Fall Reading List VI

"Philosophy and Theology: Being the First Edinburgh University Gifford Lectures" by James Hutchison Stirling.

Wikipedia: 

James Hutchison Stirling (22 June 1820 – 19 March 1909) was a Scottish idealist philosopher and physician. His work The Secret of Hegel (1st edition, 1865, in 2 vols.; revised edition, 1898, in 1 vol.) gave great impetus to the study of Hegelian philosophy both in Britain and in the United States, and it was also accepted as an authoritative work on Hegel's philosophy in Germany and Italy. The book helped to create the philosophical movement known as British idealism.

. . .After receiving a large inheritance from his father's estate in 1851, Stirling left his medical practice. He then set out to learn French and German, for the purpose of being able to better understand continental philosophical trends. In pursuit of this goal, he moved his family briefly to Boulogne-sur-Mer, France (located in the current Pas-de-Calais department of the Hauts-de-France region), then to Paris for 18 months, then to St. Servan (located two miles from the ferry port of St. Malo in the Ille-et-Vilaine department of the Brittany region of France) for four and a half years, and then finally to Heidelberg, Germany. In November 1857, Stirling and his family took up residence in London (at 3 Wilton Terrace, Kensington), where they lived for about three years. After this, in 1860 Stirling returned to Edinburgh—his address there was 4 Laverockbank Road, Trinity, Edinburgh—which then became his permanent residence until the end of his life, and where he wrote on the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and many other subjects. The primary result of his comprehensive Hegel studies was his influential work The Secret of Hegel (2 vols., 1865).

One of Stirling's other major philosophical works—Philosophy and Theology (1890) (consisting of his 20 Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1889–1890)—focuses not on Hegelian philosophical topics, but on Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories.

"Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England" by Patricia Fara (Princeton University Press, 2014).

Description (Google Books):

In this interdisciplinary study of eighteenth-century England, Patricia Fara explores how natural philosophers constructed magnetism as a science, appropriating the skills and knowledge of experienced navigators. For people of this period, magnetic phenomena reverberated with the symbolism of occult mystery, sexual attraction, and universal sympathies; in this maritime nation, magnetic instruments such as navigational compasses heralded imperial expansion, commercial gain, and scientific progress. By analyzing such multiple associations, Fara reconstructs cultural interactions in the days just prior to the creation of disciplinary science. Not only does this illustrated book provide a kaleidoscopic view of a changing society, but it also portrays the emergence of public science.

Linking this rise in interest to the utility and mysteriousness of magnetism, Fara organizes her discussion into themes, including commercialization, imperialism, instruments and invention, the role of language, attitudes toward the past, and the relationship between religion and natural philosophy. Fara shows that natural philosophers, proclaiming themselves as the only true experts on magnetism, actively participated in massive transformations of English life. In their bids for public recognition as elite specialists, they engaged in controversies that resonated with religious, economic, moral, gender, and political implications. These struggles for social and scientific authority in the eighteenth century provide the background for better understanding the cultural topography of modern society.

"Poems of Ossian and Related Works: James Macpherson" Edited by Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

An excerpt from the Preface (via Google Books):

The public may depend on the following fragments as genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry. The date of their composition cannot be exactly ascertained. Tradition, in the country where they were written, refers them to an æra of the most remote antiquity: and this tradition is supported by the spirit and strain of the poems themselves; which abound with those ideas, and paint those manners, that belong to the most early state of society. The diction too, in the original, is very obsolete; and differs widely from the style of such poems as have been written in the same language two or three centuries ago. They were certainly composed before the establishment of clanship in the northern part of Scotland, which is itself very ancient; for had clans been then formed and known, they must have made a consider-able figure in the work of a Highland Bard; whereas there is not the least mention of them in these poems. It is remarkable that there are found in them no allusions to the Christian religion or worship; indeed, few traces of religion of any kind. One circumstance seems to prove them to be coeval with the very infancy of Christianity in Scotland. In a fragment of the same poems, which the translator has seen, a Culdee or Monk is represented as desirous to take down in writing from the mouth of Oscian, who is the principal personage in several of the following fragments, his warlike atchievements and those of his family. But Oscian treats the Monk and his religion with disdain, telling him, that the deeds of such great men were subjects too high to be recorded by him, or by any of his religion: A full proof that Christianity was not as yet established in the country. 

Though the poems now published appear as detached pieces in this col-lection, there is ground to believe that most of them were originally epi-sodes of a greater work which related to the wars of Fingal. Concerning this hero innumerable traditions remain, to this day, in the Highlands of Scot-land. The story of Oscian, his son, is so generally known, that to describe one in whom the race of a great family ends, it has passed into a proverb; "Oscian the last of the heroes."

There can be no doubt that these poems are to be ascribed to the Bards; a race of men well known to have continued throughout many ages in Ireland and the north of Scotland. Every chief or great man had in his family a Bard or poet, whose office it was to record in verse, the illustrious actions of that family. By the succession of these Bards, such poems were handed down from race to race; some in manuscript, but more by oral tradition. And tradition, in a country so free of intermixture with foreigners, and among a people so strongly attached to the memory of their ancestors, has preserved many of them in a great measure incorrupted to this day.

Wikipedia:

James Macpherson (Gaelic: Seumas MacMhuirich or Seumas Mac a' Phearsain; 27 October 1736 – 17 February 1796) was a Scottish writer, poet, literary collector, and politician. He is known for the Ossian cycle of epic poems, which he claimed to have discovered and translated from Gaelic.

. . .Macpherson's reputation as an "laborious and able writer" led to his enrolment as a political pamphleteer, satirist and newspaper columnist in support of the Grafton ministry and the succeeding administration of Lord North, in exchange for the promise of a pension-for-life. This was paid clandestinely, because he (together with his brother James) used as may as forty aliases in their writings, to suggest that the views they expressed were popular and widespread. Under his own name he defended government policy in the north American colonies (The Rights of Great Britain Asserted Against the Claims of America of 1776) and he denounced the East India Company at a time when government policy was seeking to limit the organisation's power (The History and Management of the East India Company of 1799).

"Leo The Great" by Charles Gore (1897).

Wikipedia:

Charles Gore (22 January 1853 – 17 January 1932) was a Church of England bishop, first of Worcester, then Birmingham, and finally of Oxford. He was one of the most influential Anglican theologians of the 19th century, helping reconcile the church to some aspects of biblical criticism and scientific discovery, while remaining Catholic in his interpretation of the faith and sacraments. Also known for his social action, Gore became an Anglican bishop and founded the monastic Community of the Resurrection as well as co-founded the Christian Social Union. He was the chaplain to Queen Victoria and King Edward VII.

. . .Gore was a bundle of contradictions, an Anglo-Catholic in the Church of England whose questioning of the Old Testament produced in the 1890s a crisis for many believers. In the judgment of his biographer, Gore was a loner who thought he had a vocation to community life. He chose to be buried at Mirfield, in the church of the Community of the Resurrection, though he had never managed to be more than a visitor there.

Gore died on 17 January 1932 in Kensington, London. He left instructions for his body to be cremated, a practice seen by some at the time as unacceptable for a Christian. Nearly three decades earlier, in a letter read at the 1903 opening ceremony of the Birmingham Crematorium, Gore had written:

What I should desire when I myself die is that my body should be reduced rapidly to ashes, so that it may do no harm to the living, and then in accordance with Christian feeling be laid in the earth.

Gore's wishes provoked the Anglo-Catholic leader and politician Lord Halifax to exclaim, belatedly, "I could shake the life out of him with my own hands." The ashes were taken to Mirfield in Yorkshire for burial. His cope and mitre remain at the Grosvenor Chapel.

An excerpt from, "Leo The Great" (Pg. 7 - 10, via Archive.org)

Leo was born into perhaps the most important period of transition in the world's history, that stormy period which links the ancient and the modern world: the civilization of Rome and the civilization of Christendom. The great empire of Rome, which for four centuries had been almost conterminous with the known world, which seemed irresistible by the mere force of its name, and which in a condition of profound peace had been obliterating national distinctions, and uniting races the most opposite and the most remote in the bonds of commerce and a common government, was now being threatened, over-whelmed and dismembered in all directions by the barbarian hosts.

One by one the Imperial government was sur-rendering the provinces of the Empire, either to be occupied by the invading hordes, or to maintain for a time, like Britain and Armorica, a precarious independence; meanwhile the unity of the govern-ment had been finally surrendered by the separation of the Eastern and Western Empires at the death of Theodosius the Great, and the Imperial residence in the West, which had been removed for purposes of convenience at the beginning of the fourth century from Rome to Milan, was transferred by Honorius, from motives of cowardice, to Ravenna, a city which art had done its best to fortify, and which nature had rendered almost inaccessible by surrounding it with impassable morasses. Here, out of the reach of danger, and remote from any natural centre of administration, was exercised in the future what shadow of authority still remained in the hands of the Emperor of the West.

For if the Empire was becoming contemptible, that contempt centred in the emperor. That supreme position, perhaps the most magnificent that it ever fell to the lot of man to fill, and which had in fact during the four centuries of the Roman Empire, from Julius to Theodosius, been filled by no inconsiderable proportion of the greatest of the world's rulers, that position, which in pagan days had raised its occupant at once to the level of the gods, and still assigned to him a superstitious and unbounded veneration, was for nearly thirty years (A.D. 395-423) filled by Honorius, a man of whom it is related 3 (and the story must at any rate represent the estimate which his subjects formed of his character) that he was alarmed to hear of the loss of Rome, till he learned that it was not a favourite chicken of that name that was lost, but only the eternal city.

While the emperor was thus sunk in contemptible indolence the nobility of Rome seem as a class to have been not much more worthy of respect. The historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, who died about the time of Leo's birth, gives us an excellent picture of their character and manners. They were extremely wealthy, extremely luxurious, extremely indolent, and extremely frivolous. They delighted in little but vanity and display. At the same time to degrading vices they added a gross superstition, often to be found among those who were sceptics or even atheists.

Meanwhile the plebeian population of Rome was a congeries of all the nations of the earth, drawn to Rome by the various attractions of the metropolis, the circus, and, above all, the enormous largess of provisions of various kinds which it was the pleasure of the emperors to lavish upon the populace of the capital.

Enough will have been said to show that neither in the emperor, nor nobility, nor plebeians of the capital were to be found the elements of social cohesion, solidity, or resistance, nor would it seem that much could be looked for from the diminished and still constantly dwindling population of the provinces.

Salvian, a priest of Marseilles and a contemporary of Leo, gives us a terrible picture of the morality of the Roman Empire of his day. His work, " On the Government of God," is a vindication of the ways of God to man, in abandoning the Roman Empire to the barbarians : the Christian world to the pagans and the Arians. It is the punishment of sins. " Among the chaste barbarians we alone are unchaste : " the moral purity of Vandal and Goth contrasts in all directions, in Germany, in Africa, in Spain, with the universal dissoluteness of the Romans.

To complete the picture we must add that almost the whole strength of the army of that date, such as it was, was to be found in the barbarians who had recruited its ranks.

At the time of the invasion of Alaric, though the troops were recalled from the provinces, even as far as Britain, to the defence of Italy, it was found impossible to raise an army composed of Roman legions without the assistance of Alani : and a few years later not only the assistance of Alani, Huns and Goths, but the recall of provincial legions and compulsory levies of new troops were necessary to enable Stilicho to raise a small army to oppose Rhodogast, but he was actually compelled to offer bribes to any slaves who would enlist.

Amidst all these elements of weakness and decay, into this last epoch of the Roman Empire Leo was born. 

Fall Reading List V

 

"The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam" by Glen W. Bowersock (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Description (IAS):

Oxford University Press has published The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (2013), by Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies. Just prior to the rise of Islam in the sixth century A.D., southern Arabia was embroiled in a violent conflict between Christian Ethiopians and Jewish Arabs. Though little known today, this was an international war that involved both the Byzantine Empire, which had established Christian churches in Ethiopia, and the Sasanian Empire in Persia, which supported the Jews in what became a proxy war against its longtime foe Byzantium. Bowersock carefully reconstructs this fascinating but overlooked chapter in pre-Islamic Arabian history, drawing on descriptions of an inscribed marble throne at the Ethiopian port of Adulis as well as a wealth of other historical and archaeological evidence.

"The Ottoman Age of Exploration" by Giancarlo Casale (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Description: 

In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim "the Grim" conquered Egypt and brought his empire for the first time in history into direct contact with the trading world of the Indian Ocean. During the decades that followed, the Ottomans became progressively more engaged in the affairs of this vast and previously unfamiliar region, eventually to the point of launching a systematic ideological, military and commercial challenge to the Portuguese Empire, their main rival for control of the lucrative trade routes of maritime Asia.

The Ottoman Age of Exploration is the first comprehensive historical account of this century-long struggle for global dominance, a struggle that raged from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Malacca, and from the interior of Africa to the steppes of Central Asia. Based on extensive research in the archives of Turkey and Portugal, as well as materials written on three continents and in a half dozen languages, it presents an unprecedented picture of the global reach of the Ottoman state during the sixteenth century. It does so through a dramatic recounting of the lives of sultans and viziers, spies, corsairs, soldiers-of-fortune, and women from the imperial harem. Challenging traditional narratives of Western dominance, it argues that the Ottomans were not only active participants in the Age of Exploration, but ultimately bested the Portuguese in the game of global politics by using sea power, dynastic prestige, and commercial savoir faire to create their own imperial dominion throughout the Indian Ocean.

"Unmaking North and South: Cartographies of the Yemeni Past" by John M. Willis (Hurst Publishers, 2012).

Description: 

Unmaking North and South revisits the Yemeni past by situating the historical construction of Yemen’s north and south as bounded political, social, and moral spaces in the broader context of imperial rule, state formation, and religious reform in the Indian Ocean arena. The study is centered on the formation of the British Aden Protectorate and the Zaydi-Shiite Imamate of the Hamid al-Din family in the period between 1857 and 1934. Focusing on the British creation of a series of ‘native states’ on the model of princely India in the Yemeni south and Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din’s formation of a hybrid state based on Ottoman state forms and Sunni reformist ideology in the north, the book demonstrates the extent to which Yemen’s modern history was rooted both in the structures of the British Raj and the intellectual debates of the greater Sunni Muslim world. The book uses a variety of case studies dealing with imperial state ritual, arms smuggling, cartography and colonial ethnography, debates over the nature of the Islamic polity, and an undeclared war between the British and the Yemeni Imamate in order to re-center the history of Yemen in a trans-regional context. Moving deftly between narratives of the colonial, local, modern, and Islamic, Willis questions the historical inevitability of the post-colonial Yemeni nation and suggests other modes of narrating Yemen’s contested past.

"Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68" by Asher Orkaby (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Abstract (Harvard University):

Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68, to the forefront of modern Middle East History. During the 1960s, in the wake of a coup against Imam Muhammad al-Badr and the formation of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), Yemen was transformed into an arena of global conflict. Believing al-Badr to be dead, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and most countries recognized the YAR. But when al-Badr unexpectedly turned up alive, Saudi Arabia and Britain offered support to the deposed Imam, drawing Yemen into an internationally-sponsored civil war. Throughout six years of major conflict, Yemen sat at the crossroads of regional and international conflict as dozens of countries, international organizations, and individuals intervened in the local South Arabian civil war.

Yemen was a showcase for a new era of UN and Red Cross peacekeeping, clandestine activity, Egyptian counterinsurgency, and one of the first largescale uses of poison gas since WWI. Events in Yemen were not dominated by a single power, nor were they sole products of US-Soviet or Saudi-Egyptian Arab Cold War rivalry. Britain, Canada, Israel, the UN, the US, and the USSR joined Egypt and Saudi Arabia in assuming varying roles in fighting, mediating, and supplying the belligerent forces. Despite Cold War tensions, Americans and Soviets appeared on the same side of the Yemeni conflict and acted mutually to confine Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to the borders of South Arabia. The end of the Yemen Civil War marked the end of both Nasser's Arab Nationalist colonial expansion and the British Empire in the Middle East, two of the most dominant regional forces.

This internationalized conflict was a pivotal event in Middle East history, overseeing the formation of a modern Yemeni state, the fall of Egyptian and British regional influence, another Arab-Israeli war, Saudi dominance of the Arabian Peninsula, and shifting power alliances in the Middle East that continue to lie at the core of modern-day conflicts in South Arabia.

"Yemen and the World: Beyond Insecurity" by Laurent Bonnefoy (Hurst Publishers, 2018).

Description:

Contemporary Yemen has an image problem. It has long fascinated travellers and artists, and to many embodies both Arab and Muslim authenticity; it stands at important geostrategic and commercial crossroads. Yet, strangely, global perceptions of Yemen are of an entity that is somehow both marginal and passive, yet also dangerous and problematic.

The Saudi offensive launched in 2015 has made Yemen a victim of regional power struggles, while the global ‘war on terror’ has labelled it a threat to international security. This perception has had disastrous effects without generating real interest in the country or its people. On the contrary, Yemen’s complex political dynamics have been largely ignored by international observers—resulting in problematic, if not counterproductive, international policies.

Yemen and the World offers a corrective to these misconceptions and omissions, putting aside the nature of the world’s interest in Yemen to focus on Yemen’s role on the global stage. Laurent Bonnefoy uses six areas of modern international exchange—globalisation, diplomacy, trade, migration, culture and militant Islamism—to restore Yemen to its place at the heart of contemporary affairs. To understand Yemen, he argues, is to understand the Middle East as a whole.

French Historian: Russia Is Not Invading Ukraine, It Is Liberating Europe

The English, the Germans, and the Jews need to get over their historic hatred of Russia. Their thirst for revenge has destabilized Europe and spread Ukrainian-backed terrorism around the world. This isn't the 19th century when imperial adventurism could be contained. You start a fire in Ukraine and it quickly spreads to Brazil and Bangladesh.

Russia can't be vilified as easily as it was in the past.

Russia is not the enemy of Europe or world Jewry. Russians in the 21st century shouldn't be punished for what the Tsar did to Jews in the 19th century or what the Communist regime did to the Germans and Eastern Europeans in the 20th.

Russia is not perfect. I don't fully trust Putin. I think he's part of the conspiracy to depopulate Ukraine and resettle it with Jews. But Russia didn't start this war. And it's not overthrowing regimes half way across the world. It is clearing and protecting its front lawn. What it has done in Ukraine has been tame and completely justified. 

In fact, a stronger, a more moral, and wiser Russia should have already been in Kyiv. Zelensky should not be breathing. The only explanation for why its not in Kyiv is because it wants to ensure that Ukraine won't be able to raise armies against it in the future. What Putin is pursuing is extermination via war, not just a simple military victory. 

The longer he stalls in taking Ukraine the worse off Russia will be. The West has so far succeeded in turning this conflict into another Iran-Iraq war, where both sides bleed each other to death. 

I don't know if Putin can't take Kyiv out of military incompetence, or he's made promises to his Jewish allies to give them Ukrainian land. But Russia needs to figure it out for the sake of global stability. This open wound has to be closed soon. If Putin can't do it then a new Russian leader will have to.

II.

Wikipedia:

Emmanuel Todd (born 16 May 1951) is a French historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris. His research focuses on family structures across the world, and explores how they relate to beliefs, ideologies, political systems, and historical developments. He has also authored several political essays, which have received wide coverage in France.

. . .Among other books, Emmanuel Todd wrote The Invention of Europe (1990) and Le destin des immigrés (1994) (The fate of immigrants), in which he defended the "French model" of immigrants integration.

. . .Todd opposed the Maastricht Treaty in the 1992 referendum. In 1995, he authored a memo for the Fondation Saint-Simon, that gained widespread attention; the media subsequently credited him with coining the phrase "fracture sociale" (social crack or social gap), which was notably used by Jacques Chirac during the 1995 presidential campaign to distinguish himself from his rival Édouard Balladur. However, Todd denied originating the term and attributed the expression to Marcel Gauchet.

In The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social Systems, Todd explores how diverse family structures influence beliefs, ideologies, political systems, and historical development. As anthropologist David Kertzer summarises: "Building on both Le Play and Freud, Todd argues, that ideological systems are products of family concepts with family organization being the true infrastructure, not itself determined by any other social, economic, or cultural forces". Susan Greenhalgh characterises the book as "deliberatively provocative and at once annoying and impressive" and states that "although the author's argument needs substantial conceptual and empirical shaping up, the book contains many rewarding insights and deserves to be given serious consideration by anthropologists and political scientists alike." In Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus, reviewed by James C. Bennett, he offers a compelling reinterpretation of modern history—mapping how family systems ripple through religion, politics, economy, and cultural attitudes. Bennett sees it as a vital contribution for rethinking globalization with deeper cultural sensitivity and warns against ignoring these underlying dynamics. And Alan Barnard considers it as a "thoroughly interesting and unusual text" 

. . .In La défaite de l'Occident (The defeat of the West), Todd claims that Putin's Russia has triumphed over a deindustralised and nihilist West, weakened by the decline of Protestantism. The French press gave the book mixed reviews, with critics accusing Todd of being “blinded by ideology,” “ignorant of the subject,” or relying on Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories. However, the book was reviewed by anthropologist John A. Agnew who writes, in 2024 that "so far this book has met with a largely positive reaction by the pundits on the nationalist right in the United States and Europe, even though in the past, Todd as never openly affiliated himself with such quarters". The book received praise from journalist Christopher Caldwell in The New York Times, and was well received by official Russian media.

"Emmanuel Todd is a French historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris." (Wikipedia) On Ukraine/Russia war, European Union EU, NATO, he states: pic.twitter.com/W3d8XR3GrC

— Prof. Med.dr. Marcello Ferrada de Noli #HR4All (@ProfessorsBlogg) October 24, 2026

Fall Reading List IV

 

"Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt" by Frederick Soddy (1926).

Wikipedia:

Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt is a 1926 book by the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Frederick Soddy on monetary policy and society and the role of energy in economic systems. Soddy criticized the focus on monetary flows in economics, arguing that real wealth was derived from the use of energy to transform materials into physical goods and services. Soddy’s economic writings were largely ignored in his time, but would later be applied to the development of ecological economics in the late 20th century.

Wikipedia:

Frederick Soddy FRS[2] (2 September 1877 – 22 September 1956) was an English radiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements. In 1921, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes". Soddy was a polymath who mastered chemistry, nuclear physics, statistical mechanics, finance, and economics.

 

"Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development" by Herman Daly (1996).

"The World Set Free" by H. G. Wells (1914).

Description (MIT Press):

In a novel written on the eve of World War I, H. G. Wells imagines a war “to end all wars” that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in an enlightened utopia.

Writing in 1913, on the eve of World War I's mass slaughter and long before World War II's mushroom cloud finale, H. G. Wells imagined a war that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in a utopia of enlightened world government. Set in the 1950s, Wells's neglected novel The World Set Free describes a conflict so horrific that it actually is the war that ends war.

Wells—the first to imagine a “uranium-based bomb”—offers a prescient description of atomic warfare that renders cities unlivable for years: “Whole blocks of buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond.” Drawing on discoveries by physicists and chemists of the time, Wells foresees both a world powered by clean, plentiful atomic energy—and the destructive force of the neutron chain reaction.

 

"Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720" by Carl Wennerlind (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Description (Harvard University Press):

Modern credit, developed during the financial revolution of 1620–1720, laid the foundation for England’s political, military, and economic dominance in the eighteenth century. Possessed of a generally circulating credit currency, a modern national debt, and sophisticated financial markets, England developed a fiscal–military state that instilled fear in its foes and facilitated the first industrial revolution. Yet a number of casualties followed in the wake of this new system of credit. Not only was it precarious and prone to accidents, but it depended on trust, public opinion, and ultimately violence.

Fall Reading List III

"The Theology of Electricity: On the Encounter and Explanation of Theology and Science" by Ernst Benz (1989).

An excerpt:

Athanasius Kircher's work on magnetism is of particular interest to historians of religion. It shows that, despite his formal adherence to a dogmatically correct concept of God, as he came under the influence of the idea of linking the image of the magnet and its associated phenomena with God, the personal elements in Athanasius Kircher's work and in his conception of God became less and less prominent. In their stead, the impersonal elements in his idea of God began to gain prominence, [as he came to see] God as an all-pervading power and radiance that gives life to, forms, and sustains everything. "God, the Magnet" [is referred to less often, and there are more and more allusions to] the magnetic force of nature. This depersonalization in the concept of God does not urge a theoretical, but rather a practical, equation of the divine spirit as vis magnetica dei with the all-animating power of nature. Already in Athanasius Kircher we frequently find a shift in perspective---a shift of which he himself was probably not aware---from the idea of the divine magnet to that of a magnetic, all-pervasive power, which essentially creates and guides not only order and life but also the preservation and continuation of the universe. There can be no doubt that it was especially this shift in emphasis that contributed to the development that became manifest in the pansophical theology of nature and that forms the transition to Mesmer's evangelium naturae [gospel of nature] and to the philosophy of nature in Romanticism. (Pg. 10).

 

"Hans Christian Ørsted: Reading Nature's Mind" by Dan Ch. Christensen (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Abstract:

Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851), the discoverer of electromagnetism, came to be of great importance as a scientist and philosopher far beyond the borders of Denmark and his own time. The centre of an international network of scholars, he was instrumental in establishing the world picture of modern physics. Ørsted was the physicist who brought Kant’s metaphysics to fruition. His discovery of electromagnetism in 1820, a phenomenon that could not possibly exist according to his adversaries, changed the course of research in physics; it inspired M. Faraday’s experiments and discovery of the adverse effect, magneto‐electric induction; the two physical phenomena were later described in mathematical equations by J.C. Maxwell. Together these discoveries constitute the prerequisites for the overwhelming development of modern technology. But Ørsted was also one of the cultural leaders and organizers of the Danish Golden Age (together with Grundtvig, Kierkegaard, and Hans Christian Andersen, his protégé) making significant contributions to aesthetics, philosophy, pedagogy, politics, and religion. Ørsted epitomizes the synthesis of two cultures, remarkably bridging the gap between science, the humanities, and the arts. The concordance between his philosophy of ‘the true, the good, and the beautiful’ and his personal conduct of life makes him a model scholar.

 

"Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme's Haunted Narrative" by Cyril O'Regan (SUNY Press, 2001).

Description: 

Argues that the discourse of Jacob Boehme represents the return of Gnostic thought in modernity after a thousand year hiatus.

Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century German speculative mystic, influenced the philosophers Hegel and Schelling and both English and German Romantics alike with his visionary thought. Gnostic Apocalypse focuses on the way Boehme's thought repeats and surpasses post-reformation Lutheran thinking, deploys and subverts the commitments of medieval mysticism, realizes the speculative thrust of Renaissance alchemy, is open to esoteric discourses such as the Kabbalah, and articulates a dynamic metaphysics. This book critically assesses the striking claim made in the nineteenth century that Boehme's visionary discourse represents within the confines of specifically Protestant thought nothing less than the return of ancient Gnosis. Although the grounds adduced on behalf of the "Gnostic return" claim in the nineteenth century are dismissed as questionable, O'Regan shows that the fundamental intuition is correct. Boehme's visionary discourse does represent a return of Gnosticism in the modern period, and in this lies its fundamental claim to our contemporary philosophical, theological, and literary attention.

 

"Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos" by Steven M. Wasserstrom (Princeton University Press, 1999).

Description:

By the end of World War II, religion appeared to be on the decline throughout the United States and Europe. Recent world events had cast doubt on the relevance of religious belief, and modernizing trends made religious rituals look out of place. It was in this atmosphere that the careers of Scholem, Eliade, and Corbin—the twentieth century’s legendary scholars in the respective fields of Judaism, History of Religions, and Islam—converged and ultimately revolutionized how people thought about religion. Between 1949 and 1978, all three lectured to Carl Jung’s famous Eranos circle in Ascona, Switzerland, where each in his own way came to identify the symbolism of mystical experience as a central element of his monotheistic tradition. In this, the first book ever to compare the paths taken by these thinkers, Steven Wasserstrom explores how they overturned traditional approaches to studying religion by de-emphasizing law, ritual, and social history and by extolling the role of myth and mysticism. The most controversial aspect of their theory of religion, Wasserstrom argues, is that it minimized the binding character of moral law associated with monotheism.

The author focuses on the lectures delivered by Scholem, Eliade, and Corbin to the Eranos participants, but also shows how these scholars generated broader interest in their ideas through radio talks, poetry, novels, short stories, autobiographies, and interviews. He analyzes their conception of religion from a broadly integrated, comparative perspective, sets their distinctive thinking into historical and intellectual context, and interprets the striking success of their approaches.