After considering the evolution of thoughts about the origin of the Universe since antiquity, the evolution of scientific methods is described. The current view on the origin of the universe is considered in the light of these methods

At the end of November 1755, news of the Lisbon earthquake spread rapidly to all capital cities of Europe. Horrific reports gave rise to a wealth of sensational journalism. As Samuel Johnson and others attest, this was particularly marked in Great Britain. The catastrophe remained a popular subject of flysheets, newspapers, and engravings for months on end. The event was magnified many times over in the eyes and minds by the popular press, which led to forms of public distress. For the first time in the western world, the press, on the occasion of the Lisbon earthquake, helped create the illusion of proximity and unity between the peoples of different nations in Europe. As Voltaire said, ‘L'Europe ressemblait à une grande famille réunie après ses différences’.

This essay considers reactions to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in particular the ways in which the founders of English Methodism, John and Charles Wesley used the event in their sermons and hymns respectively. The Wesleys focused on the vengeful power of the divine in order to urge people to look into their hearts and change their ways to avoid damnation. In contrast, the reaction to the global natural disasters of 2005 has been quite different. The Archbishop of Canterbury's essay that emphasises the privacy of faith that exists because it is engaged in a struggle against doubt is compared with the Wesleyan response, and through these very different religious positions the contrast between eighteenth century and twenty-first century reactions to natural disasters is highlighted.

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake produced huge and diversified reactions in Portuguese literature. This paper aims at analysing some of the issues raised by these reactions, namely: the recognition of the disturbance, beginning as geographical and architectural, but soon becoming symbolic and anthropological; the effects on the understanding of a phenomenon which, because it goes beyond the frontiers of what is known, soon becomes a paradigm of the incomprehensible, with the consequent debates on how to make God compatible with the destruction that occurred, and the confirmation of fear and terror as the major effects of the event. The paradoxical relation between seeing (too much) and saying (too little) is stressed, as well as the visual, theatrical, and melodramatic components of several descriptions of the event.

The consideration of some Italian writings on the Lisbon earthquake allows us to single out three different kinds of reaction to the catastrophe. The very first contemporary reports reflect the process of the construction of an event that, according to Gilles Deleuze, is characterized by extension, intensity and formation of something new. Then, some years after 1755, a new interest in the theme of ruins emerges in the work of Giuseppe Baretti, for whom ruins represent the reference to a past that has to be contemplated in its loss of functionality (following a pattern of perception recently described by Marc Augé). Finally, a third aspect is linked to the materialistic reflection about nature put forward by the nineteenth-century poet Giacomo Leopardi who elaborates his pessimistic conception of nature in a strict dependence on Voltaire's Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne pointing out the antinomy between collective happiness and individual sorrow.

Contemporary Dutch reactions to the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 mostly followed the general European pattern, explaining the event from a philosophical and theological stance. Still, the one Dutch poet to write extensively on the disaster gave a peculiarly Dutch twist to his interpretation. In essence, he used the Lisbon disaster to vent his views on the Dutch Republic's position at the middle of the eighteenth century, and to urge it to reclaim its rightful place in the scheme of things of what we in the meantime have come to call modernity. Some two centuries later, a major Dutch modernist poet again fastened upon the Lisbon earthquake to define himself in relation to that same modernity. However, he did so in a sense opposite to that of his eighteenth-century predecessor.

In contrast to other previous and later disasters the Lisbon earthquake was more than a local disaster that changed the life of the Portuguese population and later became subject to the merciless oblivion of history. This cataclysm left lasting traces in European science, social life, religion and philosophy. The material effects were rapidly felt all over Europe, also affecting the economy and the whole conception of how humans should think and act in a world where such events occurred. This paper follows the change in Immanuel Kant's philosophy after the earthquake based on the thesis that this event contributed fundamentally to the formation of Kant's mature philosophy and its paradigmatic status in European thought until the present day.

This Focus addresses the relationship between historians and the societies they serve, particularly since the later nineteenth century when, for the first time, historians began to define themselves as a distinct professional group. One of the conclusions that emerges from the four case studies pursued here is that the independence of judgement which professionalism implies, founders the moment it is perceived by a wider public that historians are no longer providing them with the moral guidance they expect from those who have studied their pasts. It is also shown that the challenges and responses did not prove identical in any two sets of circumstances. This introduction also makes reference to general challenges to which individual contributors do not necessarily refer, but which have impacted on the work and independence of all historians.

Historians, both now and in the past, have been aware that what they write is, of necessity, influenced by their personal circumstances as also by their political and social preferences. Perhaps out of recognition of this, some writers of history in all centuries, and possibly from every culture, have celebrated their ability to shape policy in the present by citing experiences from past times. Then, in the nineteenth century, as governments in the west established Public Record Offices, National Archives and National Libraries, it came to be accepted in that part of the world that historians were professionals who, having undertaken a prescribed course of training, were uniquely equipped to assess how politicians and diplomats in the past had conducted their business.

Post-war German historiography is an interesting example of changing norms and the problem of satisfying a balance between explanation and (moral) judgement. Whereas national historians of Imperial Germany could feel in harmony with History, defeat and the peace of Versailles destroyed the belief in historical justice, so the bulk of the craft sympathized with Hitler's policy, although not always with his methods. The fall of the Third Reich and the revelation of its crimes caused a deep crisis of historical consciousness and attempts to deny or belittle personal responsibility and cooperation. After the 1960s however, a generation took over who could internalize the democratic norms and, through that, closed the gap between German and Western historiography. With the next generation after the reunification, critical revisionism of the national past even increased in so far as it included the first wave of post-war historiography with its apologetic tendencies. Historiography so became a striking example of a thorough national metamorphosis.

The whole field of historical writing concerned with imperialism and the expansion of Europe has always been suffused with moral judgement. Many earlier historians of empire extolled European intervention in other societies as a force for moral, political or intellectual improvement. Yet, from the beginning, radicals castigated empires as immoral, bringers of racism, genocide and underdevelopment. Asian and African intellectuals, in turn, constructed historical narratives that made the liberated nation the bearer of moral progress in history. This paper argues that historians cannot, and should not refrain from moral judgement on particular issues, such as the excesses of slave trade or the official neglect that allowed the famine in British Bengal in 1943 to kill three million people. They should, however, avoid creating grand historical narratives that describe long-term changes, such as the growth of European empires, as moral or immoral, as progressive or wholly pernicious. This approach merely reduces complex developments to simple formulae and can sometimes be misused by contemporary politicians and ideologues.

‘Morality and slavery’ argues that, as much as detachment and dispassion govern standard historical practice, historians cannot escape making moral judgments. Precisely because slavery is a morally charged subject, its history has been especially prone to changing points of view, traceable, for example, in recent histories of the slave trade and the controversy over Olaudah Equiano's birthplace. Various polar extremes – the structural coerciveness of slavery versus the agency of slaves; the persistence of African ethnicities versus rapid creolization; the spread of slavery versus the rapid growth of anti-slavery in the early republic – are evident in historical interpretations, which necessarily involve complicated value judgments and serious moral ramifications. The essay concludes by suggesting that a measure of balance and fairness has been possible in the study of slavery. Through empathy, historians have been able to recover, in part at least, the hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, notions of right and wrong among both slaves and masters in previous epochs.

This paper treats of the peculiarity of the Irish case. Professionalization of history came late to Ireland, and when it did happen, it was with a view to overcoming the inter-denominational and inter-communal point scoring that had energized most previous writing of Ireland's history. In tracing the further development of the history profession in Ireland, the paper alludes to the extent to which the posing of new questions and the employment of new methods were motivated by historical developments elsewhere in the western academic world. The outbreak of civil conflict in Northern Ireland inspired a new phase of introspective writing about Irish identity, sometimes given the semblance of universality through the invocation of post-colonial theory. This writing was usually presented in historical format, was composed mostly by academics employed by literature and social science departments, and was severely critical of what they described as the historical revisionism in which most professional historians in Ireland were believed to have engaged. It concludes with a consideration of how historians responded both to the challenge to their integrity and to various pressures to become more judgemental in writing about Ireland's past.