Präsentationsvideo (4. Folge der Reihe 'ÖGE18 Update') Anyone wishing to look beyond the
paradigm of Western progress needs to understand how it came into being. In the intellectual
culture of the 17th and 18th centuries the competitive comparison of Ancients and Moderns and
their respective relations to civilization and barbarism constituted one of the formative
discourses. Yet alternative ideas of time and historicity are encountered not only in cultural
contexts outside of Europe but also in the largely forgotten professional knowledge of the Old
World: Thomism Peripatetism moderate forms of criticism political theory and legal
practice. This book introduces a broad panorama of such intellectual cultures in Central
Europe. It situates theological historical and philosophical scholarship in its institutional
and epistemological environments: the Church the Holy Roman Empire and the emerging Habsburg
Monarchy. In doing so it identifies struggles over competing pasts - Christian ethnic legal
- as the core of those domains' intellectual development.
