Aristotle called the human being a zoon politikon by nature. But who exactly was this political animal? In other words, where are the boundaries of humanity to be drawn? Thinkers through the ages reflected on whether women and children were included in the question of the political; whether foreigners, slaves or servants could be considered fully human; and — particularly prompted by Roman Law — whether animals and human beings could be said to share legal and moral spaces. Indeed, concepts of what constituted true humanness are constantly being negotiated; they remain historically contingent.
This annual meeting of the Intellectual History Society invites papers that historicize shifting categories of men, women and other animals throughout the ages. When, where, how and why were boundaries drawn and redrawn between men and women, animals and non-animals, between proper and improper subjects of agency, law, and morality? We invite papers that explore exclusions and inclusions of individuals and groups from, and in, narratives of intellectual history; that reflect on the borders of intellectual and political communities; and that probe the relationship of nature to culture when it comes to defining humans and other animals.
Intellectual history has a reputation for dealing with “great white men” only. We would like to confront this historical bias by inviting papers that explore the question of what constitutes the very subjects that intellectual history deals with. What will happen if we turn our focus and intellectual practice around and think about women, men, and other animals? Proposals are invited which explore the theological, metaphysical, epistemic, empirical registers that have been influential in defining the status of men, women and other animals as knowledge-bearing subjects and as objects of enquiry and with this we hope to unpack further the category of “the human” by exploring different processes of “naturalization” in relation to men, women and other animals.
Not restricting ourselves to a specific historical era, we welcome proposals on how knowledge and ideas about men, women and other animals have been generated across all time periods and world regions. Contributions are invited from across a broad range of domains of ideas, including but not limited to the history of political and economic ideas, the history of science, the history of religious ideas, the history of philosophy, etc. Furthermore, we welcome contributions that deal with a broad array of historical actors and sources, not simply intellectuals in the classical sense of the term. We particularly welcome proposals from early career researchers.
Possible themes for papers include, but are not restricted to:
