Monboddo y Rousseau (1933)

The work –here published for the first time in Spanish translation– presents themain theses maintained by Monboddo and Rousseau regarding the nature ofhigher primates. This subject-matter motivated a long and deep discussionthroughout the 18th century, and triggered the first evolutionist intuitions laterdeveloped by Charles Darwin.El texto que aquí se presenta por vez primera en español es una exposición de lasprincipales tesis sostenidas por Monboddo y Rousseau en torno a la naturalezade los primates superiores. Este tema suscitó un prolongado y fecundo debate alo largo del siglo XVIII, y dio lugar a las primeras intuiciones evolucionistas posteriormentedesarrolladas por Charles Darwin

The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays

Originally published in 1963. The essays in this volume are critical and, with one exception, directed against the philosophic movement of pragmatism. "The Thirteen Pragmatisms" is an exercise in logical analysis and is a challenge to a group of philosophers who have taken on a collective name to show how their apparent diversities are to be reconciled. Few philosophers would call themselves orthodox followers of this train of thought, so these essays can be studied without a sense of personal injury that deadens the critical faculty and obscures insight. In The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays, logical technique is on display: the author's keenness in spotting double meanings and his ability to rephrase them in univalent form. This collection of essays should afford students of philosophy a set of cases in which they need not take sides but which give them an analytical method they can practice themselves on contemporary issues. The fact that these essays are on the whole critical gives them a heuristic value that dogmatic or expository essays would not have

Reflections on Human Nature

Originally published in 1961. Arthur O. Lovejoy, beginning with his book The Great Chain of Being, helped usher in the discipline of the History of Ideas in America. In Reflections on Human Nature, Lovejoy devotes particular attention to influential figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Bishop Butler, and Mandeville, tracing developments and changes in the concept of human nature through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He also discusses the theory of human nature held by the founders of the American Constitution, giving special attention to James Madison and the "Federalist Papers.

Essays in the History of Ideas

Originally published in 1948. In the first essay of this collection, Lovejoy reflects on the nature, methods, and difficulties of the historiography of ideas. He maps out recurring phenomena in the history of ideas, which the essays illustrate. One phenomenon is the presence and influence of the same presuppositions or other operative "ideas" in very diverse provinces of thought and in different periods. Another is the role of semantic transitions and confusions, of shifts and of ambiguities in the meanings of terms, in the history of thought and taste. A third phenomenon is the internal tensions or waverings in the mind of almost every individual writer—sometimes discernible even in a single writing or on a single page—arising from conflicting ideas or incongruous propensities of feeling or taste to which the writer is susceptible. These essays do not contribute to metaphysical and epistemological questions; they are primarily historical

Big data, small concepts:Histosophy as an approach to longue-durée history

In this essay, we sketch out a method, histosophy, which makes possible the study of intellectual history and conceptual genealogy both in depth and over long periods of time. Histosophy uses digital tools to survey ‘large issues within small compasses.’ A genealogy of signifiers, it considers metonymic parts of a problem in order to contribute precisely and coherently to a larger perspective. We outline the theoretical contours of our approach. We exemplify how it works in practice by looking at the signifier ‘esprit de corps’, the study of which is presented in detail in the histosophical book The Genealogy of Esprit de Corps(Edinburgh University Press, 2019). The phrase ‘esprit de corps’ has been widely used since the eighteenth century in different discourses (political, military, sociological, etc.), but it is sufficiently limited that its genealogy can be traced across centuries and nations with precision, coherence, clarity, and with the help of automated search engines. By contrast, related but bigger concepts like freedom, individualism or solidarity are part of dozens of disparate and fuzzy discourses, so often uttered that the analysis of modern uses is problematic. The histosophical methodology is applicable in six discrete stages, here outlined

Toward a Temporal Theory of Language

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67931/2/10.1177_007542429702500404.pd