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Current Issue Article Abstracts July 2010 Vol. 71.3 • • • • • • • • The Uses of the Past in Quattrocento Florence: A Reading of Leonardo Bruni's Dialogues Carol Quillen Although Leonardo Bruni's Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum have long occupied a central place in the study of Italian Renaissance humanism, scholarly interpretations of them differ markedly. Such differences attest to the formal complexity of this text, the uncertainty about its date of composition, and the obvious contradictions between the arguments offered at different times by its main interlocutor. This essay first briefly describes the scholarly debates that have surrounded Bruni's Dialogues, particularly as these illustrate competing definitions of Florentine humanism. I then argue that the text juxtaposes citation to chronological narration as it explores one central theme in Bruni's humanism, how best to represent the past in and for the present. The "System" As A Reading Technology: Pedagogy And Philosophical Criticism In Condillac's Traité Des Systèmes Jeffrey Schwegman This article reexamines Condillac's Traité des systêmes (1749) and the broader Enlightenment controversy over "systems." Historians have often read this work as an epistemological treatise: an expression of the empiricist rejection of seventeenth-century rationalism. Yet a different picture emerges when we consider its pedagogical aims. Condillac sought not only to refute his opponents, but also to train readers how to evaluate philosophical arguments on their own, promoting a streamlined critical technique that involved parsing texts for a reductive logical structure. In the process, he helped construct an enduring stereotype of the seventeenth-century philosophers as rigidly systematic thinkers. Statistics And History In The German Enlightenment Johan Van Der Zande Eighteenth-century German Statistik was an empirical and descriptive discipline of "the land and the people." As the study of material conditions it provided governments with information to assess the strength of their own state in comparison with others. Its adherents' claim that Statistik was a useful science, however, was severely tempered by their empirical method and holistic view of society. As a "science of the present" it was seriously challenged by the recognition of the essential historicity of its subject matter. Both circumstances explain the decline of Statistik from which mathematical statistics, political economy, and political historiography profited. The Metempsychotic Mind: Emerson And Consciousness John Michael Corrigan This article argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson employs metempsychosis (reincarnation or the transmigration of the soul into successive bodies) as a figurative template for human consciousness. Mapping various traditions from Hinduism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism onto the vastness of the geological and biological records, Emerson translates metaphysics for modernity: he depicts the soul's journey through the chronological sequence of history as a poetic process that culminates in a tenuous form of self-knowledge. Baedekers As Casualty: Great War Nationalism And The Fate Of Travel Writing Mark D. Larabee This article addresses the critically neglected relation between Baedekers and nationalism, in order to articulate the reasons for the decline of the Baedeker empire in the early twentieth century. Conditions in the First World War undermined the Baedekers' foundational concepts of landscape description. Additionally, the guidebooks emblematized a lost pre-war style of international journey. However, evidence in unexplored archival and fictional sources qualifies our understanding of these changes. This article revisits and reconciles such assessments, by explaining how the war also recast the Baedekers' mediation of international access as a form of nationalist expansionism, and hence a suspect project. Skepticism And Faith: Max Weber's Anti-Utopianism In The Eyes Of His Contemporaries Joshua Derman This article elucidates an important reason for Max Weber's popularity among German intellectuals during the Weimar Republic: for different interpreters, Weber's anti-utopianism came to signify radically different attitudes towards the modern world. My aim is to construct an original typology of these interpretations and, in the process, to explain why Weber was able to make such divergent impressions. His reception provides a case study for understanding how a philosopher's impact is determined not just by the interpretation of published texts, but also by the tension that exists between these texts and the author's personality. |
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