Conceptualizing the World: An Exploration across Disciplines

✍ Scribed by Helge Jordheim (editor); Erling Sandmo (editor)

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 408
• Series: Time and the World: Interdisciplinary Studies in Cultural Transformations; 4
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

What is—and what was—“the world”? Though often treated as interchangeable with the ongoing and inexorable progress of globalization, concepts of “world,” “globe,” or “earth” instead suggest something limited and absolute. This innovative and interdisciplinary volume concerns itself with this central paradox: that the complex, heterogeneous, and purportedly transhistorical dynamics of globalization have given rise to the idea and reality of a finite—and thus vulnerable—world. Through studies of illuminating historical moments that range from antiquity to the era of Google Earth, each contribution helps to trace the emergence of the world in multitudinous representations, practices, and human experiences.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Illustrations
Introduction. The World as Concept and Object of Knowledge
Part I NAMING THE WORLD
1 “World” An Exploration of the Relationship between Conceptual History and Etymology
2 A Multiverse of Knowledge: The Epistemology and Hermeneutics of the ʿālam Medieval Islamic Thought
3 Globalization of Human Conscience: A Modern Muslim Case
4 Creating World through Concept Learning
5 Between Metaphor and Geopolitics: The History of the Concept the Third World
6 On the Dialectics of Ecological World Concepts
Part II ORDERING THE WORLD
7 The Emergence of International Law and the Opening of World Order: Hugo Grotius Reconsidered
8 “Natural Capital,” “Human Capital,” “Social Capital” It’s All Capital Now
9 The Worlds in Human Rights: Images or Mirages?
10 Democracy of the “New World” The Great Binding Law of Peace and the Political System of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy
11 The Immanent World: Responsibility and Spatial Justice
12 From Critical to Partisan Dictionaries; or, What Is Excluded from Today’s Flat World Orthodoxies?
Part III TIMING THE WORLD
13 At Home or Away: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Cosmopolitanism
14 Extensions of World Heritage: The Globe, the List, and the Limes
15 The End of the World: From the Lisbon Earthquake to the Last Days
16 Time and Space in World Literature: Ibsen in and out of Sync
Part IV MAPPING THE WORLD
17 Middle Age of the Globe
18 The Champion of the North: World Time in Olaus Magnus’s Carta marina
19 The Search for Vínland and Norse Conceptions of the World
20 The Cartographic Constitution of Global Politics
21 The Individual and the “Intellectual Globe” Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Vannevar Bush
Part V MAKING THE WORLD
22 The World as Sphere: Conceptualizing with Sloterdijk
23 The Fontenellian Moment: Revisiting Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Worlds
24 Fixating the Poles: Science, Fiction, and Photography at the Ends of the World
25 The Norwegian Who Became a Globe: Mediation and Temporality in Roald Amundsen’s 1911 South Pole Conquest
Index