Category Archives: Books

New Book: Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters Surekha Davies Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books […]

New Book: Ancients and Moderns in Europe: Comparative Perspectives Edited by Paddy Bullard and Alexis Tadié The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, or Battle of the Books as it was known in England, famously pitted the Ancients on the one side and the Moderns on the other. This book presents a new intellectual history of […]

New Book: David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism: Methodology and Ideology in Enlightenment Inquiry Tamás Demeter David Hume has a canonical place in the context of moral philosophy, but his insights are less frequently discussed in relation to natural philosophy. David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism offers a discussion of Hume’s methodological and ideological commitments […]

New Book: Francis Bacon on Motion and Power Edited by: Guido Giglioni, James A.T. Lancaster, Sorana Corneanu, and Dana Jalobeanu This book offers a comprehensive and unitary study of the philosophy of Francis Bacon, with special emphasis on the medical, ethical and political aspects of his thought. It presents an original interpretation focused on the […]

Book Announcement: Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science Edited by Donald L. Opitz, Staffan Bergwik, Brigitte Van Tiggelen Announcing Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science, edited by Donald L. Opitz, Staffan Bergwik, Brigitte Van Tiggelen. The fourteen chapters of this volume directly challenge the strong historiographical opposition between science and domesticity by analysing the […]

A World Enchanted: Magic and the Margins Edited by Julie Davies and Michael Pickering Announcing the second volume in the Melbourne Historical Journal Research Series: A World Enchanted: Magic and the Margins. This collection of essays by students, past and present, from the University of Melbourne celebrates the life and scholarly work of Professor Charles Zika. It commemorates […]

From Aristotle’s teleology to Darwin’s genealogy: the stamp of inutility Marco Solinas (Florence University) Announcing a new book by Marco Solinas that will be of interest to many ISIH members: From Aristotle’s teleology to Darwin’s genealogy: the stamp of inutility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Starting with Aristotle and moving on to Darwin, Marco Solinas outlines the basic […]

From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth By Alex Gourevitch From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth by Alex Gourevitch (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Brown University) reconstructs how a group of nineteenth-century labor reformers appropriated and radicalized the republican tradition. These ‘labor republicans’ derived their definition of freedom from a long tradition of political theory dating […]

Book Announcement: The Art of Experimental Natural History: Francis Bacon in Context Dana Jalobeanu Francis Bacon introduced his contemporaries to a new way of investigating nature. He called it  “natural and experimental history.” Despite its rather traditional name, Bacon’s natural and experimental history was a new discipline: it comprised new ideas, new practices and new models […]

The Testosterone Hypothesis: How Hormones Regulate the Life Cycles of Civilization Roy Barzilai THE TESTOSTERONE HYPOTHESIS: How Hormones Regulate the Life Cycles of Civilization is Roy Barzilai’s next provocative book, following last year’s release of THE OBJECTIVE BIBLE: Western Civilization’s Struggle for Philosophic Liberation from a Herd-Mentality and Pagan Mysticism. Tel Aviv, May 1, 2015. Dibrah […]