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This chapter deals with intellectual, cultural, and artistic exchanges, studying in particular the profound impact of Arab science and philosophy on the intellectual revival of Europe that began in the twelfth century. It shows that the mingling of people and goods traveling back and forth across the Mediterranean was accompanied by a mingling of ideas, technologies, and texts—of cultures, in short. All the various players adopted the technologies, institutions, and tools of the merchants and sailors modified them to fit their own needs and culture, and perfected them when necessary. Exchanges of ideas and technologies in the Mediterranean basin were not limited to commerce and navigation, however. They occurred in all areas: agricultural, hydraulic, architectural, and military technologies; the knowledge and practice of medicine and pharmacology; artistic, musical, and literary tastes and expertise; scientific and philosophical scholarship.

This chapter examines the British and Irish involvement in a European community of schoalrs and intellectuals, and how scholarship itself might help to further European consciousness. It looks first at the infrastructure of inteleectual exchange — especially universities and learned societies in Britain, Ireland, and on the Continent, but also at the periodicals designed to publicize the findings of the ‘Republic of Letters’, and the role of the newspaper press and translations of French-language texts in bringing new thinking to a wider audience. Attention is then turned to the role of certain individuals, culminating in a brief study of the English and European dimensions of the life and work of the philosopher and jurisprudent, Jeremy Bentham

This chapter examines the rudiments of the concours académique as an intellectual exercise, with particular emphasis on the democratic judging process employed by French academies. It first provides an overview of the intellectual exchange made possible by the concours académique before discussing the contest's financial sponsorship, rules and regulations, the cultivation of prize questions, and advertising campaigns by the academies. It then considers the processes of reading, writing, and judging involved in the concours académique, along with the awarding ceremony and the publication, purchase, and reading of prize-winning texts. It also discusses the transgressions and limits of academic prize contests, including intellectual fraud, favoritism toward certain authors, and the issue of censorship by the state and the church.

This chapter examines the growth of the concours académique as the overall number of academic prize contests increased and the wide-ranging network of participating savants expanded. The total number of contestants from 1670 to the French Revolution may have reached as high as 15,000. The contestant population grew at roughly the same rate as the increase in annual competitions. As the practice evolved, so too did its appeal. The money and cultural capital at stake continued to tempt ambitious men and women in the Republic of Letters. Yet the increasingly critical nature of prize contests made the practice more attractive to amateur writers interested primarily in intellectual exchange. This chapter provides an overview of the concurrent community of predominantly amateur intellectuals who submitted entries to prize competitions, many of whom ended up as leaders of the French Revolution. It also considers the participation of women in the concours circuit.

This chapter examines the fate of the concours académique in the French Revolution. More specifically, it asks whether academic prize contests were able to keep pace with the evolving political culture and whether the practice remained a site of critical intellectual exchange the way it had been in the last decades of the Old Regime. The chapter first considers the state of the academies during the Revolution and notes the lack of dynamism in academic competitions after 1789. It then discusses the éloge contest held in honor of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, along with various prize contests organized by revolutionary bodies from 1790 to 1794. It also explores changes in the enlightened public sphere of the late eighteenth century due to political and intellectual illiberalism. It shows that, even though the National Convention abolished the academies and the concours académique in 1793, the French Revolution adopted the practice for itself but eliminated its pluralistic and critical elements.

This book concludes with a discussion of the concours académique's steady decline since the end of the French Revolution in term of its social and intellectual importance. Academic prize contests thrived in the eighteenth century because the public sphere of intellectual exchange thrived along with them. In the nineteenth century, however, governments lost interest in prize contests, and at some point the practice ceased to function as a screening process for technical experts. The growth of universities, research centers, and especially bureaucracies has slowly replaced the freelance man (and woman) of letters and by extension public knowledge-making exercises. The legion of bureaucratic experts in France has definitively eliminated the need for public involvement in technical matters. By the beginning of the twentieth century, prize contests had become merely academic. This book also considers four main features that help differentiate the Enlightenment of the concours from the many other Enlightenments constructed by modern historians.

This chapter traces the emergence of postcolonial theory in Latin American studies during the 1990s, a disciplinary shift that sparked a serious and hotly contested debate over the terms and conditions of intellectual exchange between metropolitan institutions of interpretation in Europe and the United States and those in Latin America. Latin American scholars opposed to this disciplinary trend drew attention to the foundational singularity and irreducibility of Latin American history and identity; asserted the categorical impropriety of drawing from European theoretical models—as well as postcolonial intellectual production from former British colonies—to reflect on Latin America; and appealed to Latin America’s own intellectual tradition as a means to counter and resist what are perceived as homogenizing and subordinating globalized narratives. The chapter returns to these debates in order to trace the political implications and cultural effects of this disciplinary deadlock. It introduces the central thesis and lays the theoretical and critical groundwork for establishing the relation between these larger claims and the claims made in subsequent chapters.

This chapter establishes the extent to which the newly invented technical language can be seen as forming the basis for a ‘calculus’ of relations. The new technical language, which evolved from initially scattered ideas in the writings of Udayana, Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya, and Raghunātha Śiromaṇi, emerged to become a standard idiom for academic works in philosophy. In early modern India the new technical language became the ‘lingua franca’ for intellectual exchange, such as in grammar, poetics, law, theology, and other knowledge disciplines.