Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A MAN ON THE CUSP : SIR WILLIAM JONES'S PHILOLOGY AND ORIENTAL STUDIES

1999; University of Texas Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

1534-7303

Haruko Momma,

History, Culture, and Diplomacy

It is often said that last quarter of eighteenth century was a time of transition: during this brief period, Europe witnessed breakdown of old regime and rise of a new; cultural climate was changing from cosmopolitanism to nationalism; in literary circles, neoclassicism gave way to romanticism.1 This was also time of an academic revolution, to which modern university may look back for its systemic foundation; academics may also recognize in this era kernels of disciplines which they still profess today. A more synthetic theorization of this period, however, has been undertaken by Michel Foucault in his influential book The Order of Things through archaeology of human sciences.2 According to Foucault, last quarter of eighteenth century entails first of two phases of a historical event one of most radical events, indeed, that ever occurred in Western culture, because it first brought about the dissolution of positivity of Classical knowledge and then constituted another positivity from which, even now, we have doubtless not entirely emerged. While fundamental mode of being of positivities did not actually change until second phase of this event, which falls in first quarter of nineteenth century, first phase nonetheless modified configuration of positivities and incurred