A. Lincoln, Philosopher: Lincoln’s Place in 19th-Century Intellectual History

The nineteenth century in Europe and America was an era of second thoughts. Those second thoughts were largely about the Enlightenment, which had been born in the mid-1600s as a scientific revolution and blossomed into the Age of Reason in the 1700s, when it seemed that no puzzle was beyond the grasp of scientific rationality. That blossom was snipped all too quickly by the French Revolution, which drowned rationality in human politics in a spray of Jacobin-terrorized blood, then by the revulsion of European art and music from the Enlightenment’s canons of balance and symmetry in favor of the Romantic glorification of the sublime and the irrational, and finally by the rage and contempt that the Enlightenment’s most rationalized offspring—its bourgeois capitalist entrepreneurs, inventors, and managers—inspired in the hearts of intellectuals and aristocrats alike. This does not mean that the Enlightenment was herded off the scene entirely by the Romantic reaction. The scientists had dug themselves firmly into a position from which they refused to be dislodged, and the bourgeoisie of France and England continued their relentless struggle to wrest control of their nations’ politics from its nobles and emperors. So, there remained men and women of the nineteenth century who lashed themselves firmly to the mast of the Enlightenment, disregarding the sirens of Romantic passion in art and literature, as well as politics. And it is among the latter that we must classify Abraham Lincoln. [excerpt

The production of ideas: Notes on Austrian intellectual history from Bolzano to Wittgenstein

This paper takes the form of a series of sketches of 19th century Austrian political and intellectual history, allied with a number of more general reflections designed to contribute to our understanding of some of the peculiar characteristics of Austrian thought, particularly Austrian philosophy and economics, in the period in question

Studies in Intellectual History

Originally published in 1953. In this collection of essays, prominent midcentury intellectual historians provide critical essays on their field of specialty. This volume gathers work by Harold Cherniss, George Boas, Ludwig Edelstein, Leo Spitzer, and others

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