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Author: Michael C. Carhart
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421427540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
How did early modern scholars—as exemplified by Leibniz—search for their origins in the study of language? Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking twenty-first-century DNA research, seventeenth-century scholars turned to language—etymology, vocabulary, and even grammatical structure—for evidence. The hope was that, in puzzling out the relationships between languages, the relationships between nations themselves would emerge, and on that basis one could determine the ancestral homeland of the nations that presently occupied Europe. In Leibniz Discovers Asia, Michael C. Carhart explores this early modern practice by focusing on philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed a vast network of scholars and missionaries throughout Europe to acquire the linguistic data he needed. The success of his project was tied to the Jesuit search for an overland route to China, whose itinerary would take them through the nations from whom Leibniz wanted language samples. Drawing on Leibniz's extensive correspondence with the members of this network, Carhart gives us access to the philosopher's scintillating discussions about astronomy and mapping; ethnology and missionary work; the contest of the Asiatic empires of Muscovy, Persia, the Ottoman, and China for control of the Caucasus, the steppes, and the Far East; and above all, language, as the best indicator of the prehistoric genealogy of the myriad peoples from Central Asia to Western Europe. Placing comparative linguistics within Leibniz's intellectual program, this book offers extensive insight into how Leibniz built his early modern scholarly network, the network's functionality within the international Republic of Letters, and its limitations. We see the scholar, isolated and lonely in little Hanover, with his hands on knowledge trickling in from scientific centers across Europe and around the world. By the end of 1697—the year his network finally began to work—Leibniz laughed to one of his patrons, "I'm putting a sign on my door reading, 'Bureau of Address for China'!" Depicting Leibniz not as a philosophical authority but as a scholar with human limitations and frustrations, Leibniz Discovers Asia is a thrilling and engaging narrative.
Author: Michael C. Carhart
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421427540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Get Book Here
Book Description
How did early modern scholars—as exemplified by Leibniz—search for their origins in the study of language? Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking twenty-first-century DNA research, seventeenth-century scholars turned to language—etymology, vocabulary, and even grammatical structure—for evidence. The hope was that, in puzzling out the relationships between languages, the relationships between nations themselves would emerge, and on that basis one could determine the ancestral homeland of the nations that presently occupied Europe. In Leibniz Discovers Asia, Michael C. Carhart explores this early modern practice by focusing on philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed a vast network of scholars and missionaries throughout Europe to acquire the linguistic data he needed. The success of his project was tied to the Jesuit search for an overland route to China, whose itinerary would take them through the nations from whom Leibniz wanted language samples. Drawing on Leibniz's extensive correspondence with the members of this network, Carhart gives us access to the philosopher's scintillating discussions about astronomy and mapping; ethnology and missionary work; the contest of the Asiatic empires of Muscovy, Persia, the Ottoman, and China for control of the Caucasus, the steppes, and the Far East; and above all, language, as the best indicator of the prehistoric genealogy of the myriad peoples from Central Asia to Western Europe. Placing comparative linguistics within Leibniz's intellectual program, this book offers extensive insight into how Leibniz built his early modern scholarly network, the network's functionality within the international Republic of Letters, and its limitations. We see the scholar, isolated and lonely in little Hanover, with his hands on knowledge trickling in from scientific centers across Europe and around the world. By the end of 1697—the year his network finally began to work—Leibniz laughed to one of his patrons, "I'm putting a sign on my door reading, 'Bureau of Address for China'!" Depicting Leibniz not as a philosophical authority but as a scholar with human limitations and frustrations, Leibniz Discovers Asia is a thrilling and engaging narrative.
Author: Michael C. Carhart
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421427532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Get Book Here
Book Description
How did early modern scholars—as exemplified by Leibniz—search for their origins in the study of language? Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking twenty-first-century DNA research, seventeenth-century scholars turned to language—etymology, vocabulary, and even grammatical structure—for evidence. The hope was that, in puzzling out the relationships between languages, the relationships between nations themselves would emerge, and on that basis one could determine the ancestral homeland of the nations that presently occupied Europe. In Leibniz Discovers Asia, Michael C. Carhart explores this early modern practice by focusing on philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed a vast network of scholars and missionaries throughout Europe to acquire the linguistic data he needed. The success of his project was tied to the Jesuit search for an overland route to China, whose itinerary would take them through the nations from whom Leibniz wanted language samples. Drawing on Leibniz's extensive correspondence with the members of this network, Carhart gives us access to the philosopher's scintillating discussions about astronomy and mapping; ethnology and missionary work; the contest of the Asiatic empires of Muscovy, Persia, the Ottoman, and China for control of the Caucasus, the steppes, and the Far East; and above all, language, as the best indicator of the prehistoric genealogy of the myriad peoples from Central Asia to Western Europe. Placing comparative linguistics within Leibniz's intellectual program, this book offers extensive insight into how Leibniz built his early modern scholarly network, the network's functionality within the international Republic of Letters, and its limitations. We see the scholar, isolated and lonely in little Hanover, with his hands on knowledge trickling in from scientific centers across Europe and around the world. By the end of 1697—the year his network finally began to work—Leibniz laughed to one of his patrons, "I'm putting a sign on my door reading, 'Bureau of Address for China'!" Depicting Leibniz not as a philosophical authority but as a scholar with human limitations and frustrations, Leibniz Discovers Asia is a thrilling and engaging narrative.
Author: Jürgen Osterhammel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196478
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 692
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Book Description
During the long eighteenth century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. In this panoramic and colorful book, Jürgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment's nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East, from the Ottoman Empire and India to China and Japan. Here is the acclaimed book that challenges the notion that Europe's formative engagement with the non-European world was invariably marred by an imperial gaze and presumptions of Western superiority. Osterhammel shows how major figures such as Leibniz, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hegel took a keen interest in Asian culture and history, and introduces lesser-known scientific travelers, colonial administrators, Jesuit missionaries, and adventurers who returned home from Asia bearing manuscripts in many exotic languages, huge collections of ethnographic data, and stories that sometimes defied belief. Osterhammel brings the sights and sounds of this tumultuous age vividly to life, from the salons of Paris and the lecture halls of Edinburgh to the deserts of Arabia, the steppes of Siberia, and the sumptuous courts of Asian princes. He demonstrates how Europe discovered its own identity anew by measuring itself against its more senior continent, and how it was only toward the end of this period that cruder forms of Eurocentrism--and condescension toward Asia--prevailed.
Author: Michael Kempe
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324093951
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
A biography of the polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz told through seven critical days spanning his life and revealing his contributions to our modern world. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was the Benjamin Franklin of Europe, a “universal genius” who ranged across many fields and made breakthroughs in most of them. Leibniz invented calculus (independently from Isaac Newton), conceptualized the modern computer, and developed the famous thesis that the existing world is the best that God could have created. In The Best of All Possible Worlds, historian and Leibniz expert Michael Kempe takes us on a journey into the mind and inventions of a man whose contributions are perhaps without parallel in human history. Structured around seven crucial days in Leibniz’s life, Kempe’s account allows us to observe him in the act of thinking and creating, and gives us a deeper understanding of his broad-reaching intellectual endeavors. On October 29, 1675, we find him in Paris, diligently working from his bed amid a sea of notes, and committing the integral symbol—the basis of his calculus—to paper. On April 17, 1703, Leibniz is in Berlin, writing a letter reporting that a Jesuit priest living in China has discovered how to use Leibniz’s binary number system to decipher an ancient Chinese system of writing. One day in August 1714, Leibniz enjoys a Viennese coffee while drawing new connections among ontology and biology and mathematics. The Best of All Possible Worlds transports us to an age defined by rational optimism and a belief in progress, and will endure as one of the few authoritative accounts of Leibniz’s life available in English.
Author: Mårten Söderblom Saarela
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252071
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
A linguistic and historical study of the Manchu script in the early modern world Manchu was a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, and for the next two and a half centuries, Manchu was the language of state in one of the early modern world's great powers. Its prominence and novelty attracted the interest of not only Chinese literati but also foreign scholars. Yet scholars in Europe and Japan, and occasionally even within China itself, were compelled to study the language without access to a native speaker. Jesuit missionaries in Beijing sent Chinese books on Manchu to Europe, where scholars struggled to represent it in an alphabet compatible with Western pedagogy and printing technology. In southern China, meanwhile, an isolated phonologist with access to Jesuit books relied on expositions of the Roman alphabet to make sense of the Manchu script. When Chinese textbooks and dictionaries of Manchu eventually reached Japan, scholars there used their knowledge of Dutch to understand Manchu. In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Mårten Söderblom Saarela focuses on outsiders both within and beyond the Qing empire who had little interaction with Manchu speakers but took an interest in the strange, new language of a rising world power. He shows how—through observation, inference, and reference to received ideas on language and writing—intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Chosŏn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and explores the uses to which it was put for recording sounds and arranging words.
Author: Howard Hotson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199553386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 499
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Book Description
This book discusses the intersection of the great military and intellectual disruptions of the mid-seventeenth century. It examines how the Thirty Years' War scattered representatives of Ramism from central Europe into old and new institutions, especially into the northwest, the Dutch Republic, and England.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900454819X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 605
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Book Description
Hiob Ludolf (1624-1704) and Johann Michael Wansleben (1635-1679), the master and his erstwhile student could not be more different. Ludolf was a celebrated member of the Republic of Letters and the towering authority on Ethiopian studies. Wansleben, himself a brilliant scholar and, unlike Ludolf, a seasoned traveller in the Middle East, converted to Catholicism and eventually died impoverished and marginalized. Both stood at the centre of the burgeoning study of Ethiopia and spent a formative part of their career in middle sized Duchy of Saxe-Gotha which for several years played a pivotal role in Ethiopian-European encounters. This volume offers in-depth studies of the remarkable life and work of these two scholars in a broader intellectual, political, and confessional context.
Author: Markus Friedrich
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421445794
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
"The practice of genealogy, in particular the work of Jakob Wilhelm Imhoff from Nuremberg, Germany, a prolific and highly respected genealogical author, is a case study in how knowledge was produced and disseminated in the 17th and 18th centuries. During this time much of Europe was in the grip of a genealogical craze. Family lineages, and their display in multiple textual and visual forms, were key instruments in defining dynasties, organizing international relations, and structuring social life at large. Despite genealogy's overall impact on social, cultural, and political life, however, scholars have so far largely failed to investigate the complex knowledge economy that supported all forms of genealogical argumentation. This monograph, in fact, is the first book-length study of post-1600 continental genealogy"--
Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Publisher: Science and the Shaping of Mod
ISBN: 0198849079
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 534
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Book Description
How did science come to have such a central place in Western culture? How did our ways of thinking, and our moral, political, and social values, come to be modelled around scientific values? Stephen Gaukroger traces the story of how these values developed, and how they influenced society and culture from the 19th to the mid-20th century.
Author: Bart Jaski
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004462171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529
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Book Description
Adriaan Reland (1676-1718), Arabist, Cartographer, Antiquarian and Scholar of Comparative Religion covers the intellectual achievements of a remarkable man: Adriaan Reland, professor of Oriental languages (1701) and Hebrew Antiquities (1713) at the University of Utrecht from 1701 to 1718. Although he never travelled beyond the borders of his home country, he had an astonishingly broad worldview. The contributions in this volume illuminate Reland’s many accomplishments and follow his scholarly trajectory as an Orientalist, a linguist, a cartographer, a poet, and a historian of comparative religions. Reland, although a devout Protestant, believed that religions should be examined objectively on their own terms with the help of reliable and authentic documents, which would dispel the prejudices of the past. Contributors: Lot Brouwer, Ulrich Groetsch,Toon van Hal, Jason Harris, Bart Jaski, Christian Lange, Richard van Leeuwen, Remke Kruk, Anna Pytlowany, Henk J. van Rinsum, Dirk Sacré, Arnoud Vrolijk, Tobias Winnerling and Jan Just Witkam
