Historical Reframing of Childhood

Abstract

Address given in abridged form upon accepting the position of Distinguished Professor of Utrecht University on Friday, April 18 th , 2008 in Utrecht."The grown-up squatted down to be at the child's level, doing so in an ungraceful manner."From: 'Bint. Roman van een zender.' by F. Bordewijk, 1934, p. 111, Utrecht: De gemeenschap. Rector Magnificus, ladies and gentlemen,Western man is a Child of the Enlightenment. Being a thinker, speaker and writer about children, I have no choice but to come to terms with the Enlightenment. However, because of the legacy of post-modern French philosophers in particular, one could be inclined to assume that the wonderful ideas of the Enlightenment have become outdated. emy of Sciences in 1995 held a conference named "The Flight from Science and Reason", the report of which was published in a book . After reading this report, Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, realised that post-modernism is based on absurdities (Hulspas, 1998). He collected a great many nonsensical quotes from post-modern philosophical works and turned these into a bulky fake article, which he submitted to Social Text magazine. His article was given the very post-modern title of "Transgressing the Boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (Sokal, 1996a). The magazine editors were very pleased and published the article without any reserves. They considered it a godsend for a theme issue, intended to parry criticism of physicists on post-modernism. Prior to publication, Sokal had his intention drawn up by a solicitor and on the very same day that the article was published, he gave an explanation in a well-read scientific magazine, Lingua Franca, acknowledging that his Social Text contribution was actually a hideous pack of fashionable post-modern sounding rubbish (Sokal, 1996b). Like no other, Sokal exposed the post-modern emperor's clothes, or if you like: deconstructed deconstruction. An awful commotion ensued, the effects of which are still reverberating today, more than 10 years later. At first, there was no or little response from French philosophers. This changed after Sokal, together with Bricmont, published the book "Impostures Intellectuelles" (1997), in which they elaborated upon the physical nonsense in many post-modern texts. This book was a great success and was printed and reprinted in many languages (e.g. Sokal & Bricmont, 1997, 1998a,b, 1999. When it received attention from Le Monde, all hell broke loose, much to the disadvantage of French post-modern philosophers, particularly

Curiosity, youth, and knowledge in the visual and textual culture of the Dutch Republic

“…The question if and how curiosity was related to early modern youth (children and adolescents, loosely defined here [for the Dutch context] as "the unmarried" [Dorren 2001, 40]) has rarely been approached from a cultural perspective. 2 That is to say, only sixteenth and eighteenth century developments have been included in the study of the early stages of the conceptualization of childhood as a social construct that occurred after the publication of Philippe Ariès's L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime in 1960 (for an overview see, for example, Frijhoff 2012, and for the Dutch context Koops 2001 andKoops 2016).…”