Search results for "Intellectual History"

Acceptance and knowledge of evolutionary theory among third-year university students in Spain

2020

The theory of evolution is one of the greatest scientific achievements in the intellectual history of humankind, yet it is still contentious within certain social groups. Despite being as robust and evidence-based as any other notable scientific theory, some people show a strong reluctance to accept it. In this study, we used the Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) and Knowledge of Evolution Exam (KEE) questionnaires with university students from four academic degree programs (Chemistry, English, History, and Biology) of ten universities from Spain to measure, respectively, acceptance and knowledge of evolutionary theory among third-year undergraduate students (nMATE = 9…

History of education and the struggle for intellectual liberation in post-Soviet Baltic space after the fall of the Berlin Wall

2014

This study on a “new” history of education is written from the perspective of a participant in the process of discarding Soviet intellectual and physical boundaries. The fall of the Berlin Wall has, over the past two decades, become a continuous process in post-Soviet societies, when the now liberated historians of education were faced with a new challenge, namely integration into the newly opened world. The only allowed theory, Marxism-Leninism, reduced historians of education to superficial methodology and its trivialisation. However, the collapse of the USSR did not immediately result in new theoretical concepts, because historians were busy discovering fresh facts in newly accessed arch…

1. Recognition And Social Ontology: An Introduction

2011

One of Hegel's big ideas is that creatures with a self-conception are the subjects of developmental processes that exhibit a distinctive structure. Call a creature 'essentially self-conscious' if what it is for itself, its self- conception, is an essential element of what it is in itself. How something that is essentially self-conscious appears to itself is part of what it really is. This chapter shows how the tripartite account of erotic awareness can be used in a natural way to build a notion of recognition that satisfies these twin philosophical constraints on the interpretation of Hegel's notion of self-consciousness in terms of recognition. Doing so it clarifies the nature of the trans…

'Economy' in European History. Words, Contexts and Change over Time

2022

Starting from the Greek idea of the law of the household, Luigi Alonzi traces the different meaning assumed by the word ‘economy’ during the modern ages and the early modern era, highlighting the semantic richness of the word and its uses in various political and cultural contexts.

Why France and India? The Convergence Hypothesis

2016

The cross-fertilization of insights derived from French and Indian intellectual history has ignited a pluridisciplinary reflection on the role played by these two countries in the fabric of the knowledge-based economy in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, the Age of Enlightenment in Western Europe in the eighteenth century, brought forward an autonomous position for knowledge in human societies, and, on the other hand, it was once predicted that India’s future would be built in her classrooms (Education Commission). Finally, we lay the ground for the characterization of a triple knowledge-based convergence between the two higher-education systems on academic, economic and institutio…

Days of the Cavemen? : Adorno, Spengler, and the Anatomy of Caesarism

2021

Abstract This article addresses the controversial question of Theodor W. Adorno’s debt to right-wing Zivilisationskritik by a close reading of his essay “Spengler after the Decline” (1950). The article shows that despite Adorno’s harsh polemics against Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918, 1922), he sought to make Spengler’s analysis of Weimar Germany’s undemocratic tendencies—“Caesarism”—serve progressive ends. However, Adorno’s essay was not just an effort at “coming to terms with the past” in Adenauerian West Germany. Reading the essay’s original 1941 version together with Adorno’s correspondence with Max Horkheimer sheds light on Spengler as an overlooked key (next to Max Weber, …

Thinking through Transition. Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts, and Intellectual History in East Central Europe after 1989

2017

What I Talk About When I Talk About Quality

2010

ABSTRACT During the 15 years that Quality in Higher Education has held a focal position in the field of higher education assessment, the concept of quality has evolved from a debatable and controversial concept to an everyday matter in higher education. The author takes a personal look into the development of the field by first tracking the discursive changes in the debate, and then reflecting on the shift of the quality discussion from a matter of political substance debate to a matter of technical implementation. The article finishes with a look into possible futures of the quality revolution.

A Closed Book: Opacity of the Human Self in Mullā Ṣadrā

2014

Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1636) subscribes at large to the Avicennian view according to which the human subject is always and fully aware of herself. At the same time, his eschatology hinges on the Qur’ānic motive of the soul as a closed book that is first opened on the Final Day, that is, on the idea that each soul’s share in the afterlife should be understood as the full revelation of the soul’s true nature to itself. The two ideas thus have seemingly contradictory entailments: the soul is fully aware of and transparent to itself, but at the same time it has aspects that can remain opaque to it, at least in this life. The task of this paper is to investigate whether Ṣadrā can coherently hol…

Al-Ghazāī on the Signification of Names

2010

AbstractAl-Ghazālī’s most detailed explanation of how signification works occurs in his treatise on The Beautiful Names of God. Al-Ghazālī builds squarely on the commentary tradition on Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias: words signify things by means of concepts and correspondingly, existence is laid out on three levels, linguistic, conceptual, and particular (i.e. extramental). This framework allows al-Ghazālī to put forward what is essentially an Aristotelian reading of what happens when a name successfully picks out a being: when a quiddity is named by some kind term, its referent in the mind is formally identical to the quiddity of an individual existent which belongs to that natural kind. Al…