Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from modernism. The term has been more generally applied to describe a historical era said to follow after modernity and the tendencies of this era.
Social science is the branch of science devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 19th century. In addition to sociology, it now encompasses a wide array of academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, human geography, linguistics, management science, media studies, musicology, political science, psychology, welfare and nursing studies and social history.
Discourse generally denotes written and spoken communications, though its usage differs between various disciplines and approaches. For instance, in semantics and discourse analysis, it is a conceptual generalization of conversation within each modality and context of communication. Moreover, in regard to semantics, discourse is understood as the totality of codified language used in a given field of intellectual enquiry and of social practice, such as legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse, etc.
Intellectual history refers to the history of ideas and thinkers. This history cannot be considered without the knowledge of the humans who created, discussed, wrote about, and in other ways were concerned with ideas. Intellectual history as practiced by historians is parallel to the history of philosophy as done by philosophers, and is more akin to the history of ideas. Its central premise is that ideas do not develop in isolation from the people who developed and use them, and that one must study ideas not only as abstract propositions but also in terms of the culture, lives, and historical contexts.
The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises, and of the effects that prevailing ideas have on societies. It is not a specialized area of sociology but instead deals with broad fundamental questions about the extent and limits of social influences on individuals' lives and with the social-cultural basis of our knowledge about the world. Complementary to the sociology of knowledge is the sociology of ignorance, including the study of nescience, ignorance, knowledge gaps, or non-knowledge as inherent features of knowledge-making.
Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretive principles or methods used when immediate comprehension fails and includes the art of understanding and communication.
Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and its discipline. The term was coined by French philosopher Voltaire.
Critique is a method of disciplined, systematic study of a written or oral discourse. Although critique is commonly understood as fault finding and negative judgment, it can also involve merit recognition, and in the philosophical tradition it also means a methodical practice of doubt. The contemporary sense of critique has been largely influenced by the Enlightenment critique of prejudice and authority, which championed the emancipation and autonomy from religious and political authorities.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being (1936), on the topic of that name, which is regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'.
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner is a British intellectual historian. He is regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Wolfson History Prize in 1979 and the Balzan Prize in 2006. Between 1996 and 2008 he was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He is currently the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London.
Hans D. Sluga is a German academic. Since 1970, Sluga has been a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He previously served as a lecturer in philosophy at University College London. He teaches and writes on topics in analytic philosophy as well as on political philosophy and has been particularly influenced by the thought of Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault.
The philosophy of social science is the study of the logic, methods, and foundations of social sciences such as psychology, economics, and political science. Philosophers of social science are concerned with the differences and similarities between the social and the natural sciences, causal relationships between social phenomena, the possible existence of social laws, and the ontological significance of structure and agency.
Historical theology is the study of the history of Christian doctrine. Grenz, Guretzki and Nordling describe it as, "The division of the theological discipline that seeks to understand and delineate how the church interpreted Scripture and developed doctrine throughout its history, from the time of the apostles to the present day. The twofold function of historical theology is to show the origin and development of beliefs held in the present day and to help contemporary theologians identify theological errors of the past that should be avoided in the present."
In social theory and philosophy, antihumanism is a theory that is critical of traditional humanism, traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition. Central to antihumanism is the view that philosophical anthropology and its concepts of "human nature", "man" or "humanity" should be rejected as historically relative, ideological or metaphysical.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to history:
Jonathan Irvine Israel is a British writer and academic specialising in Dutch history, the Age of Enlightenment and European Jews. Israel was appointed as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, in January 2001. He was previously Professor of Dutch History and Institutions at the University College London.
A scholar of the history of British political discourse, J. G. A. Pocock, the Harry C. Black Chair of History Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, has enjoyed over 60 years of publication. Now in his tenth decade, he recently concluded Barbarism and Religion, a six-volume study of Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The first two volumes of B&R were awarded the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for the year 1999.
Dag Herbjørnsrud is a historian of ideas, author, a former editor-in-chief, and a founder of Center for Global and Comparative History of Ideas in Oslo. He has published for Aeon, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association (APA), Open Culture, etc, and is currently the editor of a special issue of the journal Cosmopolis (Brussels), on decolonizing. Herbjørnsrud sits on the Editorial Review Board of the book series Global Epistemics at Rowman & Littlefield.
Lorraine Daston is an American historian of science. Director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, she is an authority on Early Modern European scientific and intellectual history. In 1993, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.
Andreas Dorschel is a German philosopher. Since 2002, he has been professor of aesthetics and head of the Institute for Music Aesthetics at the University of the Arts Graz (Austria).
