Intellectual History Research Group

Description

The Intellectual History research group brings together staff and students from across the School who are interested in the history of ideas, intellectuals, and intellectual movements.

Edinburgh has one of the largest concentrations of intellectual historians of any university in the UK, with particular strengths in the following areas:

• Ancient Greek political thought and practice
• Early modern European intellectual history
• Modern global intellectual history (including Europe, America, Asia and Africa) Members are currently involved in a wide range of research projects, including:
• a history of distributed cognition, the ability of humans to rely on features of the body and the world to supplement and structure thinking in subtle and complex ways, from ancient Greece and through the ages
• Greeks' ideas about the role of the law and the relationship between authoritative lawgiving and popular sovereignty
• the role of intellectuals in Hellenistic society and the impact of the emergence of the royal court as a focus for intellectual activity on the character of Greek intellectual culture
• a history of Japan's first psychotherapists (1930s - 1960s), together with the broader national and transnational processes of 'religion-psy dialogue' of which they were a pioneering part
• a political and intellectual biography of William Carstares, one of King William III’s most important advisors on Scottish ecclesiastical and political affairs
• Scottish religious heterodoxy and its contribution to European free thought, c. 1688-1713, with particular attention to the writings of Archibald Pitcairne (1652-1713)

The Group organises work-in-progress seminars for PhD students and members of staff, as well as occasional lectures from scholars within and outwith Edinburgh.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University affiliation(s)

University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh