Browse Items (123 total)
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The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays
A collection of essays published during the Weimar Republic that reflect on the contemporary state of reason and society as expressed in the material products of modern mass capitalism, most notebly in dance revues, photography, and the literary…
Tags: critical theory, materialism, media, modernity
"Art and Democracy"
Interprets an “increasingly visible weariness and distrust towards democracy” and proposes the construction of contemporary “Academies of Art” to aid in the education of “mature” citizens. Lachenmann interpolates his remarks into two discourses.…
Tags: aesthetic, citizenship, contemporary, destruction, disciplines, Lachenmann, music, philosophy, Schiller
Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies (ESSSS)
The ESSSS project, directed by Jane Landers and administered at Vanderbilt University, digitally preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. The ESSSS Digital Archive…
Tags: In-between, Latin America, modernity, religion, slavery
The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance
Lange’s lengthy history contains a useful overview of materialist authors from Lucretius to Holbach, along with some (biased) discussion of the Kantian and post-Kantian reaction against materialist thought. Although Lange is sympathetic to many forms…
The Enlightenment legacy is under siege. Defend it.
Linker defines Enlightenment legacies as "individualism, international commerce and trade, moral cosmopolitanism, freedom of the press and a culture of publicity, technological modernity, the valorization of expertise" and defends them against…
Tags: economics, enlightenment, globalization, modernity, politics, upheavals
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
The Essay marks an important moment in the prehistory of empirical psychology. Locke seeks to explain how we come to have certain mental states (“ideas”) while doggedly avoiding metaphysical speculation of the sort found in Descartes’s work. As a…
The Paradox of the Automaton: From Diderot to Cybernetics
A concise and provocative history of the idea of automata from Diderot to the present. She argues that the automaton is the cornerstone of modern knowledge and its powers.
Tags: disciplines, materialism, mechanism, philosophy, physics, science
The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Laws
Jenny Martinez argues that the foundation of the movement that we know today as human rights was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.
Tags: abolitionism, human rights, In-between, modernity, Slave trade
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Less a single coherent argument than a series of meditations, this book introduces many of the concepts that would become foundational to Marxist thought and critical theory, more generally, including alienation, exploitation, and dialectical…
L’invention de la catastrophe au xviiie siècle: du châtiment au désastre naturel
In the spirit of Starobinski's L'invention de la liberté, 1700-1789, essays in this edited volume consider the invention of "catastrophe" in the eighteenth century, i.e. the idea of catastrophe as a natural event and an aesthetic object was born in…
Tags: 18th century, catastrophe, disciplines, enlightenment, Europe, risk, upheavals
Nature: Course Notes from the College de France
Merleau-Ponty, one of the greatest 20th Century thinkers of perception, the body, and its operation in the natural world, gives a course on the history of nature and its relationship with human freedom and thinking. These are notes on the course…
Tags: disciplines, ethics, freedom, materialisms, mechanism, organism, perception, philosophy, physics, physiology, science
The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization
Written over the scope of 20 years of research, Mignolo argues that European colonizers used writing technologies (like the alphabet) as a weapon of war in Mesoamerica, with subsequent political and cultural projects in the Enlightenment serving to…
Tags: colonialism, In-between, Latin America, literacy, modernity
A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination
Miller links the French Revolution and the violence of the Terror to eighteenth-century understandings of the natural world (for example, earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountains) by examining the rhetoric and writings of the revolutionaries themselves.…
Hiroshima: Three Witnesses
Hiroshima: Three Witnesses is a translation of “atomic bomb literature,” created by three Japanese authors Ota Yōko, Hara Tamiki, and Toge Sankichi, all of whom survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945. As both a witness and a writer,…
Tags: art, catastrophe, culture, destruction, landscape, science, social reorganization, upheavals
Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence
"A fractured meditation on the incompleteness and inadequacy of each possible response to collective atrocities," is how the author of this work describes what she has written, and it is an apt description. It is a beautiful book, written by a…
This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason
To date, the most complete, well-researched, and historically sound study on the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake – considered one of the most transformative "natural" disasters in history. Explores the urban, social, and political landscape of Lisbon (and…
Air Apparent
Air Apparent shows how the weather map has taken on a variety of forms throughout the last four centuries––moving from a hand-eye executed graphic object to a computer-printed and later digitally displayed graphic––by tracing “graphical code” across…
Tags: climate, climate change, weather
Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
Written from a Marxist perspective, this book examines the emergence of capitalist modernity in terms of the extraction of natural resources. It analyzes the ways in which the Enlightenment ideology of history as progress depends on reducing "Nature"…
Tags: Anthropocene, capitalism, climate, ecology, materialism
Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
A by-now classic and deeply influential critique of the foundational assumptions of ecocriticism (and strands of Romantic literature), Morton’s book issues a challenge to the idea of Nature as a transcendental term—and to the fantasy of a…
Tags: aesthetic, ecocritique, ecology, environment, ethics, In-between, Romanticism
Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783
This text surveys the British Caribbean from 1624 through the calamitous hurricane season of 1780. Mulcahy examines the various natural hazards that the region was prone to, including food shortages and disease, but focuses his attention on…
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