In the introduction to their 1984 volume on Philosophy in History, Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner describe their vision of a comprehensive (and incidentally impossible) “Intellectual History of Europe”: Imagine a thousand-volume work entitled The Intellectual History of Europe. Imagine also a great convocation of resurrected thinkers, at which every person mentioned in [...]
Category Archives: history
The Sea of Stories
Earlier this week the Guardian, Forbes and others covered the discovery of 500 fairy tales collected by 19th century folklorist Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. I sent a note about this to Professor Jack Zipes, who promptly replied urging caution about the discovery and pointing to many other (in his view more interesting) 19th century collections [...]
Also posted in bibliography, culture, fairytales, hamann, herder, humanities, intellectualhistory, literature 2 Comments
Sketch for “Romanticism Without Borders” workshop series
For a few months I’ve been thinking of starting a workshop series on the influence and legacy of different forms of romanticism around the world. Each workshop would have a day or half day of short papers on a variety of topics, authors and works. The workshops would be accessible to a non-specialist audience. I’ve [...]
Also posted in art, conferences, philosophy, projects Leave a comment
The Swedenborgian Legacy
Swedenborg’s system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order and with unbroken unity, but cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, [...]
Also posted in culture, exhibitions 1 Comment
The contingent cathedral: notes on Lewis White Beck’s Early German Philosophy
Lewis White Beck‘s 1969 Early German Philosophy is a long, rich and rambling chronicle of philosophical thinkers and philosophical ideas originating from what we now call Germany, roughly from the birth of St. Ambrose in 340 to the death of Kant in 1804. Beck opens the book with the question “Can there be, should there [...]
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TEXTUS: an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata
Since finally blogging about OpenPhilosophy.org last month I’ve been thinking about how one could make a generic open source platform that could be used to power it, and other things like it. Enter ‘TEXTUS’: TEXTUS is an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata. It enables users to transcribe, translate, and [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, digitalhumanities, humanities, ideas, literature, notes, open data, openknowledge, projects, technology 9 Comments
Ideas for OpenPhilosophy.org
For several years I’ve been meaning to start OpenPhilosophy.org, which would be a collection of open resources related to philosophy for use in teaching and research. There would be a focus on the history of philosophy, particularly on primary texts that have entered the public domain, and on structured data about philosophical texts. The project [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digitalhumanities, humanities, ideas, intellectualhistory, openknowledge, projects, technology 7 Comments
Architectural Literature, Literary Architecture
A few years ago an architect friend and I used to fantasise about building and animating a model of a small but representative section of Borges’s “Library of Babel”. We wanted to incorporate the animation into a short film with a reading of Borges’s story, complete with lots of digitally-assisted indefinite zooming through the model. [...]
Also posted in architecture, art, culture, events, exhibitions, literature Tagged architecture, borges, calvino, library, literature, unbuilt extremities 4 Comments
Who read what? Mapping influence in intellectual history
In my research I often wonder about whom and what the people I’m reading read. Did Wittgenstein read Nietzsche? Did Nietzsche read Hegel? Did Hegel read Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare read Chaucer? Did Chaucer read Sophocles? Knowing which texts a given writer was aware of (and which they probably weren’t aware of) can help us to [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, digitalhumanities, humanities, ideas, intellectualhistory, open data, openknowledge, projects, technology 7 Comments
How much will digital tools change the nature of scholarship?
Will new digital technologies radically transform the nature of research in the arts and humanities? Generally I think I might be relatively old fashioned about this. Of course new technologies may change our modus operandi, and may alter the kinds of research we do. For example the (arguably disproportionate) dominance of the monograph and the [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, digitalhumanities, humanities, ideas, intellectualhistory, technology 4 Comments
Jonathan Gray