Year: 2016
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Andre GingrichWhen an early 21st-century interdisciplinary research project comprises comparative investigations across three religions and their main realms of influence in medieval Eurasia as here, basic conceptual and epistemological approaches to history emerge.Despite their heterogeneous disciplinary backgrounds, most contributors to the present set of studies operate within the broad middle ground between universalism and particularism.A certain more or less explicit commitment to investigate comparative dimensions is invested from the outset, and thus combines with being open to scrutinizing and assessing potential similarities and parallels.At the same time, this combines with a solid respect for the specificities of particular historical processes in smaller and wider contexts.Writing "multiple histories" is a loose and flexible description for such a set of approaches.1In view of current debates and buzzwords, it should be clarified that avenues toward elaborating multiple histories are by no means identical with actively participating in debates about "axial age" legacies, nor in sharing that paradigm.This does not deny that the concept "axial age" is as much debated and highly contested as it is pervasive.In one or the other version, as elaborated since the mid-20th century by generalists ranging from Karl Jaspers (1949) in philosophy to S.N.Eisenstadt (1986) in sociology,2 this concept and the underlying sets of hypotheses have been fairly influential for the study of earlier periods in some of the same regions that this volume is engaging with.The basic "axial age" argument holds that between 800 and 200 bc, new ways of philosophical and religious thinking had appeared in written genres across major parts of Asia and Europe-providing a "breakthrough" to specific dynamics of state formation, and to new civilizational patterns with a focus on conceptualizing the relation between transcendental and mundane order in new ways, largely independently of each other yet sharing a basic emphasis upon 1 Gingrich, "Multiple Histories". 2 Jaspers, The Origin; Eisenstadt, ed., Origins and Diversity of Axial Age.
Source: BRILL eBooks
Author: Andre Gingrich
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: Austrian Science Fund
OpenAlex ID: W2731963973