University Scholar Series: Mary Pickering

Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography On November 17, 2010 Mary Pickering spoke in the University Scholar Series hosted by Provost Gerry Selter at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Mary Pickering discussed her three-volume Pulitzer Prize nominated work entitled Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography. Comte was a French Philosopher and the father of sociology. Professor Pickering teaches courses at SJSU in French history, German history, European women\u27s history, and urban history.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/uss/1005/thumbnail.jp

The Powerful

History is written by the powerful. It is true that since the 1960s and the beginnings of the democratization of history, less powerful minorities have taken up the pen and more profusely expressed their views of history, but to a great extent, white males have engrained their view of history into people’s minds. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps because of its appealing nature, or perhaps for both reasons, the Renaissance stands out in people’s minds as a definitive period in history—a period during which, arguably, intellectual and cultural progress swept across Europe. The driving force behind much of the intellectual and cultural changes was the humanist movement; focusing on a devotion to and re-analysis of the classics, humanism arose between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through their devotion to the studia humanitatis (the study of rhetoric, grammar, history, poetry, and ethics), humanists strove to improve the human condition. These developments, most frequently identified in the cultural, intellectual, and social realms, altered many people’s lives for the better. These same developments, however, were also gender-biased

The co-production of historical knowledge: implications for the history of identities

This essay argues that understanding people’s lives, emotions and intellectual reasoning is crucial to exploring national identity and that ‘the co-production of historical knowledge’ provides an approach or methodology that allows for a deeper comprehension of people’s self-identities by encouraging a diverse range of people to participate in the research process. We argue that many academic historians have maintained an intellectual detachment between university history and public and community history, to the detriment of furthering historical knowledge. We argue for a blurring of the boundaries between university and communities in exploring modern British history, and especially the history of national identities. It includes extracts of writing from community partners and a brief photographic essay of projects related to exploring identities

On Picturing a Candle: The Prehistory of Imagery Science

The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical – and even psychological – reckoning with imagery and its parent concept ‘imagination’. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination’s intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for – and presents challenges to – the scientific endeavor. We focus on the neuroscientific literature’s most commonly used task – imagining a concrete object – and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualize and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological challenges to the scientific analysis of imagery. We conclude by reflecting on the intellectual history of visualization in the light of contemporary science, and the extent to which such science may resolve long-standing theoretical debates

“Rebellion in the Ranks”: Desertion and the United States Colored Troops: An Interview with Jonathan Lande

Over the course of this year, we’ll be interviewing some of the speakers from the upcoming 2018 CWI conference about their talks. Today we are speaking with Jonathan Lande, a doctoral candidate in History at Brown University, where he was the 2016 Peter Green Scholar. Jonathan teaches courses in American and African American history at Tougaloo College as the 2017-2018 Brown-Tougaloo Exchange Faculty Fellow. His current project, “Rebellion in the Ranks,” examines the desertion, mutiny, and courts-martial trials of former slaves serving in the Union army. Looking at African American soldiers who found military service offensive to their visions of freedom, “Rebellion in the Ranks” traces the resistance of African American soldiers and remaps the process of emancipation in the Union army. A portion of his research entitled “Trials of Freedom” appeared in the Journal of Social History. The African American Intellectual History Society blog, Black Perspectives, also featured a guest posting from Jonathan on desertion and black military service. He is the recipient of the William F. Holmes Award from the Southern Historical Association and the Du Bois-Wells Award from the African American Intellectual History Society. [excerpt

Constructed Languages and Their Role in Drama

This paper covers the history and use of constructed language and dialect on stage and screen as well as the issues that arise concerning social awareness and intellectual property