#intellectual history

[racefortheironthrone]

Was Catharism an actual theological position or just a catchall for inquisitors?

Paging @apocrypals...

Catharism was a gnostic tradition from the south of France that posited the existence of two gods - an evil god (identified with the God of the Old Testament) who had created the fallen material world of sin and death and had trapped humanity into an endless cycle of suffering caused by our angelic natures stuffed into material bodies; and a good god (identified with Jesus Christ of the New Testament) who had created all things of the spirit and the soul, and who had sacrificed Himself to remind us of our true natures.

As you might imagine, this is already wildly heretical in the eyes of the Catholic Church. But it gets worse, because the Cathars basically invented a new sacrament of consolamentum - a deathbed baptism that would spiritually purify the dying soul and allow them to transcend the cycle of rebirth and suffering and unify with the Godhead, which rather trumps the need for the Catholic Church's traditional structure of confession and absolution.

[newhistorybooks]

"Daut brings alive Haiti's fascinating intellectual history and shows brilliantly how Haitian thinkers shaped the culture and politics of their own country even as they transformed broader understandings of race, revolution, and the writing of history. This powerful and necessary book challenges us to think differently about the global history of thought."

[ethicopoliticolit]

Almost all the media coverage of AIDS has been aimed at the heterosexual groups now minimally at risk, as if the high-risk groups were not part of the audience. And in a sense, as Watney suggests, they’re not. The media targets “an imaginary national family unit which is both white and heterosexual” (p. 43). This doesn’t mean that most TV viewers in Europe and America are *not* white and heterosexual and part of a family. It does, however, mean, as Stuart Hall argues, that representation is very different from reflection: “It implies the active work of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shaping: not merely the transmitting of already-existing meaning, but the more active labour of *making things mean*” (quoted p. 124). TV doesn't make the family, but it makes the family *mean* in a certain way. That is, it makes an exceptionally sharp distinction between the family as a biological unit and as a cultural identity, and it does this by teaching us the attributes and attitudes by which people who thought they were already in a family actually only *begin to qualify* as belonging to a family. The great power of the media, and especially of television, is, as Watney writes, “its capacity to manufacture subjectivity itself” (p. 125), and in so doing to dictate the shape of an identity. The “general public” is at once an ideological construct and a moral prescription. Furthermore, the definition of the family *as an identity* is, inherently, an exclusionary process, and the cultural product has no obligation whatsoever to coincide exactly with its natural referent. Thus the family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister.

—Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987)

[mswyrr]

This is really excellent. It is basically a cultural and intellectual history of the concept where the author emphasizes the diversity of ways people have understood and used it.

The book was published as a historical work, though the author is a philosopher- but that speaks to how beautifully she's traced the historical change over time in how the concept has been articulated and used.

[warm-fuzzies-and-hot-anxiety]

Being in intellectual history and trying to get anything published is like, this is great but it’s too philosophical! Or, this is interesting but what about [insert random topic that is Not Relevant in any discernible way]

[persianatpenn]

"Hoist with His Own Petard": a Tragic Irony of Seyyed Nasr's Life

In 1974 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a 41 years old scholar and thinker, a descendant of the Prophet, and a representative of the highest echelon of Iranian intellectual elite, established the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Tehran: (انجمن شاهنشاهی فلسفه ایران).

In the first issue of the academy’s journal “جاویدان خرد”, (literally “Eternal Wisdom” or relying on context “Sophia Perennis”) he announced that the goal of the Academy is the revival of the traditional intellectual life of Islamic Persia.

Indeed, in highly westernized intellectual climate during Pahlavi’s regime where even the Western name فلسفه (philosophy) instead of Persian Arabic حكمة (wisdom) was offered for Academy, Nasr’s academic interests in Islamic philosophy and Islamic Science was very timely. When he was appointed to Tehran University at the Faculty of Letters and Humanities (دانشكده ادبيات و علوم انساني) it was completely dominated by western understanding of humanities.

His teaching of Islamic Philosophy and Islamic Sciences within the Tehran university in addition to his translations of Western Traditionalists (who admired Islam for preserving the “Tradition”) like Guenon in "Crise du monde moderne" (“Crisis of the modern world”) multiplied by publishing of classical texts of Islamic Philosophy through the academy plus holding meetings and conferences inviting people, like Ayatollah Mortada Mottahari and Ayatollah Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani with similar thoughts on the necessity of revival the classical Islamic intellectual traditions due to the danger of Pahlavi’s galloping Westernization lead to an obviously expected result – the growth of interest in Islamic philosophy contributed to the growth of interest in Islam in general among Iranian students.

Nasr's contributions to the revival of Islamic traditional intellectual life in Iran eventually played a cruel joke on him. While he spoke out against modernity in his lectures, he also undermined the Pahlavi regime's agenda. However, the most intricate and thorny matter was Nasr's personal association with the Shah's family, which eventually became his biggest liability. As more of his followers and students began to agree with him, the more they started scrutinizing his personal connections, which led to accusations of hypocrisy and treachery. These criticisms and accusations of hypocrisy ultimately caused Nasr to stay abroad during the Islamic Revolution and eventually never return…

(A table of contents from the first issue of Nasr's journal, containing predominantly articles about philosophy and science of Islamic Persia) سرگیٔی

[zenosanalytic]

While the term "crisis actor" became popular in the US, it needs to be understood that Israel's been claiming Palestinians "fake", "make up", or "exaggerate" deaths and injuries resulting from Israeli violence for decades(sometimes, even, that they do the attacks THEMSELVES to frame Israel); That, like pretty much ALL political movements these days, Israel's Conservatives are connected and in communication with fellow-travelers(meaning: "others who think like them", i.e., "other conservatives") in other countries; and that they are not unique in doing this. Oppressive governments have USUALLY, throughout history, denied the suffering of those they oppress(see: the Armenian Genocide).

That's all just to say that it's very unlikely Jones came up with the idea of "Crisis Actors" all on his own, even IF he's the one who coined/popularized the term. To be clear I'm NOT saying Israel "taught him" this or "is responsible" for HIS arguments in any sense, but I would not be surprised if he was somehow inspired by this sort of historical propaganda, or even by anti-palestinian propaganda in this vein he'd come across in his life.

Something unremittingly bleak about a goddamn country starting "crisis actor" conspiracy theories to deny their crimes. A term invented to deny the deaths of children at Sandy Hook in 2012 is now used to deny the deaths of children in Gaza in 2023.

As the community note says, this isn't a crisis actor. This is a guy who posts on Instagram. A influencer who posts videos online of breaking events...is seen at a lot of breaking events. To Israel, this is a sign of a conspiracy. In fact, some of those images aren't even him, or aren't even related to Palestine at all; one image included in other posts targeting Saleh Aljafarawi is a Halloween costume from Thailand. That article says "pro-Israeli accounts" tweeted this, but it's the literal, official Twitter account of Israel posting this shit, next to their comedy sketches that somehow make trans people the punchline bc fascists only have one joke the whole world wide I guess

Like. It's not new for a government to deny the reality of its atrocities. It is new for that government to outright use a conspiracy theory term devised by Alex fucking Jones, or to, when called on doing so, defend it as a "meme" (also bizarre to see hardcore Zionists use a term crafted for especially antisemitic conspiracy theories). Everything rancid about the world in 2023 congealed into a single tweet, right here

[trendynewsnow]

The Rise and Fall of Henri Bergson: A Biography of a Philosophical Sensation

HERALD OF A RESTLESS WORLD: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People By Emily Herring In the early 20th century, Henri Bergson emerged as a philosophical sensation, capturing the attention of the literary and intellectual elite, particularly in New York City. The New York Times frequently featured him, dubbing him “the favorite philosopher of the salons.” His visits to the United States…

[racefortheironthrone]

You've mentioned before that the lowest rung of the nobility tended to fight the hardest against extending the privileges of classes lower than them because they feared that it would erode their own privileges. Could fascism and other reactionary movements enjoying their greatest support among small rural landowners and the urban middle class be seen as a modern version of this?

There is a particular form of ressentiment that is unique to the middling classes, who envy and resent those above them for their wealth, privilege, and power and simultaneously hate and fear those below them out of a belief that the lower orders will take the small amounts of wealth, privilege, and power that the middling classes have managed to acquire through crime, revolution, or the welfare state.

And it's been at the core of reactionary politics since Putney and the Enlightenment. As I've written about before, the lowest-ranked nobles were particularly squeezed by the Price Revolution and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and a lot of the "noblesse d'epee" clung fiercely to their feudal privileges (and deeply resented new money bourgeois buying their way into the "noblesse de robe") because those feudal privileges were the only things that distinguished them from peasants.

And likewise, during the 19th and 20th century, a lot of small farmers and shopkeeps and small businessmen who were being squeezed by the Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism were persuaded by anti-Enlightenment reactionary propaganda that the true threat to their clinging-on-to-respectability-by-their-fingernails material standards of living was Enlightenment liberals, Jacobin radicals, and later socialists and Jews - hence why Baubel and Marx called anti-semitism the "socialism of fools."

And it never really went away...

[newhistorybooks]

“Rarely does a book fundamentally alter our understanding of a subject. Melvin Rogers’s The Darkened Light of Faith is one such book. Grand and profound, it not only provides insights about the people and ideas it examines, but also offers wisdom about how we ought to live together. The care and brilliance with which Rogers treats African American political thought is breathtaking and inspiring. This will be a foundational book for as long as the world turns.”

[principleofplenitude]

There are many myths about why aging is particularly fraught in this country, each of which Chappel dismantles in turn. The first to fall is the prelapsarian vision of a once-harmonious aging process that industrialization disrupted: that “once upon a time” intergenerational homes were the norm, and those who made it to old age were cared for with respect by family. But intergenerational households were actually a minority in the United States in the nineteenth century. Farmers, Chappel acknowledges, typically had a grown child or two “stick around in the hope of inheritance.” But that means many older people—who were still doing some farm labor—had a child living with them, not that most children had a parent living with them. Given the high birth rates of the era, there were “fewer older relatives to go around, and more grown children to choose from.” And families today do more care for their elders than families used to, he writes, because modern medicine has enabled people to live longer with age-related disability than they used to.

—"The True Threat to American Retirement" from New Republic

[jovialbasementbouquetblr]

2008: Daoism and Post Cold War Chinese Diplomacy

How much do culture and traditions influence policy?  Is culture simply the water in which we (the fish) swim without being much aware of the water (culture).  Do we recognize historical circumstances as new variations on an old theme?  When Americans see a rising power and consider our military readiness are we worrying about a new “Pearl Harbor” attack? What are the relative weights of…

[zenosanalytic]

I can answer that. There is a Short-Term answer, and a Long-Term answer.

Short-Term: The Republican Party has barely ever won the popular vote in US Presidential elections over the last 40 years, their ability to wield power in US politics increasingly rest upon their willingness to misuse particular aspects of the US Constitutional order and the refusal of their fellow elites to stop and punish this misuse, their policies are deeply harmful and widely unpopular which is leading them to slowly lose their hold on the few genuinely populated states they have an edge in and which they NEED to remain nationally competitive and politically relevant, and so they want to do away with elections before that happens.

Long-Term: Because Conservatism, as a movement, is opposed to democracy. It was founded in direct opposition to the democratic revolutions of the Enlightenment, with the stated goal of protecting aristocratic rule where it still maintained and re-establishing it where it had fallen, and the Republican Party has become a through-going Conservative political party, largely through the alliance of conservative business-Republicans and fascist "Dixiecrats" forged by Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy through the 70s to the 90s.

The "War on Crime" and "War on Drugs" that dominated US politics in that era were a big part of this, euphemistic wars waged by Conservative Republicans through the US Government itself on the US's own Black communities and citizens, and they are the primary reason why the US has more of its population in prison than pretty much any other State on the planet, and why US cops are as awful as they are. They also encouraged a hatred for democratic norms and an admiration for authoritarianism within the Republican electorate, and a personal VISCERAL hatred of leftists and liberals which would find expression in Newt Gingrich's saboteurial Congressional leadership and purge of the last few liberals left in the Republican party in the mid to late 90s.

Through the "War on Terror" of the Cheney/Bush II administration disdain for democracy -both its procedural aspects in elections and its legal/ethical aspects in human rights and civil society - was further promoted among Republicans with jingoistic talk of an ~Imperial~ United States, the institutionalization of torture(explicitly prohibited by the US Constitution, and a rabidly-pursued goal of the Republican party since the 70s), the promotion of election-denying conspiracy theories about Dems "busing black voters" into rural(spcl southern) towns and lining up ~illegal immigrants~ to vote disguised as dead citizens, and the ever-increasing legal immunities granted to administrative, judicial, police, and prosecutorial officials by Republican judicial rulings.

Donald Trump, as the first Republican to run EXPLICITLY and OPENLY on tyranny, is merely the first charlatan among them unscrupulous and unpatriotic enough to acknowledge what Republican politicians have been winking and nudging at for the last 50 years, at least, for his own aggrandizement.

Why are we living through a stupider version of the prequels

Why is the unrealistic part of the prequels now just that Palpatine didn't actually need to be nearly that smart or machiavellian or charismatic or even a lie about his intentions at all

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“DARWIN VIEWED AS PROGRESSIVE FORCE,” Montreal Gazette. January 11, 1933. Page 11. --- Profound and Lasting Effect of Work Shown by Professor Lloyd ---- INFLUENCE ON THOUGHT ---- Application of Idea of Evolution in Many Fields Held As Example at St. James Literary Society ---- The profound and lasting effect of Charles Darwin's work on human thought in general was discussed last night by Professor F. E. Lloyd, F.R.S.C., Macdonald professor of botany at McGill University, before the St. James Literary Society. Professor Lloyd's paper was on the life of Darwin, and he sought to show the human personality behind the ideas which revolutionized scientific and philosophic thought in the nineteenth century, but as an incident to that paper he demonstrated the widespread effect of the publication of the Origin of Species on public thinking. 

Professor Lloyd adopted the view of Grant Allen that, whether Darwin had appeared or not, the movement of thought would still have progressed in the general direction that it did. Both the idea of evolution and the idea of natural selection had been pronounced in vague form many centuries before Darwin, but they were not well supported by facts. Fundamentally there was nothing new in Darwin's own theory. 

What, then, did he do? the speaker asked. Again adopting the view of Grant Allen, Professor Lloyd said that he "acted the part of an immense and powerful accelerating agency which gained for us at least fifty years of progress." 

"The sequelae of Darwin's work," he added, "can be compared only with those of Copernicus, who destroyed the geocentric view of the universe. The earth, important as it seems to us who live on it, with our wars and peace, such as it is, with our strivings and bafflements, fears and hopes, is but a dust fleck in the universe. After Darwin, man is no longer a superior lord of creation, but is a creature among creatures. There are left to him humility and aspiration and curiosity. His powers of speech, acquired slowly from increasingly articulate ancestors, have engendered thought and reflection which in exceptional cases have conferred power of accomplishment in analyzing his surroundings and in bending them to his own ends, often bad and anti-social, sometimes good. With God-like capacities he has still far to go to become God-like. And this revaluation of man came like an avalanche. The whole world was agog.

 "But the net result was that. generally speaking, evolution as principle, together with a doctrine of natural selection and survival of the fittest, renamed Darwinism, became accepted as a working hypothesis by the thoughtful and swallowed holus bolus by many. This result is in part traceable to the acceptance of the laissez faire doctrine in the field of economies as early as 1865, according to which, in the field of competition. the survivor was always the fittest and the best. 

TERM OF "EVOLUTION." "So far, indeed, did Darwinism penetrate human thought that nothing occurred except by evolution, and the word itself has been used to summate the development even of man’s handiwork as, for example, the 'evolution' of the bicycle, airplane, or what you will. 

"Aside from this superficial application of terminology, the principle or descent has been applied to natural phenomena, from the evolution of the solar system, and in the last term, to the evolution of the cosmos, to the evolution of social customs and everything else between and beyond. In a word. Darwin's method put a tool into the hand of every worker searching for fundamental principles.

John T. Farmer, president of the society, was in the chair. A spirited discussion followed the presentation of the paper, among those participating being Professor H. B. Fantham, new head of the department or zoology at McGill University.

[ccuniculusmolestus]

Bunny Corcoran be like “I know a spot” and then scams you with a 300$ bill in an expensive restaurant

[racefortheironthrone]

My class had to learn the song "Sacré Charlemagne" for recital so I really believed for a longtime the song was way more prevalent and common knowledge on par with Frère Jacques or Alouette. Anyhow wondering if you concur with the main refrain about Charlemagne inviting school?

So the Carolingian Renaissance and the educational reforms instituted by Alcuin of York were quite real. Now, I wouldn't describe Charlesmagne as the "inventor" of school (i wouldn't even call Alcuin the inventor either, but rather the popularizer of ideas that had come to York via Theodore of Tarsus and the monastic traditions of Ireland), but he was Alcuin's patron.

While Alcuin provided the ideas, Charlesmagne used his political power as King and Emperor to make the Seven Liberal Arts mandatory in the "palatial schools" of the Holy Roman Empire, and then to require the Church to establish free schools in every cathedral and monestary in the Empire.

This wasn't the same thing as universal education (these schools only ever taught a small percent of the population), but it did lead to the emergence of a network of church schools who produced enough literate people to power the Carolingian Renaissance and staff the Carolingian bureaucracy, found the first medieval universities, and (a few hundred years later) found the intellectual movement of scholasticism, by which Western Europe rediscovered neo-Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy by way of Greek, Jewish, and Muslim scholars.