"It is not sufficiently appreciated, I believe, how profoundly Clio, the muse of history, permeated every aspect of thought during the Romantic era: philosophy, theology, law, natural science, medicine, and all other fields of intellectual endeavor.... Thoughtful students of the period well understand that 'Romanticism' is not merely a literary or aesthetic movement but, rather, a general climate of opinion."—from the IntroductionIn a book certain to be of interest to readers in many disciplines, the distinguished scholar Theodore Ziolkowski shows how a strong impulse toward historical concerns was formalized in the four German academic faculties: philosophy, theology, law, and medicine/biology. In Clio the Romantic Muse, he focuses on representative figures in whose early work the sense of history was first manifested: G. W. F. Hegel, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Through biographical treatments of these and other leading German scholars, Ziolkowski traces how the disciplines became historicized in the period 1790–1810. He goes on to suggest how powerfully the Romantic thinkers influenced their disciples in the twentieth century.

"It is not sufficiently appreciated, I believe, how profoundly Clio, the muse of history, permeated every aspect of thought during the Romantic era: philosophy, theology, law, natural science, medicine, and all other fields of intellectual endeavor.... Thoughtful students of the period well understand that 'Romanticism' is not merely a literary or aesthetic movement but, rather, a general climate of opinion."--from the IntroductionIn a book certain to be of interest to readers in many disciplines, the distinguished scholar Theodore Ziolkowski shows how a strong impulse toward historical concerns was formalized in the four German academic faculties: philosophy, theology, law, and medicine/biology. In Clio the Romantic Muse, he focuses on representative figures in whose early work the sense of history was first manifested: G. W. F. Hegel, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Through biographical treatments of these and other leading German scholars, Ziolkowski traces how the disciplines became historicized in the period 1790-1810. He goes on to suggest how powerfully the Romantic thinkers influenced their disciples in the twentieth century.

In the first comprehensive English-language portrait of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as political thinkers and actors, Jakob Norberg reveals how history's two most famous folklorists envisioned the role of literary and linguistic scholars in defining national identity. Convinced of the political relevance of their folk tale collections and grammatical studies, the Brothers Grimm argued that they could help disentangle language groups from one another, redraw the boundaries of states in Europe, and counsel kings and princes on the proper extent and character of their rule. They sought not only to recover and revive a neglected native culture for a contemporary audience, but also to facilitate a more harmonious and enduring relationship between the traditional political elite and an emerging national collective. Through close historical analysis, Norberg reconstructs how the Grimms wished to mediate between sovereigns and peoples, politics and culture. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

"What is historiography?" asked the American historian Carl Becker in 1938. Professional historians continue to argue over the meaning of the term. This book challenges the view of historiography as an esoteric subject by presenting an accessible and concise overview of the history of historical writing from the Renaissance to the present. Historiography plays an integral role in aiding undergraduate students to better understand the nature and purpose of historical analysis more generally by examining the many conflicting ways that historians have defined and approached history. By demonstrating how these historians have differed in both their interpretations of specific historical events and their definitions of history itself, this book conveys to students the interpretive character of history as a discipline and the way that the historian's context and subjective perspective influence his or her understanding of the past.

Immanuel Kant's work changed the course of modern philosophy; Karl Ameriks examines how. He compares the philosophical system set out in Kant's Critiques with the work of the major philosophers before and after Kant. Individual essays provide case studies in support of Ameriks's thesis that late 18th-century reactions to Kant initiated an "historical turn," after which historical and systematic considerations became joined in a way that fundamentally distinguishes philosophy from science and art.

Gentlemen and Amazons traces the nineteenth-century genesis and development of an important contemporary myth about human origins: that of an original prehistoric matriarchy. Cynthia Eller explores the intellectual history of the myth, which arose from male scholars who mostly wanted to vindicate the patriarchal family model as a higher stage of human development. Eller tells the stories these men told, analyzes the gendered assumptions they made, and provides the necessary context for understanding how feminists of the 1970s and 1980s embraced as historical "fact" a discredited nineteenth-century idea.

There exists a very particular grasp of the relation between language and objectivity in the work of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), one that rejects the idea of truth as the reflection between words and what they represent. Jeffrey Reid's Real Words is an examination of Hegel's notion of scientific language (i.e. the language of his system) and its implications to a type of discourse that is itself true objectivity. Hegel sees scientific logos as real, actual, and true, where there is no distance between signifier and signified and where the word is the effective thing. The words of Hegel's system are meant to be objective: they 'take place' in the world; they are not the arbitrary constructions of the individual philosopher. This concept of language is only possible through the idea of content, real words that actually embody the truth of nature, history, law, art and philosophy itself. Real Words presents an original way of understanding one of the most important philosophers in the Western tradition.