Nieuwe aanwinsten Geesteswetenschappen: okt - dec 2019

In der religiösen Kultur des Mittelalters spielten Visionen eine viel größere Rolle als in allen früheren oder folgenden Epochen. Sie traten in den verschiedensten Lebensbereichen auf, darunter bisher noch kaum beachtete.
Ein Magier schafft sich seine eigene Welt aus visionär eingegebenen Ritualen, Zauberer werden visionär entlarvt, das Wesen der Nekromantie basiert auf Totenerscheinungen, die Gesichter der Hexen und der Besessenen zeichnen eine Gegenwelt voller Dämonen. Um diese Phänomene zu verstehen, ist ein psychologischer Zugang unabdingbar: Inwieweit lassen sich auf die mittelalterlichen Visionen moderne Studien zur Halluzination anwenden? Sind Visionen generell als Krankheitssymptome zu verstehen und differieren mittelalterliche und moderne Psychen? Wie wurden Visionäre im Urteil der Zeitgenossen rezipiert? Ein Ausblick auf Vision und Visionsliteratur in der Neuzeit beschließt den Band, wobei auch die konträre Entwicklung im Katholizismus und Protestantismus thematisiert wird

This interdisciplinary collection of essays, containing chapters from specialists in history, art history, medical history, and literature, examines how the intimately familiar language of the body served as a convenient medium through which to imagine and describe transformations of the larger world, both for the better and also for the worse. Its individual contributors demonstrate the myriad ways in which rethinking the human body was one way to approach rethinking the social, political, and religious realities of the world from the Middle Ages until the early modern period.

We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are? In How We Became Our Data, Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. This all culminates in what Koopman calls the "informational person" and the "informational power" we are now subject to. The recent explosion of digital technologies that are turning us into a series of algorithmic data points is shown to have a deeper and more turbulent past than we commonly think. Blending philosophy, history, political theory, and media theory in conversation with thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Friedrich Kittler, Koopman presents an illuminating perspective on how we have come to think of our personhood--and how we can resist its erosion.

Meister Eckhart, a now-popular medieval German mystic, provides the contemporary person with a way of living that centers on nothing but God in everyday life. He insists that everyone--whatever they have done, whatever they believe--is one with God. Because of this, the good Meister sees no opposition between our spiritual and daily lives. We access oneness with God through letting go. Bliss and freedom flow from giving birth to this divine oneness right where we are. This book intends to help us live this everyday mysticism by prayer and letting go. Meister Eckhart invites all of us to realize our divine oneness in the midst of raising a family, commuting, doing our jobs, cooking, cleaning, and scheduling. Meister Eckhart preaches that God is one with every one of us in our everyday lives.

Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou is an anthology of writings on cinema and film by many of the major thinkers in continental philosophy. The book presents a selection of fundamental texts, each accompanied by an introduction and exposition by the editor, Christopher Kul-Want, that places the philosophers within a historical and intellectual framework of aesthetic and social thought. Encompassing a range of intellectual traditions--Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, gender and affect theories--this critical reader features writings by Bergson, Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer, Merleau-Ponty, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Lyotard, Deleuze, Kristeva, Agamben, Zizek, Nancy, Cavell, Rancière, Badiou, Stiegler, and Silverman. Many of the texts discuss cinema as a mass medium; others develop phenomenological analyses of particular films. Reflecting upon the potential of films to challenge dominant forms of ideology, the anthology considers the ways in which they can disrupt the clichés of capitalist images and offer radical possibilities for creating new worlds of visceral experience outside the grasp of habitual forms of knowledge and subjectivity. Ranging from the early silent period of cinema through the classics of European and Hollywood cinema to the early twenty-first century, the films discussed offer a vivid sense of these philosophers' concepts and ideas, casting new light on the history of cinema. This reader is an essential and valuable resource for a wide range of courses in film and philosophy.

US conservatives have repeatedly turned to classical Greece for inspiration and rhetorical power. In the 1950s they used Plato to defend moral absolutism; in the 1960s it was Aristotle as a means to develop a uniquely conservative social science; and then Thucydides helped to justify a more assertive foreign policy in the 1990s. By tracing this phenomenon and analysing these, and various other, examples of selectivity, subversion and adaptation within their broader social and political contexts, John Bloxham here employs classical thought as a prism through which to explore competing strands in American conservatism. From the early years of the Cold War to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bloxham illuminates the depth of conservatives' engagement with Greece, the singular flexibility of Greek ideas and the varied and diverse ways that Greek thought has reinforced and invigorated conservatism. This innovative work of reception studies offers a richer understanding of the American Right and is important reading for classicists, modern US historians and political scientists alike.

In Misere, famed art historian Linda Nochlin reveals how, in the new form of civilization produced by the Industrial Revolution, in which the phenomenal growth of wealth occurred alongside an expansion of squalor, writers and artists of the nineteenth century used their craft to come to terms with what were often new and unprecedented social, material, and psychological circumstances.Nochlin charts the phenomenon of misery as it was represented in the popular and fine arts of the nineteenth century. Examining work by some of the great intellects of the era--including Dickens, Carlyle, Engels, Hugo, Buret, Disraeli, and de Tocqueville--as well as relative unknowns who were searching for ways to depict new realities, Nochlin draws from a range of sources that include paintings, prints, newspaper illustrations, photography, and a variety of texts: from the account of a day in the life of an eight- year- old mine worker girl to the foundational texts of the field such as Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England.

*Rereading Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages, a Century Later* explores the legacy and historiographical impact of Johan Huizinga's 1919 masterwork a century after its publication. Often considered one of the most successful books in medieval European history, its reception has varied over the last hundred years, popular with non-academic readers, and appraised more critically by fellow historians and those more generally in the field of medieval studies. There is broad consensus, however, about the work's absolute centrality, and the authors of this volume assess the *Autumn of the Middle Ages* reception, afterlife, and continued vitality.

The Oxford Guide to Middle High German is the most comprehensive self-contained treatment of Middle High German available in English. It covers the language, literature, history, and culture of German in the period from 1050 to 1350 and is designed for entry-level readers, advanced study,teaching, and reference. The book includes a large sample of texts, not only from Classical works such as Erec, the Nibelungenlied, Parzival, and Tristan, but also from mystical writing, chronicles, and legal documents; the selection represents all major dialects and the full time span of theperiod.The volume begins with an introduction that defines Middle High German linguistically, geographically, and chronologically. Chapter 2 then provides a detailed exploration of the grammar, covering sounds and spelling, inflectional morphology, syntax, and lexis. Each section in this chapter beginswith a summary of the main points, followed by detailed paragraphs for in-depth study and reference. Chapter 3 deals with versification, discussing metre, rhyme, lines of verse in context, and verse forms, and includes practical tips for scansion. Chapter 4 offers an account of the political andsocial structures of Medieval Germany and a survey of the principal types of texts that originated in the period. The final chapter of the book comprises over forty texts, each placed in context and provided with explanatory footnotes; the first two texts, to be taken together with the introductorygrammar sections, are aimed at newcomers. A glossary provides full coverage of the vocabulary appearing in the texts and throughout the book.