Do you dream in color? If you answer Yes, how can you be sure? Before you recount your vivid memory of a dream featuring all the colors of the rainbow, consider that in the 1950s researchers found that most people reported dreaming in black and white. In the 1960s, when most movies were in color and more people had color television sets, the vast majority of reported dreams contained color. The most likely explanation for this, according to the philosopher Eric (...) Schwitzgebel, is not that exposure to black-and-white media made people misremember their dreams. It is that we simply don't know whether or not we dream in color. In Perplexities of Consciousness, Schwitzgebel examines various aspects of inner life and argues that we know very little about our stream of conscious experience. Drawing broadly from historical and recent philosophy and psychology to examine such topics as visual perspective, and the unreliability of introspection, Schwitzgebel finds us singularly inept in our judgments about conscious experience. (shrink)

"In One eloquent essay after another, some of the wisest historians of our time write American history in a grand cosmopolitan context. From the era of discovery to the present, histories that we thought we knew—of labor, of race relations, of politics, of gender relations, of diplomacy, of ethnicity—are more richly understood when causes and consequences are traced throughout the globe. One emerges invigorated, ready to welcome a new American history for a new international century."—Linda K. Kerber, author of No (...) Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship "Rethinking American History in a Global Age is an extremely stimulating and thought-provoking collection of essays written by leading historians who offer wider contexts for illuminating the traditional themes and issues of American national history. Particularly impressive is the book's combination of caution and original, sometimes daring insights."—David Brion Davis, author of In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery "For decades American historians have been urging one another to place our culture in comparative or transnational perspective. Thomas Bender's unique volume includes not only essays theorizing such efforts and essays exemplifying such work at its most successful and its most provocative, it also provides more skeptical assessments questioning whether American historians can meet the challenge of overcoming our longstanding national preoccupations. Rethinking American History in a Global Age is an indispensable book that will shape the work of a rising generation of historians whose horizons will extend beyond our own shores."—James T. Kloppenberg, author of The Virtues of Liberalism. (shrink)

This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary journal, published in post-World War I Calcutta. It uncovers a historical pattern of Bengali intellectual life that marked the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, whereby an imperial imagination was transformed into an international one, as a generation of intellectuals born between 1885 and 1905 reinvented the political category of . Hermeneutics, as a philosophically informed study of how meaning is created through conversation, and (...) grounded in this essay in the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, helps to reveal this pattern. While translocal vistas of intellectual life were always present in Bengali thought, the contours of those horizons changed drastically in the period under study. Bengali intellectual life, framed within a center (the foreign) and tik (international), as opposed to bilāt (England, or the West), to name the world abroad. The world outside empire increasingly became a resource and theme for artists and writers. Major changes in global geopolitical alignments and in the colonial politics of British India, and the relations between generations within Bengali bhadralok society, provide contexts for the rise of this international youth imagination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in HistoryCharles W. J. WithersI. IntroductionA few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits—and consequences—of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not been before), the (...) advert proclaimed "Geography is History." What the advert signalled to as the "end" of geography in the sense of the social gradients associated with space and distance is what is known, variously, as "time-space convergence" and "time-space distanciation."1 The terms embrace not just the "collapse" of geographical space given technical advances (in travel time and in communications—consequences of what Castells calls "the information age" and "the network society"2), but also the idea that the modern world has become [End Page 637] more homogenized. One place is now much the same as another. Further, given the likelihood of such technical and cultural changes continuing into the future, geographical distinctiveness, evident in the particularity of place, would be a thing of the past: geography would indeed be history. There is, of course, much evidence to the contrary: that, in the face of "globalisation," questions of locality, sense of place and of identity in place matter now more than ever. Even, then, as Francis Fukuyama cautioned against the "death" of liberal democratic politics as The End of History,3 geography—that is, geography understood as questions to do with place, and questions to do with where you are in the world as part of questions about how you are and who you are in the world—has had considerably heightened significance and for some places and people more than others.4These notions of place—as a particular location, and the character or sense of place—are only part of the meanings associated with place in geographical and in historical work. Like space, its regular epistemic dancing partner in geographical ubiquity and metaphysical imprecision, place is a widespread yet complex term. What follows is historiographical in focus and, of necessity, partial in range. I offer a historiographical survey of the term place, principally but not alone within recent work in geography. In more detail, and with reference to one of the strong senses in which place is used, namely that of locale, "the local," or localness, I trace here the connections between place, space, and the idea of the local as evident in recent work in history and in geography, especially within the history and the geography of science. Particular attention is paid in this context to the distinctive features of what we may think of as the "spatial turn" in the history of science by looking at the idea of place and space in recent work in Enlightenment studies. My argument is three-fold. Notions of place and space, much debated by geographers, have been as central a concern for intellectual historians and historians of science as for philosophers and others, but they have been differently expressed. There is, I shall argue, value in looking at these different views in order to understand that whilst place is a commonplace term it is not agreed upon: working with imprecision has been both opportunity and restriction. In relation to work within the history of science and in Enlightenment studies, consideration of the so-called "spatial turn," of place [End Page 638] as social practice and of placing as a process in accounting for the uneven movement of ideas over space and time may help provide some precision and strengthen connections between geography and history.II. Place (In Geography): A Partial HistoriographyPlace is one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography. It is also one of the most problematic.5 Place, or small-scale regional space, features as a subdivision within the Classical tripartite division of cosmography (the earth in relation to other planetary bodies), geography (the earth as a whole) and chorography (parts of the earth or regional geography). So, too, does the distinction between chorography and chronology as... (shrink)

At Columbia University in 1906, William James gave a highly confrontational speech to the American Philosophical Association (APA). He ignored the technical philosophical questions the audience had gathered to discuss and instead addressed the topic of human energy. Tramping on the rules of academic decorum, James invoked the work of amateurs, read testimonials on the benefits of yoga and alcohol, and concluded by urging his listeners to take up this psychological and physiological problem. What was the goal of this unusual (...) speech? Rather than an oddity, Francesca Bordogna asserts that the APA address was emblematic—it was just one of many gestures that James employed as he plowed through the barriers between academic, popular, and pseudoscience, as well as the newly emergent borders between the study of philosophy, psychology, and the “science of man.” Bordogna reveals that James’s trespassing of boundaries was an essential element of a broader intellectual and social project. By crisscrossing divides, she argues, James imagined a new social configuration of knowledge, a better society, and a new vision of the human self. As the academy moves toward an increasingly interdisciplinary future, William James at the Boundaries reintroduces readers to a seminal influence on the way knowledge is pursued. (shrink)

Heidegger in America explores the surprising legacy of his life and thought in the United States of America. As a critic of modern life, Heidegger often lamented the growing global influence of all things American. However, it was precisely in America where his thought inspired the work of generations of thinkers – not only philosophers but also theologians, architects, novelists, and even pundits. As a result, the reception and dissemination of Heidegger's philosophical writings transformed the intellectual and cultural history of (...) the United States at a time when American influence was itself transforming the world. A case study in the complex and sometimes contradictory process of transnational exchange, Heidegger in America recasts the scope and methods of contemporary intellectual and cultural history in the age of globalization, challenging what we think we know about Heidegger and American ideas simultaneously. (shrink)

The encounter of environmental history and intellectual history is a union of two insidiously oceanic inquiries.???Oceanic??? in the sense of limitlessness, or oneness with the universe.???All history is the history of thought???, and the history of thought is in modern intellectual history a universal investigation, of advertisements for sofas and Ayn Rand and adoption laws in early colonial Bihar. But all history is also the history of space, and of the environment that surrounds the sofas and the laws. It is (...) apparent, now, that???history occurs in space as well as time???. Environmental history is everywhere as well as nowhere. It is a new universal understanding, which subverts even the historians' own anxieties about universalization: a???negative universal history???. (shrink)