This response to Carola Dietze’s critique of Provincializing Europe takes up for examination three key expressions or ideas on which the original argument of the book was founded: hyperreal Europe, historicism, and political modernity. I appreciate the spirit of Dietze’s engagement with the book, but I show that her critique is based on a degree of misapprehension of these three central ideas. While clarifying the details and the degree of my disagreement with Dietze, I provide my own (...) critique of Dietze’s proposal of “equal histories” by arguing that Dietze has not named or explained the unit with respect to which different histories could be considered equal. I also argue that Dietze’s proposals about judging societies only by their “own” standards, and basing human dignity on the idea of a “human nature” that could be seen as a “constant,” do not solve the problems she sees with my book and are themselves open to some serious historical and logical criticism. (shrink)

미국이 기술-경제-군사력의 권력을 장악하면서 심지어는 유럽도 국제사회에서 주변부 국가로 밀려나고 있다. J. 데리다는 이를 ‘유령의 지배’라고 비판하면서 「희망의 유럽(A Europe of Hope)」에서, 유럽은 계몽주의로부터 물려받은 유산을 되살려 ‘반세계화 투쟁’에 나설 때라고 호소한다. 하지만 데리다의 이와 같은 계몽주의적 꿈이 과연 인류를 위한 꿈이라 할 수 있을까? 이러한 의문은 그가 유럽을 “다른 인간 문화들 중의 하나의 본보기라거나 다른 지역 문화들 중의 하나의 지역 문화가 아니라 최상의 모델이자 최고의 문화”라고 주장하고 있기에 드는 생각이다. 데리다의 이와 같은 ‘극장의 우상’은 ‘유럽중심주의’라는 비판을 모면하기 힘들 (...) 것이다. 본고에서 우리는 이러한 계몽주의적 유럽중심주의를, D. 차크라바르티의 『유럽을 지방화하기』를 중심으로 비판적인 논의를 해볼까 한다. 이 책에서 그는 서구유럽이 주도한 역사는 ‘보편적 역사’를 서술한 것이 아니라 서구유럽인만을 위한 ‘지방의 역사’, 즉 ‘특정 지역에 특화된 역사’의 서술일 뿐이라고 단정한다. 유럽은 보편주의의 산실이 아니라 특수주의의 온상이라는 것이다. 『유럽을 지방화하기』는 바로 이러한 유럽식 보편주의의 오남용에 대해 문제를 제기하며 ‘보편주의의 재구성’에 도전한다. ‘재구성되어야 할 보편주의’는 로컬 지역들의 다양한 지식들, ‘위계없는 지식들’이 공존하는 새로운 세계를 꿈꾼다. 이런 까닭에 차크라바르티가 꿈꾸는 보편주의는 절대/상대, 중심/주변(지역)의 이분법적 논리 안에 유폐되지 않고 모든 지식이 하나의 생태학을 지향하게 된다. 이 기준에 따르면 ‘보편적인 것’은 어느 지역에나 존재한다. 모든 지역이 자신의 힘으로 스스로 서고, 스스로 근대화되는 것, 이것이 데리다의 유럽에 제한된 계몽과 구분되는 차크라바르티의 본래적 의미의 ‘계몽’이라 할 수 있다. (shrink)

This essay is a critical discussion of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe as well as a first sketch of a History on Equal Terms. After giving a short summary of Provincializing Europe, I first argue, against Chakrabarty, that there is no necessary connection between the discipline of history and the metanarratives of modernity. To the contrary: the founding idea of the discipline of history was a turn against such grand narratives. With his attempt to deconstruct the (...) narratives of the European Enlightenment and of modernity, Chakrabarty therefore has to be regarded as a thinker of radical historicism rather than as a critic of the discipline of history. Second, I criticize the use of the term “modernity” in Provincializing Europe and the concept of modernity in general. Instead of a deconstruction of the discipline of history, I propose a deconstruction of the concept of modernity. This could open up the way for a History on Equal Terms situated within the discipline of history, that is, a historiography that would—just as Chakrabarty rightly demands—in principle pay the same attention to and expect relevant results from any region in the world, depending only on the focus of research. (shrink)

Unlike many commentators who tend to see Schweitzer's mission one-sidedly, I show the coexistence of liberal and conservative elements in his mission. While his mission intent was mostly motivated by the former, his mission practices largely show the latter. In this essay, I analyze them in detail in three parts. I first explain how such opposite elements can coexist by applying Dipesh Chakrabarty's notion of provincializing Europe. Like most nineteenth-century Western liberals, Schweitzer advocated Enlightenment rights for Europeans, but (...) denied them to the colonized. I then argue that Schweitzer's mission was motivated by the liberal elements of his theology. When his critical theology led him to deny the divinity of Jesus, he found a new basis for Christianity in Jesus? ethical activism, which led him to become a medical missionary to Africa. I then examine Schweitzer's conservative practices in Africa: by applying the developmental model of Hegelian-Marxist historicism to African society, Schweitzer opposed both decolonization and advanced learning to Africans. Schweitzer's missionary practices in Africa, I therefore conclude, were more conservative than those of the typical European missionary. (shrink)

This study of port cities, focusing on those on the Atlantic facade of France, argues that their economic significance cannot be understood within the canons of an insular French, or even European history. They were often case studies of the more general phenomenon of the early globalisation of Europe. In particular, navigation, fishing, trade, and colonisation, depended not only on the seas and the port but also on the agrarian hinterlands. They were often determinative of national imperial expansion. Thus, (...) the success of exports and imports were not necessarily judged on Atlantic crossings but rather on the supply and demand of national or European economies. Commerce did not end on the seashore, in a port, or even in a contraband network, but often deep within a nation's hinterlands. (shrink)

This article traces the moral economy of provincial elites who contributed to economic societies that were active in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Northern Europe. Such societies aimed at improving economic conditions in their respective cities, regions, or countries by advocating progressive methods of agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. The commitment of members of these societies was not explicitly motivated by economic gains, but by a more complex system of beliefs fueled by the love of their country and the promotion of (...) the common good. The unselfish exploration of new means of production and commercial activity was at the heart of forming a moral economy of trust that guided cooperation within the societies. This moral economy was not subordinate to market rationality, but served as a foundation upon which trust between members was based. Especially in times of crises, as illustrated by the case of Carl Christian Böcker, secretary of the Finnish Economic Society, members could fall.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Convention for Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine: Convention on Human Rights and BiomedicineCouncil of EuropePreambleThe Member States of the Council of Europe, the other States and the European Community signatories hereto,Bearing in mind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948;Bearing in mind (...) the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950;Bearing in mind the European Social Charter of 18 October 1961;Bearing in mind the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966;Bearing in mind the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data of 28 January 1981;Bearing also in mind the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989;Considering that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of a greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms;Conscious of the accelerating developments in biology and medicine;Convinced of the need to respect the human being both as an individual and as a member of the human species and recognising the importance of ensuring the dignity of the human being; [End Page 277]Conscious that the misuse of biology and medicine may lead to acts endangering human dignity;Affirming that progress in biology and medicine should be used for the benefit of present and future generations;Stressing the need for international co-operation so that all humanity may enjoy the benefits of biology and medicine;Recognising the importance of promoting a public debate on the questions posed by the application of biology and medicine and the responses to be given thereto;Wishing to remind all members of society of their rights and responsibilities;Taking account of the work of the Parliamentary Assembly in this field, including Recommendation 1160 (1991) on the preparation of a Convention on bioethics;Resolving to take such measures as are necessary to safeguard human dignity and the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual with regard to the application of biology and medicine;Have agreed as follows:Chapter IGeneral provisionsArticle 1. (Purpose and object)Parties to this Convention shall protect the dignity and identity of all human beings and guarantee everyone, without discrimination, respect for their integrity and other rights and fundamental freedoms with regard to the application of biology and medicine.Each Party shall take in its internal law the necessary measures to give effect to the provisions of this Convention.Article 2. (Primacy of the human being)The interests and welfare of the human being shall prevail over the sole interest of society or science.Article 3. (Equitable access to health care)Parties, taking into account health needs and available resources, shall take appropriate measures with a view to providing, within their jurisdiction, equitable access to health care of appropriate quality. [End Page 278]Article 4. (Professional standards)Any intervention in the health field, including research, must be carried out in accordance with relevant professional obligations and standards.Chapter IIConsentArticle 5. (General rule)An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person concerned has given free and informed consent to it.This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks.The person concerned may freely withdraw consent at any time.Article 6. (Protection of persons not able to consent)1. Subject to Articles 17 and 20 below, an intervention may only be carried out on a person who does not have the capacity to consent, for his or her direct benefit.2. Where, according to law, a minor does not have the capacity to consent to an intervention, the intervention may only be carried out with the authorisation of his or her representative or an authority or a person or... (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 355-366.

Epistemic Freedom in Africa is about the struggle for African people to think, theorize, interpret the world and write from where they are located, unencumbered by Eurocentrism. The imperial denial of common humanity to some human beings meant that in turn their knowledges and experiences lost their value, their epistemic virtue. Now, in the twenty-first century, descendants of enslaved, displaced, colonized, and racialized peoples have entered academies across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings, their lives matter and (...) they were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems that are capable of helping humanity to transcend the current epistemic and systemic crises. Together, they are engaging in diverse struggles for cognitive justice, fighting against the epistemic line which haunts the twenty-first century. The renowned historian and decolonial theorist Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni offers a penetrating and well-argued case for centering Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world, whilst simultaneously making an equally strong argument for globalizing knowledge from Africa so as to attain ecologies of knowledges. This is a dual process of both deprovincializing Africa, and in turn provincializing Europe. The book highlights how the mental universe of Africa was invaded and colonized, the long-standing struggles for 'an African university', and the trajectories of contemporary decolonial movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall in South Africa. This landmark work underscores the fact that only once the problem of epistemic freedom has been addressed can Africa achieve political, cultural, economic and other freedoms. This groundbreaking new book is accessible to students and scholars across Education, History, Philosophy, Ethics, African Studies, Development Studies, Politics, International Relations, Sociology, Postcolonial Studies and the emerging field of Decolonial Studies. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas’s opus magnum, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, synthesises his impressive work of the last half century. His thesis is that the modern project of the normativity of “rational freedom” can be reconstructed as a learning process of the conflictual dialogue between reason and faith, philosophy and religion in the West. Furthermore, under conditions of a world society, cross-cultural communication across lifeworlds, based on such normative principles, is possible. I argue that Habermas’s argument recapitulates a claim first made in (...) The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel, who presented the normativity of modernity through a narrative unfolding between two epistemological standpoints, namely, that of consciousness and “we.” Just like Hegel, in order to defend the idea of a Lernprozess, Habermas too must presuppose a unified subject called “we;” furthermore the development of such subjectivity unfolds in a homogeneous temporal process that is then assumed to be the same for all mankind. I call this a form of “historicism,” and juxtapose recent historical writing that presents the narrative of modernity and the emergence of world-society as a much more diverse and fractured process than Hegel’s and Habermas’s methodology. “Die Einbeziehung der Anderen,” I argue, must involve including the voices of those others who do not experience the normative of modernity as a process like the one unfolding between faith and reason in the West. Nevertheless, I conclude that this plea for a more complex narrative that “provincialises Europe,” is not a rejection of the normative legacy of modern rationality and freedom that are based on the ideals of fallibilism, refutability and revisability through a rational community of inquirers. (shrink)

We’re in the midst of a wave of efforts to historicize and localize theory. One stream, oriented toward a global social imaginary, has sought to “ provincialize Europe,” in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s resonant trope. This means provincializing Euro-American social theory and situating it within a particular geopolitical formation—a contextualizing project that opens space to center what the Comaroffs call “theory from the South” and other regional or indigenous loci of orientation. Another stream situates itself more comfortably within Western traditions (...) of theory but casts them in new historical lights—for instance a revisionist account of critical theory as the product of Hegel’s refiguration of medieval... (shrink)

This article argues that two distinctive varieties of antifascism took shape in the 1930s and endured through the late 1970s. These two varieties—Popular Front antifascism and anti-imperial antifascism—were in dialogue but in opposition to one another, and both were transnational mobilizing ideologies. Investigating these two antifascist movements allows us to place Europe in the wider world and demonstrate how anti-imperial activists of color simultaneously “provincialized” Europe and situated it within a global framework. The effort also highlights the need (...) to rethink the history of the European Left through the framework of antifascism. (shrink)

This review essay explores the potential of a European perspective on the history of epidemics and pandemics over the last three centuries. To this end, it follows Benoît Majerus’ proposal to distinguish four different “European” perspectives on the history of medicine. Europe is simultaneously an imaginary, geographical, imperial, and integrative space. As an imaginary space (1), “European” ideas about pandemics reveal a specific conception of public health and the state; as a geographical space (2), many historical case studies examined (...) the development of comparable “European” practices at the national level; as an imperial space (3), it is necessary to provincialize Europe and ask about knowledge production and practices in non-European countries; and as an integrative space (4), European responses to pandemics and epidemics represent a neglected but important aspect of European integration. This essay can only suggest that the European perspective is an interesting analytical category for both the history of pandemics and the history of “Europe.”. (shrink)

Throughout Iran’s modern history, control of the public sphere has remained in the hands of the state. With virtually no trace of a civil society, public opinion has played only a minimal role in influencing state affairs. The 1979 Islamic revolution could be viewed as a break in this historical trend, but public opinion retreated into the background once the clerics solidified their power -- and then kept it by invoking religious orthodoxy to deflect any challenges. Thus, it should have (...) been no surprise that the press revolution, which began in the late 1990s as Mohammad Khatami came to power, collapsed a few years later. While an array of newspapers and journals are still published in Iran today, the persecution of leading editors and publishers with pro-reform sympathies has successfully cleared the field of any real threat to the status quo.The early theorists of the reform movement that came to be identified with President Khatami saw a free and independent press as a vital part of an Islamic Repub lic. For centuries, they argued, the state had used its control over the media -- first the publication of books, then newspapers and finally radio and television -- to push society toward the rulers’ desired ends. In contrast, the reformers saw a free press as the best way to foster open debate and political and social pluralism, unleashing forces that would allow society at large to determine its own fate. In other words, there could be no pre-determined end, shaped by fiat. Their chosen weapon in the battle for a civil society was the newspaper, a medium with a rich history in Iran of social and political activism. Persian newspapers, particularly those published abroad and smuggled into Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had been responsible for remarkable changes in the political landscape. They introduced liberal social and political ideas from Europe and provided readers with a new, simplified language in which to debate such notions. Most important of all, the early press helped create the very idea of society as a political actor in its own right. Within months of Khatami’s move to the Presidential Palace, his new appointees in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance unleashed a “press revolution.” They quickly streamlined the issuing of publication licenses; countered Iran’s traditional centralism by encouraging the rise of local and provincial newspapers; eased the financial hardships of independent publishers; and sought protection under the existing Press Law for controversial editors and commentators facing the hostility of the ruling clerics. The result was a wave of entrepreneurial and journalistic creativity unmatched since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911.By the spring of 2000, the hard-line clerics had had enough. They used their almost complete control of the public space to shut the door on the “press revolution” and to drive their critics, including many learned clerics, back into private dissent. Dozens of newspapers were closed and prominent journalists were prosecuted, most for violating so-called Islamic norms; anything like public discourse was forced back into the shadows. The ease with which the clerical establishment crushed the free press reflected the basic weaknesses and miscalculations of the reform movement. The senior theologians had established themselves as far back as the Constitutional Revolution as the final arbiters of freedom of expression under Islam. Without a wholesale re-evaluation of the role of the clergy and the very concept of freedom in a religious system of government, this power was destined to go unchecked. The reformers had also put too much emphasis on a free press, in the absence of any other real building blocks of civil society. Newspapers were expected to play the roles of political parties, of independent think tanks and, in the case of Jameah and Tous, of exemplars of social, political and economic independence. It was a burden the Iranian press was simply unable to carry. (shrink)

The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh Throughout the years 1768–1783 looked to the outside world like a flourishing and important body. By 1771 it had sponsored the publication of five volumes of papers which had gone through several printings and translations. It had a distinguished foreign membership which assured its recognition abroad as one of the important academic bodies in the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters. From its foundation in 1737 until his death in 1768, its President had been the Earl of (...) Morton, better known as the President of the Royal Society of London and as an astronomer who had been active in the practical work of the London society. Another member, Sir John Pringle, became President of the Royal Society in 1772. It was also known abroad that among the Edinburgh philosophers were to be found the most important professors of the town's university, not only those of its distinguished medical faculty but also men like William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and later John Robison. David Hume had been at one time a Secretary of the Society and probably remained a member to the end of his life in 1776. In the British colonies, the Society could point to members in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Jamaica and other West Indian islands and it had contacts in a far-flung network reaching from China and Siberia in the east to places less remote in Europe and America. Within Britain, the Society had members in London and in provincial towns of whom William Brownrigg was the most important. From these men and from others scattered in Scotland, the Society drew information and projected its image as a successful learned society. These appearances, however, are far clearer than the Society's record of accomplishment during its last years. It is not accidental that so little pertaining to its work survives. The Society in reality had a career far from brilliant and by 1778 hardly deserved the reputation it had acquired. During its last five years it revived but even then it probably did not reach the level of activity seen in the early and mid 1750s. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 99-104 [Access article in PDF] New York Art, Pittsburgh Art, Art 1 David Carrier Champney Family Professor Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art I. New York Art A fully developed artworld requires not only artists, but also a support system — schools to teach the artists, commercial galleries to display art, and the connected artmarket; public museums and their curators to (...) make that art available to the public; and also, last and least, artwriters to interpret and evaluate the art. This has been true for a long time in America and Europe. I speak of artwriters as "last and least" just because we are important only in some artworlds. In the seventeenth century Poussin depended upon commentary of intellectuals, but his contemporaries Rembrandt and Vermeer did not. In this country, New York is such an artworld and so, perhaps, is Los Angeles. These are the places where young artists go to establish themselves, and so they are the places where the most original new art tends to be made. Artists outside of those centers then imitate the art made there.Artworld centers tend to be large business centers because they require major museums and many collectors. Each component of this system is dependent upon the others. Unless they have collectors, artists cannot support themselves without doing other jobs; unless there are museums, there is no public space in which art can be seen. Unless there are artwriters, there is no way to articulate shared experience of this art. This artworld is a product of modernist bourgeois democracy. Premodern cultures did not have public museums. Nowadays information is disseminated quickly, but the role of centers as places where new art is made, seen, and discussed remains essential. Our novel electronic technologies have not changed this situation.A collecting culture requires not just wealth, but also a special sort of sensibility. In fact, the number of serious collectors anywhere is surprisingly small, as one can see in Los Angeles, which has a great deal of wealth, but a surprisingly thin gallery system. Like collectors, artwriters too are odd sorts of creatures. I usually identify myself as a New York-based critic, because that is where I see most of the shows I review. Artforum, the Burlington Magazine, and Tema Celeste, the journals I now work for have a real interest in exhibitions at the Carnegie and the Warhol, in Pittsburgh, but no concern with shows like this one. Partly the problem is that reviewing space is very hard to come by, but also the difficulty is that it is difficult to make sense of a review discussing artists who are known only locally. Even were I to identify [End Page 99] someone local as a wonderful original talent, it would be very difficult for readers who have never seen her art to evaluate that claim.In Pittsburgh we certainly have good artists, and there are several universities with art departments. But here, as elsewhere in the cities I know, the artmarket is focused on New York; and there is, so far as I can see, only modest critical support for artists. Major collectors here, as elsewhere in America, look to New York, which has a critical mass of galleries, museums, and critics. The Carnegie too, tends to look to New York when planning its shows. The curators travel widely, but most of the art they show, whether American or from elsewhere, is displayed in New York galleries. If one adopts this way of thinking about an artworld, then art made in Pittsburgh inevitably will be judged as "provincial." There are a few major artists, and many derivative ones; and those major ones, the innovators, are in the artworld centers.This is the model Vasari adopts, it is Clement Greenberg's model, and it is the basic model driving the present day artworld. To describe Pittsburgh artists as provincial, then, is to identify the sociological structure of this, a typical local artworld. There is a lot of adventure and intelligence in Pittsburgh art, but inevitably to the critic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 99-104 [Access article in PDF] New York Art, Pittsburgh Art, Art 1 David Carrier Champney Family Professor Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art I. New York Art A fully developed artworld requires not only artists, but also a support system — schools to teach the artists, commercial galleries to display art, and the connected artmarket; public museums and their curators to (...) make that art available to the public; and also, last and least, artwriters to interpret and evaluate the art. This has been true for a long time in America and Europe. I speak of artwriters as "last and least" just because we are important only in some artworlds. In the seventeenth century Poussin depended upon commentary of intellectuals, but his contemporaries Rembrandt and Vermeer did not. In this country, New York is such an artworld and so, perhaps, is Los Angeles. These are the places where young artists go to establish themselves, and so they are the places where the most original new art tends to be made. Artists outside of those centers then imitate the art made there.Artworld centers tend to be large business centers because they require major museums and many collectors. Each component of this system is dependent upon the others. Unless they have collectors, artists cannot support themselves without doing other jobs; unless there are museums, there is no public space in which art can be seen. Unless there are artwriters, there is no way to articulate shared experience of this art. This artworld is a product of modernist bourgeois democracy. Premodern cultures did not have public museums. Nowadays information is disseminated quickly, but the role of centers as places where new art is made, seen, and discussed remains essential. Our novel electronic technologies have not changed this situation.A collecting culture requires not just wealth, but also a special sort of sensibility. In fact, the number of serious collectors anywhere is surprisingly small, as one can see in Los Angeles, which has a great deal of wealth, but a surprisingly thin gallery system. Like collectors, artwriters too are odd sorts of creatures. I usually identify myself as a New York-based critic, because that is where I see most of the shows I review. Artforum, the Burlington Magazine, and Tema Celeste, the journals I now work for have a real interest in exhibitions at the Carnegie and the Warhol, in Pittsburgh, but no concern with shows like this one. Partly the problem is that reviewing space is very hard to come by, but also the difficulty is that it is difficult to make sense of a review discussing artists who are known only locally. Even were I to identify [End Page 99] someone local as a wonderful original talent, it would be very difficult for readers who have never seen her art to evaluate that claim.In Pittsburgh we certainly have good artists, and there are several universities with art departments. But here, as elsewhere in the cities I know, the artmarket is focused on New York; and there is, so far as I can see, only modest critical support for artists. Major collectors here, as elsewhere in America, look to New York, which has a critical mass of galleries, museums, and critics. The Carnegie too, tends to look to New York when planning its shows. The curators travel widely, but most of the art they show, whether American or from elsewhere, is displayed in New York galleries. If one adopts this way of thinking about an artworld, then art made in Pittsburgh inevitably will be judged as "provincial." There are a few major artists, and many derivative ones; and those major ones, the innovators, are in the artworld centers.This is the model Vasari adopts, it is Clement Greenberg's model, and it is the basic model driving the present day artworld. To describe Pittsburgh artists as provincial, then, is to identify the sociological structure of this, a typical local artworld. There is a lot of adventure and intelligence in Pittsburgh art, but inevitably to the critic... (shrink)

This is the first-ever critical history of sociology in Britain, written by one of the world's leading scholars in the field. Renowned British sociologist, A. H. Halsey, presents a vivid and authoritative picture of the neglect, expansion, fragmentation, and explosion of the discipline during the past century. He is well equipped to write the story, having lived through most of it and having taught and researched in Britain, the USA, and Europe.The story begins with L.T. Hobhouse's election to the (...) first chair in sociology in London in 1907, but traces earlier origins of the discipline to Scotland and the English provinces. There is a lively account of the nineteenth-century battles between literature and science for the possession of the third culture of social studies, setting the context for a narrative history of rapid expansion in the second half of the twentieth century. LSE had a virtual monopoly before World War II. The educational establishment of Oxford and Cambridge opposed its introduction into the undergraduate curriculum. Only the expansion of sociology to the Scottish, Welsh, provincial, and 'new' universities after the Robbins Report of 1963 brought reluctant acceptance of the subject to Oxford and Cambridge.The student troubles of 1968 are then described and the subsequent doubts, confrontations, and cuts of the 1970s and 80s. Then, paradoxically by a Conservative Government, there was a new university expansion incorporating polytechnics and other colleges, with a consequent doubling of both staff and students in the 1990s.Yet the end of the century left sociology riven by intellectual conflict. It had survived the Marxist subversions of the 70s and the feminist invasion. Yet the renewed challenges of various forms of relativism still threatened, and at root the war was, as it began, between a scientific quantifying and explanatory subject and a literary, interpretative set of cultural studies. (shrink)

The world of academic philosophy is now entering a new age, one defined neither by colonial need for recognition nor by postcolonial wish to integrate. The indicators of this new era include heightened appreciation of the value of world philosophies, the internationalization of the student body, the philosophical pluralism which interaction and migration in new global movements make salient, growing concerns about diversity within a still too-white faculty body and curricular canon, and identification of a range of deep structural problems (...) with the contemporary philosophical academy in its discursive, citational, refereeing and ranking practices. We are entering what we might call " the age of " re-emergence, " a new period the key features of which are as follows. First, philosophies from every region of the world, locally grounded in lived experience and reflection upon it, are finding new autonomous and authentic forms of articulation. Second, philosophical industry, leaving behind a center-periphery mode of production, is becoming again polycentric: the philosophical world is returning to a plural and diverse network of productive sites. Third, Europe and other colonial powers have been provincialized, no longer mandatory conversation partners or points of comparison but rather unprivileged participants in global dialogue. Fourth, philosophers within the largely Anglophone international academy are beginning to acknowledge their responsibility to arrange international institutions to enable wide and open participation; that is, acknowledge that their control over the academy is a fallout from colonialism rather than a reflection of intellectual superiority. We may thus look to a future when there will be a vibrant pluralistic realism in departments of academic philosophy around the globe, and a new cartography of philosophy. (shrink)

For most of the 20th century literature and criticism of literature functioned as central engines of cultural change across the western world. This was especially the case in ex-colonial societies like New Zealand where writers and intellectuals frequently expressed a desire to create sophisticated local cultures which could compete with the foundation societies in Europe. Between 1940 and 1984 New Zealand writers and intellectuals developed a mode of literary criticism which this essay refers to as `Literary Critique' for this (...) very reason. In the absence of well established cultural traditions and a sense that they had a duty to import and indigenise western intellectual thought in order to further the evolution of New Zealand culture, a series of writers wrote often scathing critiques of their culture, using literature as their point of entry. Post-War New Zealand Literary Critique stands as evidence of a provincial, masculine, and angry intellectual culture. (shrink)

Summary At the beginning of the 1730s René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur published two long memoirs on a new type of thermometer equipped with a specially calibrated scale — known ever since as the Réaumur scale. It became one of the most common ‘standardized’ thermometers in Europe until the late nineteenth century. What made this thermometer so successful? What was it specifically? I will first argue that the real Réaumur thermometer as an instrument was a fiction, a ghost — (...) an idealized instrument. On paper, it was theoretically flawless. In reality, the standardized Réaumur thermometer was most likely never achieved. This article shows that its success was essentially due to a recontextualisation from theoretical natural philosophy — Réaumur's principle of uniformity — to: 1) the context of artisanal knowledge and practices and 2) the context of making and reporting in the Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences actual measurements done in the field (in Paris at the Observatory, in Provincial France, in the Colonies, and in the rest of Europe). Réaumur's thermometer was essentially a theoretical method to which was associated a particular scale. It was the instrument's reification for market consumption and fieldwork that gave this specific type of thermometer materiality and authority. Although most Réaumur thermometers ever made were strikingly different from one another, over time the thermomètre de Réaumur designation became a brand, a seal of approval born from customary artisanal practices and cultural habitudes. (shrink)

This essay is a memorial tribute from one member of the Common Knowledge editorial board to another. Adam Michnik, a cofounder of the first dissident organization in East-Central Europe, writes about the details and the symbolic importance of his first meeting, in 1978 on Mt. Snĕžka, with Václav Havel, coorganizer of Charter 77. From his insider’s perspective, the author retells the history of dissent in communist Europe from that time until the Velvet Revolution and Havel’s election as president (...) of Czechoslovakia in 1989. He also assesses the impact of Havel’s work as a playwright and antipolitical essayist, but the emphasis of the essay falls on how Havel the man dealt with the disappointments he endured in political office, including the passage of “lustration” laws and the election of Václav Klaus as prime minister. The organizing principle of this essay is the distinction made by the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka between “great history” and “small history.” In periods of greatness, the Czechs led European civilization toward the path it would subsequently take; at other times, they withdrew into the “banality of provincialism.” This tribute to Havel ultimately argues that, after many decades of provincial Stalinism, Havel brought Czech history back to the path of greatness on which T. G. Masaryk had set it in the first part of the twentieth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Inventing Philosophy’s Other: Phenomenology in America by Jonathan StrassfeldGregory FloydSTRASSFELD, Jonathan. Inventing Philosophy’s Other: Phenomenology in America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 363 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $30.00Recent years have witnessed an increase in scholarly attention paid to the intellectual history and development of socalled Continental philosophy. That attention has turned to not only key figures and philosophical schools but also to the historical factors, social (...) conditions, and institutions that have aided, hindered, and otherwise directed its itinerary across the European continent and eventual migration to the “new world.” Edward Baring’s Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2019) is a well-researched and intricate account of the European development of phenomenology’s growth from “a provincial philosophy of southwest Germany into a movement that spanned Europe.” Baring argues convincingly that European networks of Catholic scholars and institutions were essential to the dissemination of the ideas and works of early phenomenologists, and his work offers a salutary reappraisal of neoscholasticism as a vibrant, internally diverse, and philosophically sophisticated movement attentive to and engaged in the dominant questions of its day. The various contributors to the 2020 volume, The Catholic Reception of Continental Philosophy in North America (University of Toronto Press) take up the story as it begins again amid American and Canadian Catholic institutions of higher learning. They offer an extended account of the historical, institutional, and conceptual relationships between Catholicism and Continental philosophy on North American soil up to the present day.To these, Jonathan Strassfeld’s Inventing Philosophy’s Other: Phenomenology in America offers a necessary complement. Strassfeld tells another and essential side of the story focused on eleven “elite” universities—Harvard in particular—and the way in which American scholars in the first half of the century and European émigrés in the second half set the conditions for an at times fruitful at times fraught engagement with Continental thought in America. Key to that analysis is the contention that in the first half of the twentieth century, Harvard and other leading institutions that would later become bastions of analytic philosophy were the first to take interest in phenomenology sending scholars to study with its founders and engaging a tradition that they [End Page 366] “encountered as a work in progress” and as possessing natural points of contact with various strands of American philosophy such as new realism, critical realism, pragmatism, and the philosophy of language.Strassfeld then documents the reversal of that early philosophical pluralism and the foreclosure of the possibility of philosophical integration due to the rapid ascendancy of analytic philosophy between 1950 and 1969, showing that foreclosure to be neither a necessary outcome nor the triumph of a superior philosophical approach: “[B]oth the intra-university mandates of new interdisciplinary formations and changing inter-university dynamics of hiring and promotion after World War II transformed the ecosystem of philosophical reproduction catalyzing the rise of analysis and decline of humanistic pluralism in American philosophy.”The consequence of the decrease in faculty specializing in phenomenological and Continental areas from elite institutions was twofold. First, Continental philosophy increasingly “relied on a network of departments and organizations that were defined by the resistance to the practice and influence of mainstream American philosophy.” Second, it became of increasing interest to nonphilosophical disciplines such as sociology, psychology, geography, architecture, and anthropology, which sought to transcend culturally ascendant forms of scientific reductivism. In both ways, Strassfeld argues, Continental thought became “an unassimilated other” within the American academy.In telling this story, Inventing Philosophy’s Other uses a distinctive alphanumeric structure. One set of numbered chapters introduces the essential doctrines and early figures of phenomenology and chronicles its varied transpositions on American soil. These numbered chapters are punctuated by a set of shorter alphabetic chapters that present portraits of American-born or expatriated phenomenologists. The dual structure of the work tells the story of phenomenology in America along two axes: an intellectual history of ideas, institutions, and social practices as well as an interpenetrating history of constitutive figures.A major strength of Strassfeld’s work is that he brings a historian’s care... (shrink)

Recent histories of American jurisprudence tend to ignore the fact that ideas that appeared in the United States often appeared simultaneously in Europe. Even those works that do not ignore the European context are content with tracing the influence or reception of European thought in America. This article suggests that another possible approach is to compare jurisprudential developments in the United States, Europe, and other places in order to reach more general, sociology-of-knowledge-like insights into the reasons why certain (...) ideas appear at certain times and places. One concrete example is discussed: the rise of an interest in the distinction between formal and "living" law in American and European jurisprudence in the first decade of the twentieth century. This distinction was central to the work of Roscoe Pound in the United States and the work of the Austro-Hungarian legal thinker Eugen Ehrlich. Pound and Ehrlich shared similar personal backgrounds. When they began advocating the study of informal law, both Pound and Ehrlich were teaching law in provincial towns situated on the frontiers of empires. Both towns were marginal places where different cultures clashed and where the legal culture of the center of the empire had only a tenuous hold. Scholars working in such an environment, it is argued, would tend to be more aware of the gap between formal state law and the actual norms governing the daily lives of people than scholars working at the center of an empire. The article offers additional support for this argument by looking at the scholarship of Guido Tedeschi, an Italian-Israeli legal scholar who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1940s. The article concludes by calling for the study of the history of American jurisprudence from a comparative perspective, taking into account such issues as the interaction between center and periphery and between empire and provinces in more than one national context. (shrink)

In America most of us are so proud of our own achievements and—as a corollary of this—so provincial and narrow-minded in our general worldoutlook, that it has probably never occurred to us that until very recently we have cut absolutely no figure in the world's philosophy. In fact, it may still be said that even in 1930 the influence of American philosophy upon the philosophical world is almost a negligible factor. But even such nearly negligible influence is vastly more than (...) American philosophers could boast of thirty or forty years ago. The fact is that even as late as at the outbreak of the world-war most of Europe hardly knew that there was any such thing as American philosophy. And up to a very few years prior to the beginning of this devastating conflict such judgment concerning the non-existence of American philosophy was probably quite in agreement with the facts of the case. For an understanding of America's present cultural position it is essential, therefore, that one should know something of the recent advances in American philosophy. In fact, such philosophical progress in contemporary America constitutes one of the most remarkable and distinct proofs of America's ability to make significant and appreciated contributions to the highest intellectual and cultural life of the world. It would be foolish were one—even yet—to claim that America has arrived, philosophically. But the signs which indicate that American philosophy is definitely on its way are numerous, and are constantly multiplying. If American philosophers cannot yet say: “Plato, Hume, and Kant, we are here!”. (shrink)