scholarly journals Revealed Science

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin K Stearns

The intellectual history of the Muslim world during the post-formative period is poorly understood compared to the centuries in which the initial development of the principal Islamic intellectual traditions occurred. This article examines the legal status of the natural sciences in the thought of the Moroccan scholar al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī (d. 1102/1691) and his contemporaries, both in terms of the categorization of knowledge and in terms of developments in conceptions of causality in post-formative Ashᶜarī theology. In the latter respect, I compare al-Yūsī’s writings on causality to those of his contemporary in Damascus, ᶜAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, with attention to the broader historiographic perils in comparing intellectual developments in the Early Modern period to those occurring in Europe. By placing al-Yūsī’s views in intellectual context, I seek to demonstrate how a more productive history of the natural sciences in the post-formative Muslim world might be written.

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 49-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Stearns

The intellectual history of the Muslim world during the post-formative period is poorly understood compared to the centuries in which the initial development of the principal Islamic intellectual traditions occurred. This article examines the legal status of the natural sciences in the thought of the Moroccan scholar al-Ḥasan al-Yūsī (d. 1102/1691) and his contemporaries, both in terms of the categorization of knowledge and in terms of developments in conceptions of causality in post-formative Ashʿarī theology. In the latter respect, al-Yūsī’s writings on causality are compared to those of his contemporary in Damascus, ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, with attention to the broader historiographic perils in comparing intellectual developments in the Early Modern period to those occurring in Europe. By placing al-Yūsī’s views in intellectual context, I seek to demonstrate how a more productive history of the natural sciences in the post-formative Muslim world might be written.



Author(s):  
Larissa Alves de Lira

This paper aims to present the exemplarity of an intellectual meeting between a French intellectual, trained in history and geography at the Sorbonne, France (before spending time in Spain during the beginning of his doctorate), and the “Brazilian terrain”. From his training to his work as a university professor in Brazil, what I want to characterize is a transnational intellectual context in the domain of the history of science, using geographical reasoning as a reference. However, before becoming aware of these intellectual processes, it should be said that at the base of this context lies the Brazilian space. This kind of reasoning as a proposed methodology is named here the geohistory of knowledge. In this paper, I seek to present this methodology and its theoretical and empirical results, focusing on how the construction of contextualization can be related to space.


2010 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 669-699
Author(s):  
Nicholas Aroney

AbstractThis article draws attention to an important but neglected story about the dissemination of German and Swiss state-theories among English-speaking scholars in the second half of the 19th century and the influence of these ideas on those who designed and drafted the Australian Constitution. In particular, the article focuses upon the theories of federalism developed by the Swiss-born scholar, Johann Caspar Bluntschli, and the Saxon-born Georg Jellinek, and explains their influence, via the British historian, Edward A Freeman, and the American political scientist, John W Burgess, upon the framers of the Australian Constitution. The story is important because it illustrates the way in which constitutional ideas can be transmitted from one social and political context into a very different one, undergoing significant, though often subtle, modifications and adaptations in the process. The story is also important because it sheds light on the way in which the framers of the Australian Constitution came to conceive of the kind of federal system that they wished to see created. The story seems to have been overlooked, however, not only due to a general neglect of the intellectual history of the Australian Constitution, but also due to the assumption that prevailing Australian political and legal ideas were of Anglo-American provenance. While this assumption generally holds true, a closer examination of the intellectual context of Australian federalism reveals a surprisingly significant German influence on the framers of the Australian Constitution.


Author(s):  
Ahmad S. Dallal

Replete with a cast of giants in Islamic thought and philosophy, Ahmad S. Dallal’s pathbreaking intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Muslim world challenges stale views of this period as one of decline, stagnation, and the engendering of a widespread fundamentalism. Far from being moribund, Dallal argues, the eighteenth century--prior to systematic European encounters--was one of the most fertile eras in Islamic thought. Across vast Islamic territories, Dallal charts in rich detail not only how intellectuals rethought and reorganized religious knowledge but also the reception and impact of their ideas. From the banks of the Ganges to the shores of the Atlantic, commoners and elites alike embraced the appeals of Muslim thinkers who, while preserving classical styles of learning, advocated for general participation by Muslims in the definition of Islam. Dallal also uncovers the regional origins of most reform projects, showing how ideologies were forged in particular sociopolitical contexts. Reformists’ ventures were in large part successful--up until the beginnings of European colonization of the Muslim world. By the nineteenth century, the encounter with Europe changed Islamic discursive culture in significant ways into one that was largely articulated in reaction to the radical challenges of colonialism.


2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 879-891 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. S. JONES

Ever since the resurgence of the sub-discipline in the 1960s, the foremost achievements of the history of political thought have dealt with the early modern period. The classics of the genre—Laslett's edition of Locke, Pocock'sMachiavellian Moment, Skinner'sFoundations—have all dealt with that period, and it is hard to think of any works on the nineteenth century that have quite the same stature. Of all the canonical political thinkers, John Stuart Mill is perhaps the one who has proved resistant to the contextualist method. There is a vast literature on Mill, and many historians have written penetratingly about him—Stefan Collini, William Thomas, Donald Winch—but there has hitherto been no historically grounded study of his thought to rival, say, John Dunn on Locke or Skinner on Hobbes, or even a host of learned monographs. Before Varouxakis's book, no study of Mill had been published in Cambridge University Press's flagship series in intellectual history, Ideas in Context. But all that has changed. In these two works, published more or less concurrently, we have two triumphs for contextualism. They demonstrate in impressive detail just why it matters in reading Mill to get the history right.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Steven E. Pena

This paper is an examination of certain assumptions that, I hold, lie in the background of MacIntyre’s conception of the formation of the intellectual schema as found, most prominently, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. A thorough examination of MacIntyre’s concept of the rational schema, I will show, reveals that the parsing he proposes to carry out on intellectual history is confronted with a problem that finds its analogue in the field of biological taxonomy. In order to carry out this project of determining where the seams lie in intellectual history one must first recognize that the parsing itself is a scheme-dependent undertaking. As such it is not unlike the necessarily somewhat arbitrary identification of species and genera in the biological realm. In other words, it should be recognized that intellectual history, like the morphology of the plant and animal kingdoms, is continuous, not discreet. An almost wholly unexamined assumption that stalks through Whose Justice? and Three Rival Versions is that there are something like intellectual natural kinds in the history of ideas. Indeed, the notion that there are “traditions” at all in the sense in which MacIntyre uses the term may be a highly conventional artefact of an Enlightenment-era view of intellectual progress. This leads me to conclude that MacIntyre has failed to observe that the view of traditions and schemes neatly succeeding one another, on which much of his critique is dependent, is itself a product of the perspective he calls “encyclopedia.” This, in turn, will make manifest why it is that almost all of MacIntyre’s examples of rational scheme-switching are from the natural sciences rather than the normative, a fact I will show is connected to a paradigm of linear progression that one tends to find in the exact sciences, but not in praxis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-107
Author(s):  
Samuel Moyn ◽  
Jean-Paul Gagnon

Samuel Moyn provides insight into how the history of democracy can continue its globalization. There is a growing belief that the currently acceptable fund of ideas has not served the recent past well which is why an expansion, a planetary one, of democracy’s ideas is necessary – especially now as we move deeper into the shadow of declining American/Western imperialism and ideology. Deciding which of democracy’s intellectual traditions to privilege is driven by a mix of forced necessity and choice: finding salient ground for democracy is likely only possible in poisoned traditions including European ones.


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