The Journal Of The History Of Ideas V2 No 4 October 1941

An international quarterly devoted to intellectual history.

As philosopher, historian, and teacher, John Herman Randall, Jr. is world-renowned and universally respected. In more than fifty years of study he has probed Western thought inclusively from the early Greeks, Aristotle and the Peripatetics through contemporary European and American philosophers. Currently, Professor Randall is conducting his scholarly research at the University of Padua and the Columbia-Padua Institute, a society which he helped found, devoted to the study of the Aristotelian tradition in the Renaissance. In his introduction to this volume, the editor characterizes Professor Randall's relation to the contemporary world of thought. "It can be said in truth that Randall never touched a subject-matter without making it luminous and intelligible, ...and has scorned no inquiry, no idea, no vision ever ardently pursued by men anywhere. The measure of our intellectual indebtedness to him will not soon be taken." This volume has provided the rare opportunity to present related work of several eminent scholars in different fields. Most of the essays were written to honor Professor Randall on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Using Randall's work as a point of departure, and reflecting its broad relevance, they treat subjects as diverse as religion, Greek philosophy, Kant's philosophy of science, Renaissance Aristotelianism, and British Empiricism. Included also are two tributes and memoirs—personal reminiscences of Randall's early career—and a valuable bibliography of Randall's published work.

Reading with John Clare argues that at the heart of contemporary biopolitical thinking is an insistent repression of poetry. By returning to the moment at which biopolitics is said to emerge simultaneously with romanticism, this project renews our understanding of the operations of contemporary politics and its relation to aesthetics across two centuries. Guyer focuses on a single, exemplary case: the poetry and autobiographical writing of the British poet John Clare (1793–1864). Reading Clare in combination with contemporary theories of biopolitics, Guyer reinterprets romanticism’s political legacies, specifically the belief that romanticism is a direct precursor to the violent nationalisms and redemptive environmentalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Guyer offers an alternative account of many of romanticism’s foundational concepts, like home, genius, creativity, and organicism. She shows that contemporary critical theories of biopolitics, despite repeatedly dismissing the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of power as a culpable ideology, emerge within the same rhetorical tradition as the romanticism they denounce. The book thus compels a rethinking of the biopolitical critique of poetry and an attendant reconsideration of romanticism and its concepts.

American Historical Explanations was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In this new edition of American Historical Explanations,Gene Wise expands his examination of historical thinking to include the latest work in American Studies, the new social history, ethnography, and psychohistory. Wise asserts that historians address their subjects through an intervening set of assumptions, or what he calls "explanation forms," similar to the philosophical paradigms that Thomas Kuhn has found in scientific inquiry. Through analysis of historical-cultural texts (including the work of V. L. Parrington, Lionel Trilling, and Perry Miller) he defines the forms used by several groups of American historians and traces the process by which an old form breaks down and is replaced by a new set of assumptions. Throughout, he aims to study the process of change in the history of ideas. His conclusions extend beyond historiography and will be useful for those interested in literature, social sciences, and the arts.