New Books in Intellectual History
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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3326
Craig Martin, “Subverting Aristotle: Religion, ...
Craig Martin‘s new book carefully traces religious arguments for and against Aristotelianism from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. Based on a close reading of a staggering array of primary sources, Subverting Aristotle: Religion,
67 min
3327
Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (Uni...
Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Natural His...
68 min
3328
J. Matthias Determann, “Historiography in Saudi...
Saudi Arabia is, for most Westerners, a mysterious place. It’s home to one of the most conservative forms of Islam around and ruled by one of the least democratic regimes in the world. Yet it’s a great friend of the liberal, democratic Western powers,
56 min
3329
Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narc...
“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.” From this opening, Elizabeth Lunbeck‘s new book proceeds to offer a fascinating narrative of how this came to be,
69 min
3330
Hans Noel, “Political Ideologies and Political ...
Hans Noel is the author of Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Noel is an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University. He is also the co-author of The Party Decides: Presidential Nomi...
23 min
3331
Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860...
The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating w...
58 min
3332
Michael Saler, “As If: Modern Enchantment and t...
In As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford, 2012), historian Michael Saler explores the precursors of the current proliferation of digital virtual worlds. Saler challenges Max Weber’s analysis of modernity as th...
52 min
3333
Richard Weikart, “Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Purs...
For many years now, historians have wondered whether Hitler had any sort of consistent ideology. His writings are rambling and confusing. His speeches are full of plain lies. His “table talk” reflects a wandering,
53 min
3334
Donna-Lee Frieze, “Totally Unofficial: The Auto...
It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide. But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted their time and attention to other people and other things.
36 min
3335
Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Open Mind” (University o...
Jamie Cohen-Cole‘s new book explores the emergence of a discourse of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the “open mind” in the context of Cold War American politics, education, and society. The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human N...
66 min
3336
Stephen C. Neff’s Justice Among Nations: A Hist...
Stephen C. Neff‘s Justice Among Nations: A History of International Law (Harvard UP, 2014) is a book of breathtaking scope, telling the story of the development of international law from Ancient times to the present.
36 min
3337
Steven L. Jacobs, “Lemkin on Genocide” (Lexingt...
It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide. But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted their time and attention to other people and other things.
58 min
3338
Miranda Spieler, “Empire and Underworld: Captiv...
54 min
3339
Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. J...
Believe it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan (Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, as it happens) in 2004. I was sitting there minding my own business when I ...
66 min
3340
Josef Stern, “The Matter and Form of Maimonides...
The medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides’ most famous work, The Guide of the Perplexed, has been interpreted variously as an attempt to reconcile reason and religion, as a guide to philosophers on ruling the community while concealing the truth,
68 min
3341
Colette Colligan, “A Publisher’s Paradise: Expa...
From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books, including many of a sexually explicit, pornographic nature. Colette Colligan‘s new book,
57 min
3342
Timothy Shenk, “Maurice Dobb: Political Economi...
The British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb is now largely forgotten. That’s too bad for a number of reasons. He was a brilliant thinker who wrote some of the most insightful analyses of the development and workings of capitalism around.
61 min
3343
Sarah Pessin, “Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire...
Neoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of “invisible floating Kansas” in which spatiotemporal talk isn’t really about spa...
74 min
3344
Nitzan Lebovic, “The Philosophy of Life and Dea...
Thomas Mann referred to Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) as a “criminal philosopher,” a “Pan-Germanist,” “an irrationalist,” a “Tarzan philosopher,” “a cultural pessimist… the voice of the world’s downfall.” Yet, Walter Benjamin urged his friend Gershom Schol...
70 min
3345
David N. Livingstone, “Adam’s Ancestors: Race, ...
A report to the General Assembly of Scottish Presbyterians of 1923 contains the following passage: “God placed the people of this world in families, and history which is the narrative of His providence tells us that when kingdoms are divided against th...
70 min
3346
Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?: D...
In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected in Was Hitler a Darwinian?
60 min
3347
Samuel Moyn, “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in ...
The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press 2010) takes the reader on a sweeping journey through the history of international law from the ancient world to the present in search for an answer to the question: where did human righ...
61 min
3348
Leora Batnitzky, “How Judaism Became a Religion...
From her first book about the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, Leora Batnitzky has been heralded as a rising star in contemporary Jewish thought and the philosophy of religion. Batnitzky, a professor of Jewish studies and chair of the Department of...
32 min
3349
Yuval Levin, “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, T...
If you went to college in the United States and took a Western Civ class, you’ve probably read at least a bit of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791).
59 min
3350
Jeffrey Church, “Infinite Autonomy: The Divided...
Jeffrey Church is the author of Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche (Penn State Press 2012). The book won the Best First Book Award from the Political Theory Section of the American...
26 min