Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey, and Tim Stainton
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526125316
- eISBN:
- 9781526136213
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526125316.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
Intellectual disability is an unstable concept, and its fundamental instability is magnified when we track its history and relation to other concepts. This introductory chapter explores some of the ...
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Intellectual disability is an unstable concept, and its fundamental instability is magnified when we track its history and relation to other concepts. This introductory chapter explores some of the challenges of investigating the forces shaping the concept of intellectual disability in Europe and Britain across the centuries: not only those generated by shifting language and terminology, but also the demands imposed by the interdisciplinary nature of this project, which takes us through histories of literature, religion, law, education, philosophy, psychology and medicine, in addition to engaging with cultural and social history. Further, the fundamental slipperiness of the idea of intellectual disability raises the question of whether it could even be said to exist in forms similar to that which it assumes today. This introduction also includes a review of literature exploring the history of intellectual disability, and an overview of the chapters to follow.Less
Intellectual disability is an unstable concept, and its fundamental instability is magnified when we track its history and relation to other concepts. This introductory chapter explores some of the challenges of investigating the forces shaping the concept of intellectual disability in Europe and Britain across the centuries: not only those generated by shifting language and terminology, but also the demands imposed by the interdisciplinary nature of this project, which takes us through histories of literature, religion, law, education, philosophy, psychology and medicine, in addition to engaging with cultural and social history. Further, the fundamental slipperiness of the idea of intellectual disability raises the question of whether it could even be said to exist in forms similar to that which it assumes today. This introduction also includes a review of literature exploring the history of intellectual disability, and an overview of the chapters to follow.
Clifford Siskin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035316
- eISBN:
- 9780262336345
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035316.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
History is a genre consisting historically of different kinds with different functions. Instead of just writing “a history” of system, we need to recover the changing relationship between these two ...
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History is a genre consisting historically of different kinds with different functions. Instead of just writing “a history” of system, we need to recover the changing relationship between these two genres—starting with Bacon’s emphasis on the need for new histories and Galileo’s focus on system. This chapter follows their interrelations into the eighteenth century using a new computational resource I call Tectonics. It maps spatially over time the coming together of system and history at the century’s end as they share more and more title pages, modifying each other and forming a new platform for knowledge: the narrow-but-deep disciplines of modernity. The chapter confirms this finding using Encyclopedia Britannica and then—with turns to William Jones and the novel--shows how history itself became one of those narrowed disciplines by foregrounding “ideas” and the modern subject that embodies them. The chapter shows how these interrelations of system and history shaped the efforts of system theory, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Niklas Luhmann, and recovers for this book a different kind of history: Bacon’s notion of a capacious literary history that would tell the “story of learning” from age to age. The chapter concludes with Carl Woese’s efforts to transform biology through a newly capacious history, and with explanations of the scope and kinds of history featured in this book: the histories of “mediation,” “blame,” and the “real.”.Less
History is a genre consisting historically of different kinds with different functions. Instead of just writing “a history” of system, we need to recover the changing relationship between these two genres—starting with Bacon’s emphasis on the need for new histories and Galileo’s focus on system. This chapter follows their interrelations into the eighteenth century using a new computational resource I call Tectonics. It maps spatially over time the coming together of system and history at the century’s end as they share more and more title pages, modifying each other and forming a new platform for knowledge: the narrow-but-deep disciplines of modernity. The chapter confirms this finding using Encyclopedia Britannica and then—with turns to William Jones and the novel--shows how history itself became one of those narrowed disciplines by foregrounding “ideas” and the modern subject that embodies them. The chapter shows how these interrelations of system and history shaped the efforts of system theory, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Niklas Luhmann, and recovers for this book a different kind of history: Bacon’s notion of a capacious literary history that would tell the “story of learning” from age to age. The chapter concludes with Carl Woese’s efforts to transform biology through a newly capacious history, and with explanations of the scope and kinds of history featured in this book: the histories of “mediation,” “blame,” and the “real.”.
Joe Earle, Cahal Moran, and Zach Ward-Perkins
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781526110121
- eISBN:
- 9781526120748
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526110121.003.0005
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, History of Economic Thought
Chapter 4 details the history of how the discipline of economics came to be so narrow and the more recent student led movements to reform it. It also includes a critique of the new CORE syllabus.
Chapter 4 details the history of how the discipline of economics came to be so narrow and the more recent student led movements to reform it. It also includes a critique of the new CORE syllabus.
James Montgomery
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748683321
- eISBN:
- 9780748695072
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748683321.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
This book documents and explores a ninth century Muslim thinker’s response to an emergent information technology—widely available books written on rag-paper. By 850, in Baghdad rag-paper books were ...
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This book documents and explores a ninth century Muslim thinker’s response to an emergent information technology—widely available books written on rag-paper. By 850, in Baghdad rag-paper books were all the rage. A book market, with its professionals: stationers, copyists, booksellers and authors, emerged. A cosmopolitan society responded enthusiastically. Al-Jā?i? had, for most of his life, earned his living as an influential counselor, a special adviser to the elite. By the time of his death in 868/9, he had become a professional author. Al-Jā?i? was a bibliomaniac and prided himself on his expertise in Kalām, a dialectical method for ascertaining the truth, the predominant intellectual discipline of his day, a rigorous study of the nature of God and the universe derived from close observation of creation and informed by inferential and analogical reasoning about the suprasensible world. Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books concentrates on The Book of Living, the most important work by al-Jā?i?, a documentation of almost all creation, from insect life, such as beetles and flies, to reptiles, such as lizards and snakes, to birds and mammals. The primary focus of the study is the extensive praise of books that The Book of Living contains. This is also the story of how al-Jā?i? thought that his book would save his society from the disorder it had fallen into through its addiction to argument and dissent, an addiction that created social tumult.Less
This book documents and explores a ninth century Muslim thinker’s response to an emergent information technology—widely available books written on rag-paper. By 850, in Baghdad rag-paper books were all the rage. A book market, with its professionals: stationers, copyists, booksellers and authors, emerged. A cosmopolitan society responded enthusiastically. Al-Jā?i? had, for most of his life, earned his living as an influential counselor, a special adviser to the elite. By the time of his death in 868/9, he had become a professional author. Al-Jā?i? was a bibliomaniac and prided himself on his expertise in Kalām, a dialectical method for ascertaining the truth, the predominant intellectual discipline of his day, a rigorous study of the nature of God and the universe derived from close observation of creation and informed by inferential and analogical reasoning about the suprasensible world. Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books concentrates on The Book of Living, the most important work by al-Jā?i?, a documentation of almost all creation, from insect life, such as beetles and flies, to reptiles, such as lizards and snakes, to birds and mammals. The primary focus of the study is the extensive praise of books that The Book of Living contains. This is also the story of how al-Jā?i? thought that his book would save his society from the disorder it had fallen into through its addiction to argument and dissent, an addiction that created social tumult.
Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey, and Tim Stainton (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526125316
- eISBN:
- 9781526136213
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526125316.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
This collection explores how concepts of intellectual or learning disability evolved from a range of influences, gradually developing from earlier and decidedly distinct concepts, including ‘idiocy’ ...
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This collection explores how concepts of intellectual or learning disability evolved from a range of influences, gradually developing from earlier and decidedly distinct concepts, including ‘idiocy’ and ‘folly’, which were themselves generated by very specific social and intellectual environments. With essays extending across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical, and psychiatric histories, this collection maintains a rigorous distinction between historical and contemporary concepts in demonstrating how intellectual disability and related notions were products of the prevailing social, cultural, and intellectual environments in which they took form, and themselves performed important functions within these environments. Focusing on British and European material from the middle ages to the late nineteenth century, this collection asks ‘How and why did these concepts form?’ ‘How did they connect with one another?’ and ‘What historical circumstances contributed to building these connections?’ While the emphasis is on conceptual history or a history of ideas, these essays also address the consequences of these defining forces for the people who found themselves enclosed by the shifting definitional field.Less
This collection explores how concepts of intellectual or learning disability evolved from a range of influences, gradually developing from earlier and decidedly distinct concepts, including ‘idiocy’ and ‘folly’, which were themselves generated by very specific social and intellectual environments. With essays extending across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical, and psychiatric histories, this collection maintains a rigorous distinction between historical and contemporary concepts in demonstrating how intellectual disability and related notions were products of the prevailing social, cultural, and intellectual environments in which they took form, and themselves performed important functions within these environments. Focusing on British and European material from the middle ages to the late nineteenth century, this collection asks ‘How and why did these concepts form?’ ‘How did they connect with one another?’ and ‘What historical circumstances contributed to building these connections?’ While the emphasis is on conceptual history or a history of ideas, these essays also address the consequences of these defining forces for the people who found themselves enclosed by the shifting definitional field.
Carool Kersten
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190247775
- eISBN:
- 9780190638528
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190247775.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
The introduction lays out the intentions of this intellectual history of contemporary Indonesian Islam. As a history of ideas, the book is theoretically framed by the notions of “circulation of ...
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The introduction lays out the intentions of this intellectual history of contemporary Indonesian Islam. As a history of ideas, the book is theoretically framed by the notions of “circulation of ideas”, developed in South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies, and Edward Said’s “traveling theory”. It is further informed by Zygmunt Bauman’s explanation of the role of intellectuals in Legislators and Interpreters and Bruce Robbins’ interpretation of intellectual work in Secular Vocations. It outlines the analysis of the rise of a new generation of Muslim intellectuals who are not only critical citizens vis-à-vis the state, but who have also interrogated the intellectual and political credentials of earlier generations of Muslim activists and leaders, and who have their own ideas about the localization of Islam and how Indonesian nation-building relates to regional, transregional, and global contexts.Less
The introduction lays out the intentions of this intellectual history of contemporary Indonesian Islam. As a history of ideas, the book is theoretically framed by the notions of “circulation of ideas”, developed in South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies, and Edward Said’s “traveling theory”. It is further informed by Zygmunt Bauman’s explanation of the role of intellectuals in Legislators and Interpreters and Bruce Robbins’ interpretation of intellectual work in Secular Vocations. It outlines the analysis of the rise of a new generation of Muslim intellectuals who are not only critical citizens vis-à-vis the state, but who have also interrogated the intellectual and political credentials of earlier generations of Muslim activists and leaders, and who have their own ideas about the localization of Islam and how Indonesian nation-building relates to regional, transregional, and global contexts.
