The following article was originally published in the April-May 2013 edition of Red Pepper (Issue 189). Who can share what on the internet? There is an increasing awareness of debates around illegal sharing through high profile court cases and controversies in the news – through things like the Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, or the recent tragic [...]
Category Archives: intellectualhistory
The Genius and the Soil: Open Access and the Politics of Information
Also posted in copyright, edwardyoung, herder, history, ideas, law, legalhistory, open data, openknowledge, publications
Leave a comment
The Hegemony of the Eye
Insofar as the most innovative instruments of the era – the telescope and the microscope – extended the range and acuity of one sense in particular, scientific experience tended to privilege the visual, with its capacity to produce knowledge at a distance, over the other senses. Even when Bacon castigated normal vision for staying on [...]
Also posted in academia, history, ideas, philosophy, quotes
Tagged history of science, instruments, John Poinsot, Martin Jay, microscope, perspective, Renaissance, Songs of Experience, telescope, the eye
Leave a comment
Diderot on Living Marble and Self-Replicating Harpsichords
Denis Diderot explains how he can make marble come to life ‘whenever he pleases’ in an imaginary dialogue between himself and his friend Jean le Rond d’Alembert, mathematician and co-editor of the Encyclopedia. In the following passage he has just informed d’Alembert, much to the latter’s astonishment, that he knows how to make marble have [...]
Hamann and Benjamin on the Concept of Experience
Next month I’ll be giving a paper at the upcoming The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin conference at Goldsmiths, University of London. Here’s the abstract: In his 1917 essay “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy”, Benjamin wrote: “The great transformation and correction which must be performed upon the concept of experience, oriented so one-sidedly along [...]
Also posted in academia, benjamin, hamann, history, philosophers, philosophy, talks
1 Response
When Leibniz met Spinoza
In 1676 Leibniz found a pretext to visit Spinoza in The Hague, having learned that Spinoza was at work on a philosophical treatise of great importance. Spinoza showed Leibniz the manuscript of the Ethics, and the two men discussed philosophy together over several days. Although there is no written record of their conversation, it seems [...]
Also posted in history, leibniz, philosophers, philosophy, quotes, spinoza
Leave a comment
Hamann, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein on the Language of Philosophers
I’ve got a chapter on “Hamann, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein on the Language of Philosophers” in Hamann and the Tradition, which has just been published by Northwestern University Press. The book is based on a series of papers given at an international conference on Hamann in New York in March 2009. It is edited by Lisa [...]
Also posted in hamann, herder, history, humanities, nietzsche, philosophy, wittgenstein
Leave a comment
The Intellectual History of Europe
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 [...]
Also posted in history, philosophy
Leave a comment
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, history, humanities, literature
2 Responses
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.
Also posted in hamann, herder, history, humanities, philosophy
Leave a comment
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.
Also posted in bibliography, digitalhumanities, history, humanities, ideas, openknowledge, projects, technology
7 Responses
