You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703 - after 1752) is the first modern African philosopher to study and teach in a European university and write in the European philosophical tradition. We give an extensive historical and philosophical introduction to Amo's life and work, and provide Latin texts, with facing translations and explanatory notes, of Amo's two philosophical dissertations, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind and the Philosophical Disputation containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to our Living and Organic Body, both published in 1734. The Impassivity is an extended argument that the mind cannot be acted on, that sensation is a being-acted-on by the ...
Calvinism was the most dynamic and disruptive religious force of the later sixteenth century. Its emergence on the international scene shattered the precarious equilibrium established in the first generation of the Reformation, and precipitated three generations of religious warfare. This collection of essays probes different aspects of this complex phenomenon at a local level. Contributors present the results of their detailed work on societies as diverse as France, Germany, Highland Scotland and Hungary. Among wider themes approached are the impact of Calvin's writings, Calvinism in higher education, the contrasting fates of reformed preachers in town and country, Calvinist discipline and apocalyptic thought, and the shadowy affinity of merchants and scholars who formed a critical part of the 'Calvinist International'.
Volume XXII/1 of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, conference reports, and bibliographical information, which makes this publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. Its contributions range widely geographically, chronologically, and in subject-matter. The volume is, as always, a lively combination of original research and invaluable reference material.
Large city fires were a huge threat in premodern Central European every-day life; only quite late, institutional forms of fire insurances emerged as a post-disaster instrument of damage recovery. During the nineteenth century, insurance agencies spread through the World forming a plurality of modernities, safe or unsafe.
Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna.
Poor students experienced a kind of upward mobility that was not uncommon in old-regime Europe. They were also objects of controversy. and as such they reveal the many dimensions of the issue of opening careers to talent. At stake were socially and politically sensitive questions about the relative importance of nature and nurture, of natural talent and 'birth', in realizing human potential; about the proper reconciliation of collective imperatives and individual freedom, of hierarchical stability and progress; about how national systems of education should be structured; about the kind and degree of upward mobility the society and the culture needed and could tolerate. This 1988 book shows how a cluster of familiar eighteenth-century ideas about grace, talent, and merit shaped a formative social experience for men whose importance is still celebrated today, as well as for members of the educated elite who were and have remained obscure.
This book discusses the early modern engagement with books that survived intentional or accidental fire in Lutheran Germany. From the 1620s until the middle of the eighteenth century, unburnt books became an attraction for princes, publishers, clergymen, and some laymen. To cope with an event that seemed counter-intuitive and possibly supernatural, contemporaries preserved these books, narrated their survival, and discussed their significance. This book demonstrates how early modern Europeans, no longer bound to traditional medieval religion, yet not accustomed to modern scientific ways of thinking, engaged with a natural phenomenon that was not uncommon and yet seemed to defy common sense.