picasso13

Side by side with the question of animals and history are the question of ethical inclusion in general, and the conception of the ethical position of animals in particular. Historian Gary David Shaw’s idea of “we” as a limiting principle in which those writing history decide which entities are ‘”…enough like us to count’” mirrors […]

When introducing deep history, Daniel Lord Small discussed two ideas that I see as particularly fertile both intellectually and in terms of cultural perspective.  The first is that of a unique, new interdisciplinarity that would link “physical and life sciences” to social sciences and the humanities (Small 2008, 9).  Considering history through the ‘”reciprocally creative […]

“As Holtmaat and Naber state in Women’s Human Rights and Culture: From Deadlock to Dialogue, the concept of the fundamental equality of all humans, regardless of their categorization related to their unique characteristics, in the service of  universalist ideals, cannot be statically applied through the exact same treatment of all individuals”  (Schwartz 2013, 4). As I […]

Technically, class-consciousness has not been conceived of as psychological consciousness.  It has been separated from ‘the empirically given, and from the psychologically describable and explicable ideas that men form about their situation in life’, and has been seen rather as a possible set of reactions people might have to discovering the implications of the position […]

“Foucault…provided detailed accounts of the lineages of both Western institutions and subjectivity. These genealogical accounts are carried out in a language and set of concepts that recognize themselves to be within the lineage that they describe;  the descriptive accounts have a decentering effect on the values and  forms of knowledge that give the lineage its […]

“Once human behavior is seen as…symbolic action—action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music…– the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together loses sense…The thing to ask is what their import is…” (Geertz, “Thick Description,” […]

“Once human behavior is seen as…symbolic action—action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music…– the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together loses sense…The thing to ask is what their import is…” (Geertz, “Thick Description,” […]

Following my critical analysis of Weinberger’s use of the term ‘expert’ in my last post, I now consider his discussion on the fluidity and interactivity of the internet. I find these concepts making a deep impression on me though leading to more mixed conclusions about the nature of books versus the internet than those of […]

Example of Exquisite Corpse The Online Oxford English Dictionary defines expertise as: “Expert skill or knowledge in a particular field: ‘technical expertise’. An expert, accordingly is, “A person who is very knowledgeable about or skilful in a particular area.” The origin of the word originally flows from the past participle of the Latin verb meaning […]

Historical Awareness and the Historical Continuum In The Pursuit of History, John Tosh describes historical awareness as a sense of history that avoids some of the interpretive distortions to historical events, like blatant nationalism, that personal or social memory and its justifications often produce. According to Tosh, the three constitutive elements of such awareness are: […]