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The liminality of man: astronomy and the birth of anthropology in the eighteenth century
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia, 2010)
This essay argues that modern cultural anthropology is a product of early-modern
astronomical science. Analyzing a variety of texts from the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, this text shows how the
conceptual ...
The enlightenment on trial: autonomy, the state and public sphere in eighteenth-century Prussia
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia, 2006)
Prussia’s Edict on Religion of 1788 forbade sermons that undermined
popular belief in the Holy Trinity and the Bible. Historians have evaluated
this edict with respect to the German Enlightenment’s defense of autonomy:
the ...
Clock watchers and stargazers: on time discipline in early-modern Berlin
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia, 2006)
This essay contests the view that humanity’s centuries-long experience with
clocks is marked by a steady increase in time awareness that culminated in
the modern compulsion known as “time discipline”. It argues, in ...
Conscience and the rhetoric of freedom: Fichte's reaction to the edict on religion
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia, 2008)
This essay explores Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s supposedly critical reaction to Prussia’s Edict on Religion of 1788. The word “supposed” is acceptable here, because in the course of his career, Fichte actually took both sides ...
Germans in space: astronomy and anthropologie in the eighteenth century
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia, 2006)
Physical orientation was a central philosophical problem for German thinkers in the late eighteenth century. Moses Mendelssohn, for instance, pondered in Morgenstunden, o Vorlesungen uber das Daseyn Gotten (1785) whether ...
The renaissance and the round ball: spheres, globes and the early modern spatial imagination
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia, 2013)
The contemporary literature on the Renaissance invention of terrestrial globes is fixated on the images that globemakers drew, expending great energy in determining how “correct” they were. This essay, in contrast, understands ...
Human space: the rise of Euclidism and the construction of an early-modern world, 1400-1800
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia, 2011)
This essay argues that intellectual historians have overlooked the significance of the return of Euclid’s geometric thought to early-modern Europe. Looking at the period between 1400 and 1800, this essay shows how geometric ...
Spanning the poles: spatial thought and the global backdrop to our globalizad world, 1450-1850
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia, 2012)
This essay illuminates the historical context of the contemporary language
of globalization. It argues that the key concepts of the “global” began in
ancient Greek thought about unseen space, before being reified through ...
Clock watchers and stargazers: Berlin's clocks between science, state and the public sphere at the eighteenth century's end
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia, 2003)
This article argues that modern time discipline was a product of the eighteenth-century. Whereas other works have emphasized the integration of time through nineteenth-century railway networks, this article holds that ...
Strangers to the world: astronomy and the birth of anthropology in the eighteenth century
(Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Historia, 2011)
An important strain in the literature on the rise of anthropological thought in
the early-modern world identifies anthropological thought’s biggest insight
as the ascription of unity to the human species via the encounter ...