Collection of previously published essays, three translated into English. See "Sources", page [120]. Includes bibliographical references (pages 105-119).
Contents:
Schema and bias : a historian's reflection on double-blind experiments. The soul of brutes : a sixteenth-century debate -- Calvino, Manzoni and the gray area -- Schema and bias : a historian's reflection on double-blind experiments.
Summary:
"Carlo Ginzburg has been at the forefront of the discipline of microhistory ever since his earliest works were published to great acclaim in the 1970s. The soul of brutes brings together four of Ginzburg's recent essays and lectures that testify to the diversity of his thoughts on history and philosophy. 'Civilizaton and barbarism' resurrects a sixteenth-century debate between two thinkers in Spain about the humanness, or lack thereof, of Native Americans, and highlights the influence of classical thinkers, from Herodotus to Aristotle, and the iterations and interpretations through which their writings have traversed down to the Cinquecento. In 'The soul of brutes', Ginzburg traces the genealogy of the debate on the rationality of animals and the limits of their imagination. Following Montaigne, he provokes, are we to beasts as they seem to us? In 'Calvino, Manzoni and the grey zone', he writes about the mental dialogue between Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and two Italians who profoundly influenced Levi's search for these'unexplored pockets of exception'--Italo Calvino and nineteenth-century novelist and philosopher Alessandro Manzoni. And finally, in 'Schema and bias', he probes whether the historian can clearly see into the past, peering through the layers of their own prejudices, or if relativism is the only path." -- Publisher, inside front flap of dustjacket.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.