The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of the environment enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. Humans have a need to communicate, as they…[Read more]

Dini çoğulculuk, dini dışlayıcılık ve kapsayıcılıktan farklı olarak, her dinsel inanış taraftarlarının kendi dinleri içinde kalarak ilahi selamete erişeceğini söyler. Temelde, teolojik ve felsefi boyutları olan dini çoğulculuk tartışmasının siyasete bakan bir yönü de vardır. İslam tarihinde Meşşâî felsefenin kurucusu ve mutluluk filozofu ola…[Read more]

The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment, including fire and metals, to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of fire and metals enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. Fire and…[Read more]

This paper was written to investigate the order of discoveries made in chemistry leading up to the discovery of the periodic table. New experimental techniques, such as the pneumatic trough, voltaic pile, spectroscopy, and potassium analysis led to the discovery of many new elements and their properties which enabled the discovery of the periodic…[Read more]

The change from the traditional Western and Chinese view of the elements involving materials such as water, air, earth, wood, metal and fire, to the chemical elements making up the periodic table, to atoms, to particles such as protons, neutrons and electrons, and then to quarks was inevitable. The order of discovery of these ideas of the ultimate…[Read more]

The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. The human environment has a particular structure so that human knowledge of the environment is acquired in a particular order. The structure of the universe and the nature of the human sensory apparatus ensured that…[Read more]

It is proposed that the ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of the environment enables human needs to be meet in a more efficient manner. Human needs…[Read more]

This paper was written in order to examine the order of discovery of significant developments in the history of electricity. The history of electricity reveals a series of discoveries with the simplest discoveries being made first and more complex discoveries being made later. Some discoveries could not be made without certain prior discoveries…[Read more]

Guttman scale analysis is a very useful tool to understand the evolution of societies. It shows the accumulation of cultural traits throughout history in various societies and that those cultural traits were usually accumulated in the same order. The results of studies, by Robert Carneiro and others, shows the accumulation of cultural traits is…[Read more]

This paper was written to question the widespread belief among anthropologists that prehistoric hunter gatherers knew about agriculture long before agriculture began to be practised. The paper suggests gradually accumulating human knowledge led to the development of agriculture rather than population pressure, favourable mutations or convenient…[Read more]

Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Leslie White, Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, and Stephen Sanderson, all produced some of the more interesting theories of history, social change and cultural evolution but their theories have a common deficiency. None of them provide an ultimate explanation for social, cultural and historical change. This failure was…[Read more]

The functioning of truth in a history text does not depend only on its episte-mological conditions, but also on an ethical relation between the historian and the reader. Paul Ricoeur proposed that such ethical relation is based upon a tacit reading pact, a contract in which the author ensures his reader that his narra-tive is…[Read more]

In Historians of Brazil, Francisco Iglésias reviews some of the great names in Brazilian historiography as divided by him into three distinct moments: up to 1838, from 1838 to 1931, and from 1931 onwards. This article shall focus on the third of these moments, which has traditionally been considered the moment of the “modern Brazilian hi…[Read more]

This paper suggests ever increasing human knowledge of the world around us is the driving force for much social and cultural evolution. It examines the order of discovery of our knowledge of the world around us and notes this knowledge comes to us in a particular and necessary order from the easiest to discover to the more difficult to discover.…[Read more]

By way of the autobiographical writings of Bruno Schulz and the “resurrection” paintings of Stanley Spencer, this talk sketches out some of the ways in which literature and the fine arts situate themselves within the division, or series of breaks, that Michel de Certeau argued Western historiography inscribes between past and present, between the…[Read more]

Although the ultimate theme of “The Seven Sleepers” can be located in its medieval Christian doctrine—the bodily resurrection is real, and therefore it is in the afterworld where one finally, really “lives,” with shining body and soul together—I would like to argue that, in the Old English version’s emphasis on the highly individualized emotion…[Read more]

Through an analysis of Tony Kushner’s 2001 play “Homebody/Kabul” and the Old English “Ruin” poem, this essay explores the tension, anxiety, and isolation inherent in the aesthetic and philosophical enterprises of measuring the distance that separates myth from real being (a project that takes place, I would argue, against Levinas, not just o…[Read more]

Through a comparative analysis of Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale” and Lars von Trier’s film “Breaking the Waves,” this essay wonders what happens when two texts and one reader happen to each other and open up a singular adventure that is also a moment of ‘futurition’ that opens up new horizons of meaning, both human and inhuman. How can we reckon the…[Read more]

An overview of the “state of the field” of critical post/humanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary post/humanist studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to “Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio State…[Read more]

Preface to Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018)