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Conceptual history (also the history of concepts or, from German, Begriffsgeschichte) is a branch of historical and cultural studies that deals with the historical semantics of terms. It sees the etymology and the change in meaning of terms as forming a crucial basis for contemporary cultural, conceptual and linguistic understanding. Conceptual history deals with the evolution of paradigmatic ideas and value systems over time, such as "liberty" or "reform". It argues that social history – indeed all historical reflection – must begin with an understanding of historically contingent cultural values and practices in their particular contexts over time, not merely as unchanging ideologies or processes.
Interest in conceptual history was given a particular boost in the 20th century through the publication of the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, and the journal Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte .
Conceptual history is an interdisciplinary methodology. Alongside the philosopher Joachim Ritter, the historians Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, and the sociologist Erich Rothacker are viewed as its pioneers in the German-speaking world and internationally. Raymond Williams was the leading scholar in the English-speaking world. Since the Eighties, a relevant development of the history of concepts (storia dei concetti), has been promoted by a numerous group of Italian scholars, counting among them Alessandro Biral, Giuseppe Duso, Carlo Galli , and Roberto Esposito, founders of the Centro di ricerca sul lessico politico europeo. [1] Outlets of the Italian debate on conceptual history have been the short-lived Centauro (1981-1986) [2] and Filosofia Politica, founded in 1987. Today, conceptual history is promoted also by the History of Concepts Group and its peer-reviewed journal Contributions to the History of Concepts under the lead of Margrit Pernau, Jan Ifversen, and Jani Marjanen. Another journal that publishes research in conceptual history is the Journal of the History of Ideas . Examples of conceptual histories include a genealogy of the concept of globalization drawing on the approach of Williams written by Paul James and Manfred B. Steger:
Although keywords represent a critical mass of the vocabulary of any given era, the history of their meaning construction often remains obscure. "Globalization" is no exception. While the meanings of other seminal "keywords" such as "economics", "culture", or "modernity" evolved rather slowly and built upon a relatively continuous base, "globalization" has had a very short and discontinuous history. [3]
This historiographical approach has also been used by the Cambridge Group for the History and Epistemology of Psychiatry who, since the 1980s, has published a long series of papers on the ‘conceptual history’ of the most relevant mental symptoms and diseases. [4]
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory.
Intellectual history is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual history is that ideas do not develop in isolation from the thinkers who conceptualize and apply those ideas; thus the intellectual historian studies ideas in two contexts: (i) as abstract propositions for critical application; and (ii) in concrete terms of culture, life, and history.
Higher education in Italy is mainly provided by a large and international network of public and state affiliated universities. State-run universities of Italy are under the supervision of Italian's Ministry of Education. There is also a number of private universities and state-run post-secondary educational centers providing a vocational instruction.
Otto Brunner was an Austrian historian. He is best known for his work on later medieval and early modern European social history.
Victor Neumann is a Romanian historian, political analyst, and professor at the West University in Timișoara. He is a well-known specialist in the recent cultural and intellectual histories of Eastern and Central Europe. Much of his work deals with Conceptual History, history of political thought and theory of history. As of October 2013, he is Director of the Timișoara Art Museum.
Remo Bodei was an Italian philosopher. He was a professor of the history of philosophy at the UCLA University, Los Angeles California, and also taught at the University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Bodei was born in Cagliari. His initial interests were in classical German philosophy, and the Weimar Classicism period (1770–1830). He subsequently penned over 200 papers on utopian thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and contemporary political thought. He died in Pisa, aged 81. He has been member of the Contemporary Centre of Arts founded by Menotti Lerro. He won the Cilento Poetry Prize for criticism in 2020 (posthumous). He was the philosopher who defined the oral speech given by Menotti Lerro, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Centro Contemporaneo delle Arti, as "New Manifesto on the Arts": theoretical basis of Empathism. Bodei was considered a philosopher, "among the leading experts in the philosophies of classical German idealism and the Romantic age".
Carlos Alzugaray Treto is a Cuban diplomat and educator.
Manfred Frank is a German philosopher, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen. His work focuses on German idealism, romanticism, and the concepts of subjectivity and self-consciousness. His 950-page study of German romanticism, Unendliche Annäherung, has been described as "the most comprehensive and thoroughgoing study of early German romanticism" and "surely one of the most important books from the post-War period on the history of German philosophy." He has also written at length on analytic philosophy and recent French philosophy.
Giacomo Marramao is an Italian philosopher who teaches theoretical philosophy and political philosophy at the Roma Tre University in Rome.
Sebastiano Maffettone is a political philosopher and University Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome, where he teaches Political Philosophy and Theories of Globalization. He has taught in several Italian universities as well as International universities. Maffettone graduated summa cum laude from the University of Naples in 1970, and he completed his graduate studies in social philosophy LSE in 1976, under the supervision of philosophers such as Karl Popper and Amartya K. Sen.
Jörn Leonhard is a historian and professor of Western European History at the History Department of the University of Freiburg since 2006. From 2007 to 2012, he was co-director of the School of History at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). His published works focus on the history of liberalism, nationalism, empires and wars. Leonhard has received several important research awards. His books “Die Büchse der Pandora” (2014) as well as “Der Überforderte Frieden” (2018) established him as an important representative in the research of global history.
Werner Conze was a German historian. Georg Iggers refers to him as "one of the most important historians and mentors of the post-1945 generation of West German historians." Beginning in 1998, Conze's role during the Third Reich and his successful postwar career in spite of this became a subject of great controversy among German historians.
Marco Sgarbi is an Italian philosopher and an historian of philosophy, with a special interest in the history of epistemology and logic. He is associate professor at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He is member of the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana.
William Klinger was a Croatian historian who specialized in modern Croatian and Yugoslav history as well as history of communism and nationalism.
Thomas Maissen is a professor of modern history at Heidelberg University and co-director of the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context". From 2013 to 2023 he was director of the German Historical Institute in Paris.
Francisco Elías de Tejada y Spínola Gómez was a Spanish scholar and a Carlist politician. He is considered one of top intellectuals of the Francoist era, though not necessarily of Francoism. As theorist of law he represented the school known as iusnaturalismo, as historian of political ideas he focused mostly on Hispanidad, and as theorist of politics he pursued a Traditionalist approach. As a Carlist he remained an ideologue rather than a political protagonist.
Celia Amorós Puente is a Spanish philosopher, essayist and supporter of feminist theory. She is a key figure in the so-called equality feminism and focused an important part of her research in the building of relations between Enlightenment and feminism. Her book Hacia una crítica de la razón patriarcal constitutes a new outlook on the gender perspective of philosophy, revealing the biases of androcentrism and claims a critical review on behalf of women.
Sergio Cotta was an Italian philosopher, jurist and university professor. He was considered a specialist on the political thought of the Enlightenment. Cotta, along with André Masson and Robert Shackleton, was considered the most important interpreter of Montesquieu during the 20th century.
François Hartog is a French historian. He is noted for his "regimes of historicity" theory as well as his analyses of presentism and the contemporary experience of time. Hartog is also an academic and author of several works including The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History.
Critique and Crisis is the title of the dissertation by the historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) from 1954 at the University of Heidelberg. In the 1959 book edition, it was initially subtitled A contribution to the pathogenesis of the bourgeois world, and later A study on the pathogenesis of the bourgeois world. In this work, Koselleck subjected the Enlightenment and its philosophy of history to a critical appraisal influenced by the authoritarian idea of the state of his early mentor Carl Schmitt. With this, he intended to expose the (seemingly) humanistic-universal theorems of the Enlightenment as "hypocritical" fighting concepts. In misjudging the peace function of the absolutist state in the religious wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, they had undermined its foundations. The elites of the bourgeoisie, who had risen under the protection of absolutism, had triggered a state crisis with their enlightening criticism, which ultimately led to the French Revolution. The widespread attention that the book received can be seen from the multiple reprints and the numerous translations.
Kończal, Kornelia (2016), Czego możemy się nauczyć od Reinharta Kosellecka, czyli o potrzebie badania polskiej semantyki historycznej. Rozmowa z profesorem Maciejem Janowskim, Stan Rzeczy 1, p. 83-96.