Tag: History

Travellers and Cosmographers Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology


Free Download Joan-Pau Rubiés, "Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology "
English | ISBN: 1138382361 | 2019 | 444 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
Joan-Pau Rubiés brings together here eleven studies published between 1991 and 2005 that illuminate the impact of travel writing on the transformation of early modern European culture. The new worlds that European navigation opened up at the turn of the 16th century elicited a great deal of curiosity and were the subject of a vast range of writings, much of them with an empirical basis, albeit often subtly fictionalized. In the context of intense literary and intellectual activity that characterized the Renaissance, the encounters generated by European colonial activities in fact produced a remarkable variety of images of human diversity. Some of these images were conditioned by the actual dynamics of cross-cultural encounters overseas, but many others were elaborated in Europe by cosmographers, historians and philosophers pursuing their own moral and political agendas. As the studies included here show, the combined effect was in the long term dramatic: interacting with the impact of humanism and of insurmountable religious divisions, travel writing decisively contributed to the transformation of European culture towards the concerns of the Enlightenment. The essays illuminate this process through a combination of general discussions and the contextual analysis of particular texts and debates, ranging form the earliest ethnographies produced by merchants travelling to Asia with Vasco da Gama, to the writings of Jesuit missionaries researching idolatry in India and China, or thinkers like Hugo Grotius seeking to explain the origin of the American Indians.

(more…)

Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia


Free Download Anne Murphy, "Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia"
English | 2015 | ISBN: 1138119261, 0415595975 | PDF | pages: 225 | 2.1 mb
Religious imaginary is a way of conceiving and structuring the world within the conceptual and imaginative traditions of the religious. Using religious imaginary as a reference, this book analyses temporal ideologies and expressions of historicity in South Asia in the early modern, pre-colonial and early colonial period.

(more…)

This Delta, This Land An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain


Free Download Mikko Saikku, "This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain"
English | 2005 | pages: 400 | ISBN: 0820326739, 0820325341 | PDF | 2,7 mb
This Delta, This Land is a comprehensive environmental history of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta―the first one to place the Delta’s economic and cultural history in an environmental context. The Delta, the floodplain between two great rivers in the northwestern corner of Mississippi, has changed enormously since the Civil War. Agriculture, lumbering, and flood-management schemes have transformed it beyond recognition―and beyond any prospects for a full recovery.

(more…)

Thinking about the Emotions A Philosophical History


Free Download Alix Cohen, "Thinking about the Emotions: A Philosophical History "
English | ISBN: 0198766858 | 2017 | 320 pages | EPUB | 636 KB
Philosophical reflection on the emotions has a long history stretching back to classical Greek thought, even though at times philosophers have marginalized or denigrated them in favour of reason. Fourteen leading philosophers here offer a broad survey of the development of our understanding of the emotions. The thinkers they discuss include Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James, Brentano, Stumpf, Scheler, Heidegger, and Sartre. Central issues include the taxonomy of the emotions; the distinction between emotions, passions, feelings and moods; the relation between the emotions and reason; the relationship between the self and the emotions. At a metaphilosophical level, the collection also raises issues about the value of historical study of the discipline, and what light it can shed on contemporary concerns. Thinking about the Emotions is a fascinating and illuminating collective study of how philosophers have grappled with this most intriguing part of our nature as beings who feel as well as think and act.

(more…)