Recently added articles from Journal of the History of Ideas:
Protestant theology and apocalyptic rhetoric in Roger Ascham's The Schoolmaster.(Critical essay)(Report)
Oct 01, 2008; ... Samuel Johnson described Roger Ascham's The Schoolmaster (1570) as "perhaps containing the best advice that was ever given for the study of languages." (1) Not prone to hyperbole, Johnson recognized in Ascham the same excellence that Elizabeth did. Upon taking the throne, she invited ...
Malebranche, taste, and sensibility: the origins of sensitive taste and a reconsideration of Cartesianism's feminist potential.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2008; ... The difference which one remarks in the man and the woman, comes not only from education, but also from their nature. The fibers of the woman are ordinarily more slender, which makes the senses more fine, and the interior sentiment more delicate. This natural disposition makes ...
Banishing Fortuna: Montmort and De Moivre.(Pierre Remond de Montmort and Abraham De Moivre)(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2008; ... INTRODUCTION In the first two decades of the eighteenth century there was a flowering of publications in probability theory: Pierre Remond de Montmort's Essay d'analyse sur les jeux de hazard in 1708 (1) followed by a second edition in 1713, (2) Jacob Bernouilli's posthumous ...
The idea of police in eighteenth-century England: discipline, reformation, superintendence, c. 1780-1800.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2008; ... Recent years have seen considerable interest in the idea of "police" in the eighteenth century. (1) "Police" in this archaic sense did not mean a uniformed force employed by the state to govern law and order, it implied a much more general system of government, the task of which was to ...
The style of linguistics: Aby Warburg, Karl Vossler, and Hermann Osthoff.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2008; ... In the last paragraphs of his 1893 dissertation, the Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) startled his readers by suggesting that the painter Sandro Botticelli had mindlessly imitated classical motifs from the past. Of all the Quattrocento artists, "Botticelli was one of those who ...
The unity of physics and poetry: H. C. Orsted and the aesthetics of force.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2008; ... INTRODUCTION A new era in the history of science began in the summer of 1820 when Hans Christian Orsted announced his discovery of electromagnetism. In the attempt to understand the conceptual underpinnings of Orsted's discovery, historians have generally believed that he was ...
Thep place of the sacred in the absence of God: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2008; ... INTRODUCTION The philosopher Simone Weil, born in France in 1909 to Jewish but secular parents, succumbed to her initial mystical experience in Santa Maria degli Angeli, a twelfth-century Romanesque chapel in Assisi once frequented by Saint Francis. "Something stronger than I ...
Books received.
Oct 01, 2008 ... Antliff, Mark. Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909-1939. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 2007. xv, 352p., bibl., ill., index, $23.95. The merging of aesthetics and violence by Georges Sorel, and the appropriation of his writings by Georges Valois, ...
On the ancient uses of political fear and its modern implications (1).(Report)
Jul 01, 2008; ... I. POLITICAL FEAR AND POLITICAL THOUGHT Political fear has attracted much attention from political theorists, philosophers, and scientists in recent years. (2) Anne Norton, for instance, notes that "Soccer moms on the radio, policy makers on television tell us that nothing is ...
"Following the way which is called heresy": Milton and the Heretical Imperative.(John Milton)(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... John Milton is widely regarded as a forerunner of Lockean liberalism, and so of the political thought of the English Enlightenment. (1) Indeed, already in 1698, Milton's biographer John Toland had constructed a unified tradition of English liberalism running from Milton through Locke, and ...
A virtuoso's history: antiquarianism and the transmission of knowledge in the alchemical studies of Elias Ashmole.(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... On August 20, 1672, the antiquary and occult enthusiast, Elias Ashmole (1617-92) carefully recorded that he had acquired "Dr. Dees Manuscripts, all written with his owne hand" of "his Conferences with Angells." (1) His precious acquisition was a manuscript by John Dee (1527-1609) that ...
Stoic constructions of virtue in the vicar of Wakefield.(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... In R. S. Crane's seminal essay "Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the 'Man of Feeling'," he locates the origins of eighteenth-century sentimentalism in the seventeenth-century rejection of Stoic indifference. Crane quotes an anonymous writer from 1755 who questions "whether those are ...
Mandeville's ship: theistic design and philosophical history in Charles Darwin's vision of natural selection.(Bernard Mandeville)(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... I. INTRODUCTION: THE VIEW FROM THE SHORELINE In the diary he kept during his five-year voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin described an episode that would later be made famous by his published Journal of Researches (1839). The diary's version, however, included more detail ....
The pointsman: Maxwell's demon, Victorian free will, and the boundaries of science.(James Clerk Maxwell)(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... The railway pointsman was the vigilant employee shifting tracks and posting signals to route hurtling trains safely on their way. In a twelve-hour shift in 1880, a pointsman might pull two thousand levers. (1) Their daily life was governed by "reliability, service, and coolness." (2) The ...
A conversation about morals and history.(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... In Moliere's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), Monsieur Jourdain is stunned to learn that "For more than forty years," he has "been talking prose without any idea of it." (1) Perhaps, as some of the commentators suggest, historians have been speaking morals for a lot longer than I had ...
Joseph M. Levine: 1933-2008.(Obituary)
Jul 01, 2008; ... Joseph M. Levine, Distinguished Professor of History at Syracuse University, died after several months of ill health, working on his most recent project. Educated at Cornell, Joe received his M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University. He taught at Queens College of the City University of New ...
Books received.
Jul 01, 2008 ... Adamson, Peter, ed. Classical Arabic Philosophy: Sources and Reception. London: Warburg Institute and Savigliano: N. Aragno, 2007. ix, 212p., index, 36 [pounds sterling]. Eleven essays on God, self, and ontology in Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Avicennan traditions, ninth to twelfth ...
Morris D. Forkosch Prize.(NOTICES)
Jul 01, 2008 ... The Journal of the History of Ideas will award the Morris D. Forkosch Prize ($2000) for the best book in intellectual history published in 2007. The awards committee favors books which are published in English and which display some interdisciplinary range, demonstrate sound ...
Institute for Advanced Study: Princeton, New Jersey: opportunities for scholars for the academic year 2009-2010.(NOTICES)(Brief article)
Jul 01, 2008 ... The Institute For Advanced Study is an independent private institution founded in 1930 to create a community of scholars focused on intellectual inquiry, free from teaching and other university obligations. Each year scholars from around the world apply to come to the Institute to pursue ...
Reading medicine in the Codex de la Cruz Badiano.(Critical essay)
Apr 01, 2008; ... Bicultural medical practices have long been the norm in Western societies. Looking at the history of Western medicine, we find the constant adaptation of foreign ideas and materials. Humoral medicine, the translations of Dioscorides, and the search for ancient remedies like balsam are all ...