scholarly journals Studying development in the 21st Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-356
Author(s):  
Michael S. C. Thomas ◽  
Gert Westermann ◽  
Denis Mareschal ◽  
Mark H. Johnson ◽  
Sylvain Sirois ◽  
...  

AbstractIn this response, we consider four main issues arising from the commentaries to the target article. These include further details of the theory of interactive specialization, the relationship between neuroconstructivism and selectionism, the implications of neuroconstructivism for the notion of representation, and the role of genetics in theories of development. We conclude by stressing the importance of multidisciplinary approaches in the future study of cognitive development and by identifying the directions in which neuroconstructivism can expand in the Twenty-first Century.

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter M. Antoci

This article answers the question of whether the study of theology and metaphysics can be classified currently, or ever qualify in the future, as a scientific endeavor. Rather than choose a particular theology or metaphysics as the subject of inquiry, this essay argues that it is not only necessary to recognize the role of hermeneutics within different fields of study, but that it is also necessary to begin a human hermeneutic with human experience. Changes in our global context, whether social, economic, political, or environmental, are important drivers of hermeneutical evolution. We should expect no less change in the areas of theology, metaphysics, and science. The question of truth, whether subjective or objective, is a hermeneutical one.


MODOS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-141
Author(s):  
Nora Sternfeld

“Towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century”, as Anthony Gardner and Charles Green propose, “biennials became self-conscious.” Increasingly they are reflecting on themselves as "hegemonic machines" (Oliver Marchart), and for this very reason also understand themselves as places of intervention. We have to come to terms with the fact that biennials today are both: "Brands and Sites of Resistance", "Spaces of Capital and Hope" (Panos Kompatsiaris).The article follows withdrawals and protests as well as interventions and strategies of appropriation of biennials in the second decade of the 21st century. Protests in St. Petersburg, Sydney and New York shape the biennials they boycott. In Kochi, Athens, Dhaka, and Kassel we encounter curatorial projects that challenge the apparatus of value coding. The relationship between bottom up and top down often becomes blurred. In Prague, Warsaw, Kiev, and Budapest it is even reversed. Here biennials are used as a means of counter-hegemony and institutional survival.


Author(s):  
Peter Boxall ◽  
Bryan Cheyette

This chapter addresses the future of the novel. It also reflects on the possibility and nature of historical change. The push and pull between the novel as an expressive symptom of an ailing culture, and the novel as the engine for the production of new cultural possibilities, runs through the long history of novelists’ reflections on the future of the novel. From our perspective in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the perception of a watershed triggered by 1973, and a new understanding of the relationship between style, fiction, and knowledge, seems remarkably prescient. Moreover, the new generation of novelists that have emerged since the turn of the century have collectively registered the re-emergence of a kind of historical vitality in the culture.


Author(s):  
Naftali Loewenthal

We have looked at a number of aspects of the Habad-Lubavitch movement in their historical context: its relationship with general Jewish society, the theme of outreach, including beyond the Jewish community, rationalism, the role of the individual, contemplation, women, the messianic idea, and the fact that Rabbi Menachem Mendel passed away without a successor. This concluding chapter explores some further theological questions: What are the positions within Habad in relation to the teachings of the last Rebbe and his messianic thrust? What might the contemporary movement have to say for the future?


2020 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-340
Author(s):  
Victoria S. Harrison

Abstract Securing a future for philosophy and wisdom in the professionalized and specialized context of twenty-first century academia is the challenge taken up by this article. If the conception of philosophy as the love of wisdom expects too much of philosophers, the construal of philosophy as the study of wisdom expects too little. To attempt to rehabilitate the relationship between philosophy and wisdom by claiming that philosophy is the study of wisdom unreasonably limits the scope of the current vibrant and expansive discipline, leaving it unclear how the more theoretical dimensions of philosophy might fit into it. Moreover, to exclude from consideration the possibility that a person might be improved by philosophy, and his or her life enhanced, is to denature the discipline. The model of philosophy as encouraging friendship with wisdom, on the other hand, does not underestimate philosophy’s potential for helping someone to become the kind of person who could make the choices likely to contribute to the living of a good life. By providing a way of thinking about the relationship between philosophy and wisdom that is appropriate to our age, the idea that philosophers are friends of wisdom can contribute to our evolving practice and understanding of the discipline, while at the same time allowing philosophy and philosophers to remain vitally connected to their heritage.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Duncan ◽  
Anthony Egan

 In contemporary South Africa, it would be true to say that there is no longer any urgency with regard to organic union as an aim of ecumenism. This marks a significant reversal of the pre-1994 situation where political and other motives stimulated the impulse. This is not only a local situation, for ecumenism has taken on a different character globally. Former alignments have weakened, and emerging alignments challenge former assumptions regarding ecumenism—and are no less political than formerly within the Pentecostal bloc, which has ousted the SACC from its former place of privilege in the government’s affections. This is not to say that nothing has been happening on the ecumenical scene. There has been significant activity which is ongoing and offers hope for the future of cooperation. This article includes material up to the present and explores these recent activities of the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Dario Azzellini

The chapter critically analyses the different efforts in Venezuela to support and build a solidarity, social, popular and communal economy as part of what is defined as goal of a societal transformation toward a so-called ‘21st century socialism.’ It presents different initiatives from below as well as the state’s reaction and initiatives. The range of initiatives and models of collective ownership and production ranges from workers’ participation in state companies to workers’ control and the construction of a communal economy self-managed by the communities based on direct democracy. The chapter also points out the tension between the officially declared policy supporting self-management and workers’ control and the far more contradictory and conflictive reality of the relationship between state and self-management.


Author(s):  
Mark Levene

This article presents two scenarios that might have a huge influence for the prospects of genocide in the future: the carrying capacity of the planet and global warming. The key point about the pursuit of this theme is that the disruptive potential of climate change, whether writ small in terms of the single state, or writ large in terms of the international system, is entirely exponential. It also hints the necessity for a paradigmatic shift in the relationship not only to each other but to the precious planet if people are to avoid not simply genocide but omnicide. For those who would seek to avoid genocide in the twenty-first century, the task cannot somehow be reduced to Lemkin's law. The phenomenon cannot be contained within this box: it is too fundamental a by-product of a more general dysfunction, not to say, even as it transmutes into persistent post-genocide.


2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802110543
Author(s):  
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

In this piece, I approach the relationship between the paradigm of imbricated crises pertaining to the second decade of the twenty-first century and its contemporaneous dystopian literature. I focus particularly on how dystopian literature forges a sense of closure that attempts to give meaning through the construction of imaginary memories of how crises came and went, or came and stayed. Dystopian tales provide the troubled reader of its time with a sense of narrative continuation and a substitute for closure. For my analysis, I draw on a corpus of literary works from around the world, which includes The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz; Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel; The Emissary, by Tawada Yōko; Severance: A Novel, by Ling Ma; China Dream, by Ma Jian; Ansibles, Profilers and Other Machines of Wonder, by Andrea Chapela; and The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson.


2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Piketty

When a lengthy book is widely discussed in academic circles and the popular media, it is probably inevitable that the arguments of the book will be simplified in the telling and retelling. In the case of my book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), a common simplification of the main theme is that because the rate of return on capital r exceeds the growth rate of the economy g, the inequality of wealth is destined to increase indefinitely over time. In my view, the magnitude of the gap between r and g is indeed one of the important forces that can explain historical magnitudes and variations in wealth inequality. However, I do not view r > g as the only or even the primary tool for considering changes in income and wealth in the 20th century, or for forecasting the path of income and wealth inequality in the 21st century. In this essay, I will take up several themes from my book that have perhaps become attenuated or garbled in the ongoing discussions of the book, and will seek to re-explain and re-frame these themes. First, I stress the key role played in my book by the interaction between beliefs systems, institutions, and the dynamics of inequality. Second, I briefly describe my multidimensional approach to the history of capital and inequality. Third, I review the relationship and differing causes between wealth inequality and income inequality. Fourth, I turn to the specific role of r > g in the dynamics of wealth inequality: specifically, a larger r − g gap will amplify the steady-state inequality of a wealth distribution that arises out of a given mixture of shocks. Fifth, I consider some of the scenarios that affect how r − g might evolve in the 21st century, including rising international tax competition, a growth slowdown, and differential access by the wealthy to higher returns on capital. Finally, I seek to clarify what is distinctive in my historical and political economy approach to institutions and inequality dynamics, and the complementarity with other approaches.


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