In the middle of the 14th century, the chapel Maria am Gestade at the edge of the medieval city of Vienna was extended by a three-bay chancel with a […]
The contemporary epoch of a knowledge society requires a new approach to understanding knowledge, which is different from what was basic during the modern era up to now. The foundation of knowledge can no longer be understood by assuming its ultimate origin in a rational subject. The implications of the new approach to knowledge have fundamental impact on ethics in the knowledge society.
This article is about the problem of the unity of history as seen through the writings of Karl Löwith. By “unity of history” I understand the notion that all history constitutes one and only one range of kinds of objects and/or one field of knowledge. The article argues that the problem of the unity of history—though often neglected as a matter of mere argumentative infrastructure—is central to a number of wider problems, most prominently the possibility of a plural understanding of historicity and the possibility of ultimately avoiding a unified historical teleology. The article revisits Löwith’s writings and proposes a variety of novel interpretations with the aim of evincing the centrality, and of exploring diverse aspects, of the problematic of the unity of history. This problematic is shown to have informed Löwith’s work on the secularization thesis as well as his debate with Hans Blumenberg. The foundations of Löwith’s discussion of the problem are pursued across his ambivalent critique and appropriation of Heidegger’s model of an ontology of historicity as marked by inevitable internal conflict and thus disunity. The paper reconstructs the manner in which, after the Second World War, Löwith’s philosophy of history sought to salvage basic traits of the Heideggerian model when it tried to establish the possibility of plural historicity from a notion of the natural cosmos. It is demonstrated that the motives for this salvage operation ultimately extended beyond the problem of Löwith’s reception of Heidegger and concerned the possibility of continuing any debate on the philosophy of history.
Among most historians of Africa, and others in the humanities concerned with Africa, it has been almost axiomatic that writing and reading arrived in Africa and spread with the coming of European colonialism, especially through the agency of Christian missionaries. Although missionaries did indeed establish schools and introduce various kinds of literacy, there is a much longer history of the book in various parts of the continent. This essay looks at some of the recent work that focuses on the use of the Arabic script in Africa. Although the field of “Islam in Africa” has framed this work, it is necessary to see the uses of this literacy within the frame of the history of the book and related fields. The works discussed are rich in content and analysis and provide the opening for new initiatives on the content of the literacy and the methods of teaching and reading, but also the materiality of the book and the formation of the archive.
Gradual changes in the way historians select, interpret, and represent aspects of the past are related to equally or perhaps more gradual changes in museum practice. Edited collections on this subject reflect the state of both disciplines and offer an opportunity to evaluate trends, assess progress, and forecast the future. The collection examined in this review essay focuses on the idea of sharing historical authority: How far have we come? What methods have been used? What is the value of collaborative effort? Have technological developments, including digital media and the “participatory Web,” really enabled more inclusive participation? The analysis of the collection includes specific attention to the text itself as an exhibitionary object and emphasizes the effects of its unusual design elements, deictic signals, and heterogeneous genres—particularly the case studies and “thought pieces” that form a significant part of the collection. Other focal points include: the interrogative mood of the text and its call for active reading; explicit historical, social, and disciplinary contexts; and precursor texts that have addressed similar subject matter.
Emotions in History: Lost and Found by Ute Frevert is a lively introduction to some of the issues that historians must address when writing about emotions. Emotions in History notes some of the uses emotions have had in both public and private life, and it charts the changing fate of several emotions—particularly acedia, honor, and compassion—that have been either “lost” or “found” over time. Nevertheless, it suffers from a notion of modernity that obscures rather than clarifies. Making “modernity” the cause of changes in emotional ideas, comportment, and feeling, it cuts today’s society off from its earlier roots and fails to see the continuities not only in emotions themselves but also in the mechanisms by which emotions have changed over time. Frevert’s assumption that only the modern world has been interested in emotions is belied by eloquent learned writings on the topic in the medieval period (though not using the term “emotions”). Further, modernity is not alone in having effective mechanisms by which ideal standards of emotions and their expression are transmitted to a larger public.
Books reviewed in this issue.
History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past. Edited by Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor.
Turning Traditions Upside Down: Rethinking Giordano Bruno’s Enlightenment. Edited by Anne Eusterschulte and Henning …
This essay reviews two books in the French Que Sais-je? series by Charles-Olivier Carbonell in 1981 and by Nicolas Offenstadt in 2011 on the topic of historiography. Offenstadt’s volume is intended to bring Carbonell’s up to date, but goes in very different directions. There is general agreement among historians that a fundamental reorientation has taken place in historical thought and writing in the past half century, about which quite a bit has been written in recent years in the West, including in Latin America, East Asia, and India. But this is not the theme of either of these volumes. Carbonell tells the history of history from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth-century Annales; Offenstadt is not interested in examining major trends in historiography as much of the historiographical literature has done, but in analyzing the changes that the key concepts that guide contemporary historical studies have undergone. For Carbonell’s chronological narrative of the history of historical writing, theory has no place; for Offenstadt, who proceeds analytically, history and theory are inseparable. He deals specifically with changes in conceptions of historical time, of the role of documents, of the place of history within the social sciences, of the centrality of narrative, and finally of historical memory.
This article considers A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam, in the light of theories of sacred kingship and religious change. Although Muslim kingship has tended to be presented as an essentially secular institution, Moin is able to show how deeply divine images and understandings shaped kingship in both the Safavid and Mughal empires, which were bound together by mutual influence and competition. The divine matrix of kingship was facilitated by the influence of preeminent Sufism, Mongol universalism, millenarian technologies and dreams, and Persian tradition. The article suggests that the methodological approach adopted here, resembling l’histoire des mentalités, shows how our analyses of sacred kingship can be obscured by a focus on canonical and prescriptive texts. Taking up the theme of transgression, it compares Moin’s work with recent anthropological reflections on the symbolism of the stranger-king. The article also uses Moin’s work to indicate the problems with the critical dismissal of “legitimacy” as an indispensable (though insufficient) analytical tool. The subject matter is further placed within an overarching conceptualization of global religious diversity based on the tension between transcendentalist vs. immanentist impulses. In that light the reassertion of “transcendentalist” religiosity in the guise of an orthodox push-back against the enchanted cultural world re-imagined by Moin only appears in greater need of explanation. Avenues of comparative reflection are also opened up with Christian monarchy, which was both less profoundly “immanentized” in the early modern era and less successful at exporting itself in areas outside of imperial influence. The article concludes by considering the implications for theories of a global early modernity, and a comparison with Andre Wink’s quite different characterization of Akbar as a secular-minded rationalist.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.10702
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