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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.

The recipient of the Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities, Ying-shih Yü is a premier scholar of Chinese studies. Chinese History and Culture volumes 1 and 2 bring his extraordinary oeuvre to English-speaking readers. Spanning two thousand years of social, intellectual, and political change, the essays in these volumes investigate two central questions through all aspects of Chinese life: what core values sustained this ancient civilization through centuries of upheaval, and in what ways did these values survive in modern times? From Yü Ying-shih’s perspective, the Dao, or the Way, constitutes the inner core of Chinese civilization. His work explores the unique dynamics between Chinese intellectuals’ discourse on the Dao, or moral principles for a symbolized ideal world order, and their criticism of contemporary reality throughout Chinese history. Volume 1 of Chinese History and Culture explores how the Dao was reformulated, expanded, defended, and preserved by Chinese intellectuals up to the seventeenth century, guiding them through history’s darkest turns. Essays incorporate the evolving conception of the soul and the afterlife in pre- and post-Buddhist China, the significance of eating practices and social etiquette, the move toward greater individualism, the rise of the Neo-Daoist movement, the spread of Confucian ethics, and the growth of merchant culture and capitalism. A true panorama of Chinese culture’s continuities and transition, Yü Ying-shih’s two-volume Chinese History and Culture gives readers of all backgrounds a unique education in the meaning of Chinese civilization.

The recipient of the Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities, Ying-shih Yü is a premier scholar of Chinese studies. Chinese History and Culture volumes 1 and 2 bring his extraordinary oeuvre to English-speaking readers. Spanning two thousand years of social, intellectual, and political change, the essays in these volumes investigate two central questions through all aspects of Chinese life: what core values sustained this ancient civilization through centuries of upheaval, and in what ways did these values survive in modern times?

This book brings together international relations scholars, political theorists, and historians to reflect on the intellectual history of American foreign policy since the late nineteenth century. It offers a nuanced and multifaceted collection of essays covering a wide range of concerns, concepts, presidential doctrines, and rationalities of government thought to have marked America’s engagement with the world during this period: nation-building, exceptionalism, isolationism, modernisation, race, utopia, technology, war, values, the ‘clash of civilisations’ and many more.

The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation – the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus – and edits its catalogue. This catalogue shows that even book collections attached to Sunni religious institutions could hold rather unexpected titles, such as stories from the 1001 Nights, manuals for traders, medical handbooks, Shiite prayers, love poetry and texts extolling wine consumption. At the same time this library catalogue decisively expands our knowledge of how the books were spatially organised on the bookshelves of such a large medieval library. With over 2,000 entries this catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting the Ashrafiya catalogue into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles this book opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries.

This edited collection of essays brings together the work of senior and junior scholars to demonstrate how social and cultural tools complement intellectual history. George Fredrickson’s pioneering work, The Inner Civil War (1965), has long been the seminal text for scholars interested in the intellectual history of the American Civil War Era. The historians in this volume broaden the scope of what has traditionally been considered intellectual history. By including works about the history of medicine, art history, Catholic history, education, ethnicity, and identity, these contributions demonstrate how intellectual history informs many different fields within the study of nineteenth-century U.S. history. Additionally, the volume expands the definition of which individuals in society are considered intellectuals: Health reformers, sketch artists, college professors, lawyers, and religious leaders are considered alongside Fredrickson’s writers and business leaders. Following up on Fredrickson’s queries, this volume examines whether the Civil War forced out or strengthened old notions and ideas, supported or suppressed democratic individualism, and challenged or maintained ideas about nationalism. In short, the essays in this collection ponder whether the Civil War changed how northerners viewed themselves, others, and individuals’ roles in American society.

This book argues for a concept of natural morality that unites the concepts of natural rights and the natural law in a new and compelling way. Drawing on the thought of John Locke and St. Thomas Aquinas, it is argued that natural rights and the natural law are each derived independently from the single underlying fact of self-ownership through self-consciousness. From an intellectual historical standpoint, this argument includes the claim that while the idea of natural rights is a distinctly modern one and the idea of the natural law is a distinctly classical and medieval one, these two ideas are nevertheless profoundly compatible with one another. Taking issue equally with historians of political thought in the tradition of Leo Strauss and New Natural Law theorists in the tradition of Jacques Maritain, classical liberals and communitarians, and political liberals and conservatives, this book aims to re-establish the natural foundational approach to morality in an original manner. The concept of natural morality that emerges possesses both the backward-looking potential to unite intellectual history in a new way, and the forward-looking potential to illuminate persuasive approaches to issues of contemporary political relevance including universal health care, the death penalty and same-sex marriage.

This book places Biruni in his historical and cultural context within the long-term history of medieval Eurasia. It outlines the course of Biruni’s life, clarifying key questions about his associations, travels, and patrons. Following an overview of Biruni’s chief interests, it details his major works to illustrate the breadth of Biruni’s output and his intellectual approach, especially his attention to language, esteem for knowledge, and commitment to objective truth. An account of his institutional context and relationships elucidates his friendships and rivalries, notably with Avicenna. The book also shows how varied paths of transmission affected the legacy of Biruni and its reception in global scientific and literary traditions. Finally, a timeline, list of key works, and detailed bibliographic essay will guide readers into further study of Biruni and his thought. This comprehensive overview of Biruni is based on the Arabic and Persian primary sources in the original languages using the best editions. The author has consulted scholarship in French, German, and Russian to draw conclusions and present up-to-date bibliographic references in a manner accessible to specialists and the general reader alike.

It is a curious and little-known fact that the largest existentialist scene outside of Europe was in the Middle East. For two long decades, from the end of World War II until the late 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre was the uncontested champion of the Arab intelligentsia. Sartre’s existentialist philosophy nourished the post-colonial Arab quest for a new Arab subjectivity, or, as they called it, a “New Arab Man.” Sartre’s political writing manifested itself in unflinching support for the cause of Third Worldism, thus framing the liberationist struggle against neo-colonialism, imperialism and Zionism. His influence on Arab thought and action and his two-way relationship with an important circle of Arab thinkers was therefore very significant. By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, No Exit reconstructs the forgotten global milieu of the post-colonial Arab generation. Drawing extensively on new Arabic and Hebrew archival sources, No Exit examines the multiple cultural functions of Arab existentialism and, especially, the rise and fall of the relationship between Jean Paul Sartre and Arab intellectuals due to Sartre’s decision to side with Israel on the eve of the 1967 war.

This book offers the first overarching history of the humanities from Antiquity to the present. Unlike the sciences and the social sciences, the humanities lack a general history. There are already historical studies of musicology, logic, art history, linguistics, and historiography. This book pulls all these fields together, with many more, in a single coherent account. It takes as it main theme the way scholars throughout the ages and in virtually all civilizations have sought to identify patterns in texts, art, music, languages, literature, and the past. What rules can we apply if we wish to determine whether a tale about the past is really trustworthy? By what criteria are we to distinguish consonant from dissonant musical intervals? What rules jointly describe all possible grammatical sentences in a language? How can modern digital methods enhance pattern-seeking in the humanities? A New History of the Humanities amounts to a persuasive plea to give Panini, Valla, Bopp, and countless other often overlooked intellectual giants their rightful place next to the Galileos, Newtons, and Einsteins we celebrate so much more often.

While other scholars have demonstrated that the global marketplace is timeful and complex and not timeless and simple, my book is unique because I analyze how four academic groups-historians, economists, literary critics–and ecologist have responded to the failure of the prophecy of a new world. I am not aware of other scholarship that makes comparisons and contrasts among these four academic groups. I demonstrate that because of the long segregations of the physical sciences from the humanities and social science, historians, literary critics, and economists in the 1990s were not aware that the modem science of the Enlightenment that defined space as timeless had been replaced in the nineteenth century by the heretical sciences of geology, biology, and the physics of Einstein which defined space as timeful. Ecologists, who are aware of this revolution, have used the theory that nature is always timeful and complex to criticize the modem faith in a timeless, single global marketplace. I make a contribution by showing how the humanities have been moving toward the ecological critique of the modem metaphor of two worlds. They are seeing a single world that is timeful and complex.