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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3351
Darrin M. McMahon, “Divine Fury: A History of G...
Here’s an odd thing: there really haven’t been any universally-acclaimed geniuses since Einstein. At least I can’t think of any. Really smart people, yes. But geniuses per se, no. It seems Einstein was such a genius that he destroyed the entire concept...
69 min
3352
Molly Worthen, “Apostles of Reason: The Crisis ...
Molly Worthen, author most recently of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the ideas that moved a variety of evangelicals in America over the last seventy...
59 min
3353
Vincent Geoghegan, “Socialism and Religion: Roa...
“Christianity and socialism go together like fire and water,” remarked August Bebel, Germany’s leading socialist, in 1874. The anticlerical violence of revolutions in Mexico, Russia, and Spain in the early twentieth century appears to confirm his verdi...
73 min
3354
Todd H. Weir, “Monism: Science, Philosophy, Rel...
I always learn something when I interview authors, but in this chat with Todd H. Weir I learned something startling: I’m a monist. What is more, you may be a monist too and not even know it. Do you believe that there is really only one kind of stuff an...
51 min
3355
Philip Mirowski, “Never Let A Serious Crisis Go...
Philip Mirowski is author of Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso Books 2013). Mirowski is the Carl Koch Chair of Economics and the History of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
27 min
3356
Mohammed Rustom, “The Triumph of Mercy: Philoso...
What is the relationship between philosophy, mysticism, and scripture in the Islamic tradition? Mohammed Rustom, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Carleton University, has been thinking about this question for years.
61 min
3357
Marga Vicedo, “The Nature and Nurture of Love” ...
Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emotional development. In Marga Vicedo,
71 min
3358
Steven Usitalo, “The Invention of Mikhail Lomon...
Mikhail Lomonosov is a well known Russian figure. As poet, geographer, and physicist, Lomonosov enjoyed access to the best resources that 18th century Russia had to offer. As a result, his contributions to Russian arts and sciences were immeasurable.
58 min
3359
W. Caleb McDaniel, “The Problem of Democracy in...
How could members of a movement committed to cosmopolitanism accommodate nationalism? How could men and women committed to non-resistance reconcile themselves to politics when the authority of even democratic polities depended ultimately upon the threa...
62 min
3360
Robert Horwitz, “America’s Right: Anti-Establis...
Robert Horwitz is the author of America’s Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party (Polity, 2013). Horwitz is professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego.
24 min
3361
Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on ...
In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of professional and public engagements with science and techno...
69 min
3362
Michael J. Kramer, “The Republic of Rock: Music...
74 min
3363
Christopher Hookway, “The Pragmatic Maxim: Essa...
Charles Sanders Peirce was the founder of the philosophical tradition known as pragmatism. He is also the proponent of a distinctive variety of pragmatism that has at its core a logical rule that has come to be known as “the pragmatic maxim.
64 min
3364
Drew Maciag, “Edmund Burke in America: The Cont...
Drew Maciag, author of Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2013) spoke with Ray Haberski about the intellectual challenges Burke raised in a time of democratic revolutions and th...
58 min
3365
John E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign.
49 min
3366
Daniel Stedman Jones, “Masters of the Universe:...
Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period...
25 min
3367
Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the...
Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Unive...
69 min
3368
Cheryl Misak, “The American Pragmatists” (Oxfor...
Pragmatism is American’s home-grown philosophy, but it is not widely understood. This partly is due to the fact that pragmatism emerged out of deep philosophical disputes among its earliest proponents: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James,
66 min
3369
Roslyn Weiss, “Philosophers in the Republic” (C...
Contemporary philosophers still wrestle mightily with Plato’s Republic. A common reading has it that in the Republic, Plato’s character Socrates defends a conception of justice according to which reason should rule the soul and philosophers should rule...
66 min
3370
Willem J. M. Levelt, “A History of Psycholingui...
The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, before Pim Levelt is himself a major player in psycholinguistics.
56 min
3371
Joel Isaac, “Working Knowledge: Making the Huma...
Imagine the academic world as a beach. The grains of sand making up the beach are the departments, institutes, and other bodies and related gatherings that make up the officially sanctioned parts of academic institutions and academic life.
71 min
3372
Patrick Allitt, “The Conservatives: Ideas and P...
Tired of politics? I grew tired of campaign commercials, especially once Mitt Romney identified Pennsylvania (where I live) as a battleground state. Now that the ad wars have ended and the ballots have been counted,
41 min
3373
Jill Gordon, “Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic...
It’s traditional in Plato scholarship to divide his dialogues in various ways. One common division is a temporal one that distinguishes among early, middle and late dialogues. Another is by content: there are the so-called erotic dialogues,
61 min
3374
Ulrich Plass, “Language and History in Theodor ...
In Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature (Routledge, 2007), Ulrich Plass makes the case for the importance and relevance of Adorno’s often forgotten and derided attempts at literary criticism.
58 min
3375
Whitney Bodman, “The Poetics of Iblis: Narrativ...
The Qur’an is filled with stories. It chronicles the lives of prophets, the stories of believers and non-believers, and lays out the creation of the cosmos. However, the Qur’an’s narrative qualities are often overlooked. Recently,
63 min