of utopia as the annihilation of space and the negation

This article examines J. S. Mill's philosophical logic as the basis for his political philosophy. In particular, it explores how he understands the logical mechanism of political discourse in his work A System of Logic and how this understanding supports his defense of freedom of thought and discussion in his On Liberty (chapter 2). While it is well known in the scholarly literature that Mill draws

While Grotius does not offer a new theory of marriage, nonetheless marriage seems to crop up in the most unlikely of places in The Rights of War and Peace. Marriage, as it arises out of natural law, becomes a model for thinking about topics vital to the early modern international: conduct in war, trade, sovereignty, and subordination of peoples; theorizing hierarchy and obligation of unequals; forging

This article presents a reassessment of the seventeenth-century debate over the origin of the Hebrew vowel points. Previous accounts have treated this debate from the perspective of Protestant scholarship, with the reception of Louis Cappel's Arcanum punctationis revelatum (1624) used to measure progress or reaction according to how far scholars accepted or rejected-the latter for theological reasons-the

Why compare Aby Warburg, talented cultural and art historian, creator of the eponymous library, and Leo Frobenius, pioneer of primitive art studies and the father of modern Africanism? Not merely for biographical reasons. The work of Warburg and Frobenius offers two clear examples of a cultural and scientific trend between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, which

What is too often lacking in contemporary interpretations of Immanuel Kant's racial thinking is a more thorough overview of the context and of the literature that he used to support his ideas. This article is mainly limited to Kant's brief discussion on race mixing at the end of this 1785 essay. He presented there the cases of the gypsies, the black Portuguese, and the Jews on St. Thomas in order to

In this article I explore how William Godwin depicted the social operation of media, and argue that his writing highlights a crosscurrent of alethic thought in Romantic-period Britain. I examine his direct assessments of the social merits of book-reading and conversation, revealing his ambivalence regarding sources of epistemic authority. I argue that he inherited this ambivalence from his Dissenting

By the 1880s, the Universities' Mission to Central Africa had stations scattered all over East Africa. African adherents came to the mission's Zanzibar headquarters for school and returned to the mainland as clergy and teachers. Despite their wide dispersal, the members of the mission maintained strong connections; in this piece, I trace these connections through the idea of the Upelekwa, a Swahili

Well-studied in historiography, nineteenth-century debates on Portugal's decadence ("decadência") left a deep and long-lasting impression in this country's historical culture. The idea that Portugal had reached its apogee and was inexorably losing ground in the concert of other European peoples led its intellectuals to search in the past for elements capable of inspiring a national rebirth. Among the

In 1748 Montesquieu simultaneously published his immense Spirit of the Laws and republished his brief Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline. Both the date of publication and the evidence of the texts themselves correct contemporary scholars' tendency to discount the status of the Considerations as the unique partner of the Laws. Reading the two works together

This article uses computational and statistical methods for analyzing the concept of liberty 1600-1800. Based on a bespoke set of tools for parsing conceptual structures it contributes to the literature on the concept of liberty and engages with the thesis concerning negative liberty first put forward by Isaiah Berlin and subsequently modified by Quentin Skinner.

Crucial to accounts of complexity is the history of the concept of emergence. Pride of place is generally given to G. E. Lewes, who in 1879 offered a theory of "emergents," of the unpredictable and incommensurate effects which follow from the crossing of causes. This essay recovers an earlier tradition; it focuses on experiments in seventeenth-century materials science, which explain emergent properties

In recent works on the Enlightenment and the origin of modern Western thought, there is often a dichotomy between Moderate versus Radical Enlightenment. This essay evaluates the early experiences of freedom of print in Sweden and Denmark against the backdrop of such assertions. Sweden and Denmark were widely diverging polities but they obtained officially recognized freedom of the press at almost the

During the French Revolution, several decrees were issued ordering the bells of suppressed churches to be melted and converted to money and cannons. Through examples drawn from literary and historical sources, this essay explains this fateful condemnation by showing how bells were part and parcel of pre-revolutionary anti-clerical writing. This essay also argues that the conflicting attitudes toward

Following Hans Blumenberg, this essay studies the genealogy of the idea of originality in a medieval metaphor characterizing the church interior as a "meadow" or λειμῶν (leimôn). Scholars focusing on this metaphor have neglected its use as a description of artistic process. Procopius of Caesarea, John of Damascus, and Leo VI, "the Wise." form the basis of this study, which argues that compiling anthologies

Scholars have generally depicted kabbalists within an air of exclusivity. During the second quarter of the eighteenth century, however, a handful of Jewish mystics in Padua, led by Moses HayimLuzzatto, opened their secret society to others interested but not adept in Kabbalah in an attempt to establish a "perfected community" and attain the long-awaited messianic redemption. This article explores the

Abstract:This review essay discusses recent Anglophone research on melancholy from both historical and cultural-critical traditions. I argue that these works offer a way for reconceptualizing early modern melancholy as a problem of accounting for passions and motives. The early modern archive of melancholy can help us articulate anti-depressive melancholy as a social problematic rather than merely

Abstract:This article probes the interplay of religious belief and early modern textual culture in Francisco Zumel's 1588 vita of Peter Nolasco. Like many hagiographers before and after, Zumel drew on earlier saint's lives to supply missing details; to choose his diverse set of sources, however, turned to bibliomancy, opening Laurentius Surius's hagiography collection De probatis sanctorum historiis

Abstract:This collection celebrates the semicentennial of the publication of Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. The question that inspired Blumenberg may continue to provoke readers today, when challenges to secularism have emerged both in academic discourse and in political life: Can modernity ground its own normativity without appealing to the religious past? Or must we abandon the

Abstract:Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age was published in the same year as Foucault's The Order of Things (1966). Both books attempt to grasp certain not altogether self-evident changes in the Western history of knowledge and attempt new methods of considering these discontinuities and the so-called "thresholds" between epochs. Beyond such general points of shared interest, one must ask

Abstract:This essay reconstructs the secularization debate between Blumenberg and Löwith. It explores what a genealogy of secular modernity can and cannot accomplish, asking how to build on Blumenberg's legacy without repeating his errors. Blumenberg absorbed the skepticism of a genealogy of secularism and responded with an unrealistic image of disconnected modernity, while also understanding that

Abstract:Especially in the second part of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Hans Blumenberg considered philosophical modernity through a reflection on theodicy. Theodicy even appeared here as constitutive for modernity, although this philosophical project of defending God against the existence of evil had been challenged several times in the past centuries. This role of theodicy in Legitimacy has been

Abstract:This article explores an ideological basis for a Stuart royal empire in early modern Britain that encompassed not just the three kingdoms of the Atlantic archipelago but also the overseas possessions held by the Crown. It argues that contemporaries articulated and acknowledged, especially from the 1620s into the 1680s, a fully realized entity, headed by the Stuart monarchs, and that royalism

Abstract:This paper explores how Blumenberg narrates the history of modernity as a second overcoming of Gnosticism. This detour through late antiquity illuminates the full meaning of his idea of modernity. Blumenberg develops important methodological insights about historical change, the threshold between epochs, etc. that appear in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. We see the central role of the interpretation

Abstract:This article examines Bodin's distinction between sovereignty and government ("la police") in the Six Livres de la République (1576) in the intellectual context of the Wars of Religion, and argues that the terminology of "la police" requires investigation in order to clarify its meaning. It demonstrates how Bodin distinguished his understanding of political science from his contemporaries

Abstract:The notion of a "theoretical attitude" [theoretische Einstellung or Haltung] is of central importance to Blumenberg's work, and particularly so in his writings on the history of science. From The Legitimacy of the Modern Age onwards, Blumenberg used this notion to insist on a continuity between scientific and humanistic modes of inquiry despite their different methodologies, and he attached

ABSTRACT:This paper addresses the topic of seventeenth-century religious freedom of speech, focusing on the concepts conceived by Adam Boreel, an early member of the Dutch Collegiants. First, it gives historical information on Adam Boreel and the Collegiant movement. Second, it examines Boreel’s ideas concerning freedom of prophesying, highlighting how Boreel perceived this freedom and religious enthusiasm

Abstract:This article argues that the recent rise of "anti-gender ideology," reproductive nationalism, and related discourses is best seen as an attempt to rework the boundaries of national sovereignty in a time of crisis. By focusing on the case of Estonia, the article shows how discourses which linked demographic decline to supranational, totalitarian, and utopian "experimentation" was articulated

Abstract:"Authority" is a term widely used by scholars from various fields of studies, including the history of philosophy, but its actual meaning often remains obscure. This paper aims to show how a philosophical reflection on the structure of epistemic authority can shed light on this phenomenon and facilitate a better understanding of its meaning in historical research. It will present an analytical

Abstract:This paper explores the reception of Dewey's ideas on democracy and education in Latin America from the beginning of the twentieth century through the "long 1960s" (1958–1974). The analysis is framed by a dynamic interplay between the local, regional, and supranational. To bring empirical specificity to Dewey's "translations," the author discusses Dewey's uptake in two political settings,

ABSTRACT:Recent interest in Raymond Aron has focused on his “Cold War Liberalism,” but he is neither a neo-liberal nor a Hayekian libertarian. Instead, this article will argue that Aron is a “Machiavellian” liberal – that his democratic theory is underpinned by an engagement with Pareto, Mosca, and Michels. First, it will reconstruct Aron’s dialogue with Pareto. Second, it will explore his overlooked

ABSTRACT:Völkisch research was a phenomenon in the social sciences and humanities that aimed to describe and cultivate the Volk, conceived broadly as a group united by some pre-existing or transcendental bond. Studies of this research complex have thus far been dominated by questions related to its close affiliation with the Nazi regime, but much remains unknown about how its longer-term development

ABSTRACT:Muslim thinkers have long debated the impact of secularism in their societies. This article examines “the rejectionist approach” to the question of secularism as articulated by a renowned Muslim intellectual, Naquib Al-Attas. I develop the argument that Al-Attas offered a unique view of secularism as an ungodly ideology and historical process that grew from the fusion of conflicting world

ABSTRACT:An examination of what has been claimed about the relationship between the seventeenth-century philosopher Bento (Benedictus) Spinoza and Menasseh ben Israel, a rabbi of the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community. The article shows that, despite claims by scholars that Menasseh was Spinoza’s teacher and intellectual mentor, in fact there is no evidence for the former claim, and much evidence

ABSTRACT:This paper examines the emergence of a philosophical concept of genius based on imagination, association, and the Lockean theory of ideas, primarily in eighteenth-century Britain. It considers the background, including the work of the Abbé Jean Baptiste Du Bos, the third earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume, but it focuses specifically on the British writers William Duff

ABSTRACT:Geoffrey Scott’s influential book The Architecture of Humanism has become an irrevocable part of the architectural canon. The origin of Scott’s ideas and their theoretical framework can be traced to Bernard Berenson’s little-known essay “A Word for Renaissance Churches.” This article will delineate a line of influence from Scott’s own mentor to the subsidiary authors who disseminated his theories

Abstract:This article illuminates the construction of the concepts "democracy" and "republic" in the Arabic-speaking regions of the eastern and southern Mediterranean between 1798 and 1878. Examining these ideas through conceptual analysis on two levels, language construction and political discourse, the article reveals the layers these concepts acquired and their reception in the context of state

Abstract:I compare the notion of natural right in the work of François Poulain de la Barre and Gabrielle Suchon. Poulain defined right in terms of possession like Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke, but limited the equality it established between men and women to private spaces beyond the state's gaze. Suchon gave the natural right of freedom strong impetus by grounding it in Aristotelian teleology, but this

Abstract:Jon Stewart has recently argued that Hegel's defense of Friedrich Creuzer's controversial Symbolik should give us pause to reconsider the widely held view of Hegel's philosophy as racist and Eurocentric. More attention needs to be paid, however, to the strategy that Hegel employs in this defense. This article argues for the influence of Aristotle's theory of epigenesis on Hegel's philosophy

Abstract:In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, theories of price regulation were developed in order to analyze the demands of justice in situations where markets cease to function—be it through natural conditions, wars, or artificially induced shortages in supply. This article investigates the relevance of the methodological notion of presumption for the legally binding power of laws concerning

Abstract:This essay describes the naturalistic pantheism of the Free Religious movement as it appeared in the journal Reform, published in Halle between 1846 and 1852. The Free Religious advocated a "transcendental materialism," in which the universe ran not by a deterministic clockwork mechanism, but organically in the same way a tree grows according to particular natural laws. Influenced by Ludwig

Abstract:The complete scholarly edition of Bayle's correspondence adds many new and intriguing details to our knowledge of his career, associates, and preoccupations. However, Bayle was always guarded and cautious about his innermost thoughts and purposes; many of his core concerns and commitments remain veiled from our view. Thus the continuing basic disagreement in recent scholarly literature about

Abstract:For a project on the origins and migrations of the European nations, Leibniz wanted to see a comparative lexicon purporting to derive the Germanic languages from Asiatic sources. Friends in nearby Gotha were known to have the book; its author had corresponded with Leibniz a few years earlier. But actually getting the book was more difficult than one might expect. In addition to the actual

Abstract:Historians of early modern "scientia civilis" focus on two main understandings of that concept: the juridical and the rhetorical. This article focuses on another way of thinking about civil science in the early modern period, the origins and development of which are in the Aristotelian commentary tradition. This article begins with political science in Aristotle then turns to the works of

Abstract:To subject politics to "theory," "metaphysics," or "speculation" was disreputable in 1790s Britain, owing largely to the success of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which linked these practices with enthusiasm. This fact is well established, but less studied are the means by which those committed to these forms of inquiry defended their intellectual conduct. Dugald

ABSTRACT:How Christian conceptions of human rights became associated with anti-racism is the subject of this article. Protestants rooted human rights in a philosophical doctrine called “personalism,” whose language of “dignity,” the “human family,” and the “human person” was first developed in the Methodist-run philosophy department at Boston University at the turn of the century. Personalism, evoked

ABSTRACT:This article provides a rejoinder to recent historical accounts which trace the origins of international human rights to the work of conservative Christians writing in the 1930s and 1940s. Focusing on the French Catholics usually identified as the architects of Christian human rights theory, I argue that this was neither a unified project, nor an unambiguously conservative one. Instead, I

ABSTRACT:This essay explores the early Catholic response to the concept of human rights. It is widely assumed that the Catholic Church opposed human rights talk in the wake of the French Revolution, and only slowly came around to accepting it in the twentieth century. However, a more systematic analysis of Pius VI’s stance toward the French Revolution reveals that he approved of human rights, but had

This study considers the phrase "art of arts and science of sciences," and its variants, in antiquity. Often scholars who note the phrase in a particular ancient author's writing may make reference to another ancient author, but without considering the breadth or depth of its occurrences in antiquity. Beginning with the late sixth-century Gregory the Great's Book of Pastoral Rule, this article retraces

Abstract:During the 12th century and early 13th century, natural law was a central interest of canon lawyers and Roman lawyers, but theologians also debated it on the basis of the exegesis of some key passages of Scripture. Peter Lombard, with his understanding of the content of Paul's Epistle to the Romans 1:19 and 2:13-14 is at the origin of a relevant tradition within the Parisian theological framework

Abstract:This article excavates some of the classical foundations of early modern European thinking about empire. It shows that Renaissance humanists drew from Roman sources a conceptual apparatus with which they described the Florentine Republic's subjection of neighboring peoples in terms that avoided the idea of slavery. Of particular importance to the humanists' ideological project was their exploitation

Abstract:The first few sections of this article concern the pleasure taken in the dynamically sublime. I argue that, according to Kant, intuited nature does not only serve to occasion that pleasure, but is actually a constitutive element of it. The latter sections concern the role of the dynamically sublime in Kant's philosophy. I argue that this notion is a significant link between morality and theology

ABSTRACT:This article examines Volney right before and after 1789. Placed together in their intellectual historical context, his works in this period – Travels in Syria and Egypt (1787), Considerations (1788), and The Ruins (1791) – offer a valuable guide into the workings of the “Enlightenment narrative” of “European” and “Oriental” history at the critical juncture of the age of revolutions. The image

Abstract:Little is known about the shaping and development of Anne Conway's thought in relation to her early modern contemporaries. In one part of her only surviving treatise, The Principles, Conway criticises "those doctors" who uphold a dualist theory of soul and body, a mechanist conception of body (as dead and inert), and the view that the soul is "intimately present" in the body. In this paper