Intellectual history in the context of "Samuel Moyn"

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⭐ Core Definition: Intellectual history

Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual history is that ideas do not develop in isolation from the thinkers who conceptualize and apply those ideas; thus the intellectual historian studies ideas in two contexts: (i) as abstract propositions for critical application; and (ii) in concrete terms of culture, life, and history.

As a field of intellectual enquiry, the history of ideas emerged from the European disciplines of Kulturgeschichte (Cultural History) and Geistesgeschichte (Intellectual History) from which historians might develop a global intellectual history that shows the parallels and the interrelations in the history of critical thinking in every society. Likewise, the history of reading, and the history of the book, about the material aspects of book production (design, manufacture, distribution) developed from the history of ideas.

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Intellectual history in the context of Literary theory

Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy, often witnessed within Western canon along with some postmodernist theory.

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Intellectual history in the context of Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian-born British economist and philosopher. He is known for his contributions to political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how prices communicate information is widely regarded as an important contribution to economics that led to him receiving the prize. He was a major contributor to the Austrian school of economics.

During his teenage years, Hayek fought in World War I. He later said this experience, coupled with his desire to help avoid the mistakes that led to the war, drew him into economics. He earned doctoral degrees in law in 1921 and political studies in 1923 from the University of Vienna. He subsequently lived and worked in Austria, Great Britain, the United States and Germany. He became a British national in 1938. He studied and taught at the London School of Economics and later at the University of Chicago, before returning to Europe late in life to teach at the Universities of Salzburg and Freiburg.

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Intellectual history in the context of Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah FRSL (/ˈæpiɑː/ AP-ee-ah; born 8 May 1954) is an English-American philosopher and writer who has written about political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Appiah is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he joined the faculty in 2014, and has been a Silver Professor since 2025. He was previously the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Appiah was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2022.

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Intellectual history in the context of History of human thought

The history of human thought covers the history of philosophy, history of science and history of political thought and spans across the history of humanity. The academic discipline studying it is called intellectual history.

Merlin Donald has claimed that human thought has progressed through three historic stages: the episodic, the mimetic, and the mythic stages, before reaching the current stage of theoretic thinking or culture. According to him the final transition occurred with the invention of science in Ancient Greece.

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Intellectual history in the context of Perry Anderson

Francis Rory Peregrine "Perry" Anderson (born 11 September 1938) is a British intellectual, political philosopher, historian and essayist. His work ranges across historical sociology, intellectual history, and cultural analysis. What unites Anderson's work is a preoccupation with Western Marxism.

Anderson is perhaps best known as the moving force behind the New Left Review. He is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Anderson has written many books, most recently Different Speeds, Same Furies: Powell, Proust and other Literary Forms and Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War. He is the brother of political scientist Benedict Anderson (1936–2015).

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Intellectual history in the context of Korean Confucianism

Korean Confucianism, or Korean Ruism, is the form of Confucianism that emerged and developed in Korea. One of the most substantial influences in Korean intellectual history was the introduction of Confucian thought as part of the cultural influence from China.

Today the legacy of Confucianism remains a fundamental part of Korean society, shaping the moral system, the way of life, social relations between old and young, high culture, and is the basis for much of the legal system. Confucianism in Korea is sometimes considered a pragmatic way of holding a nation together without the civil wars and internal dissent that were inherited from the Goryeo dynasty.

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Intellectual history in the context of Legal history

Legal history or the history of law is the study of how law has evolved and why it has changed. Legal history is closely connected to the development of civilizations and operates in the wider context of social history. Certain jurists and historians of legal process have seen legal history as the recording of the evolution of laws and the technical explanation of how these laws have evolved with the view of better understanding the origins of various legal concepts; some consider legal history a branch of intellectual history. Twentieth-century historians viewed legal history in a more contextualised manner – more in line with the thinking of social historians. They have looked at legal institutions as complex systems of rules, players and symbols and have seen these elements interact with society to change, adapt, resist or promote certain aspects of civil society. Such legal historians have tended to analyze case histories from the parameters of social-science inquiry, using statistical methods, analysing class distinctions among litigants, petitioners and other players in various legal processes. By analyzing case outcomes, transaction costs, and the number of settled cases, they have begun examining legal institutions, practices, procedures, and briefs offering a more nuanced picture of law and society than traditional legal studies of jurisprudence, case law and civil codes can achieve.

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Intellectual history in the context of Arie M. Dubnov

Arie M. Dubnov (Hebrew: אריה דובנוב; born 1977) is an Israeli-born, US-based essayist and historian. He specializes in modern Jewish and Israeli history, nationalism, the history of the British Empire in the Middle East, and intellectual history. He currently serves as the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University.

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