Research in a global context: a discussion of Toynbee's legacy

1992 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brewin

Arnold Toynbee was Director of Studies at Chatham House from 1924 until his retirement in 1954. His fame rests on two monumental projects to establish a global perspective. The Annual Survey each year reviewed the world as a geographical whole, selecting four or five themes for special treatment. It was not an edited volume. The Study of History put Western civilization in the context of a historical survey of all previous civilizations. Quite apart from his considerable journalistic output, the thirty-four volumes of the Survey and the ten volumes of the Study show how seriously Toynbee had taken a schoolmaster's injunction ‘first to see your subject or your problem as a whole’. Toynbee believed that a global perspective in terms of both time and space was of practical use.

Author(s):  
Keith Ward

Human evaluations in religion, as in the arts, history, morality, politics, and philosophy, differ widely, in part because of different personal experiences, social histories, and forms of education. This suggests that seeking understanding is difficult and gradual, in religion as well as in other areas, and a full grasp of truth probably remains a future goal. In religion, three main factors—the rise of science, of critical historical research, and of a greater understanding of diverse religions—suggest the adoption of a more global perspective. One may be committed to a specific religious tradition, yet accept that no religion has a final, inerrant, or complete grasp of truth. An expansive global religious understanding might see the grounding of religion in apprehensions of transcendent meaning and value, and be attentive to the variety of such apprehensions in the religions of the world.


Author(s):  
Thomas Borstelmann

This book looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, this book creates a new framework for understanding the period and its legacy. It demonstrates how the 1970s increased social inclusiveness and, at the same time, encouraged commitments to the free market and wariness of government. As a result, American culture and much of the rest of the world became more—and less—equal. This book explores how the 1970s forged the contours of contemporary America. Military, political, and economic crises undercut citizens' confidence in government. Free market enthusiasm led to lower taxes, a volunteer army, individual 401(k) retirement plans, free agency in sports, deregulated airlines, and expansions in gambling and pornography. At the same time, the movement for civil rights grew, promoting changes for women, gays, immigrants, and the disabled. And developments were not limited to the United States. Many countries gave up colonial and racial hierarchies to develop a new formal commitment to human rights, while economic deregulation spread to other parts of the world, from Chile and the United Kingdom to China. Placing a tempestuous political culture within a global perspective, this book shows that the decade wrought irrevocable transformations upon American society and the broader world that continue to resonate today.


Author(s):  
Noor Mohammad Osmani ◽  
Tawfique Al-Mubarak

Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) claimed that there would be seven eight civilizations ruling over the world in the coming centuries, thus resulting a possible clash among them. The West faces the greatest challenge from the Islamic civilization, as he claimed. Beginning from the Cold-War, the Western civilization became dominant in reality over other cultures creating an invisible division between the West and the rest. The main purpose of this research is to examine the perceived clash between the Western and Islamic Civilization and the criteria that lead a civilization to precede others. The research would conduct a comprehensive review of available literatures from both Islamic and Western perspectives, analyze historical facts and data and provide a critical evaluation. This paper argues that there is no such a strong reason that should lead to any clash between the West and Islam; rather, there are many good reasons that may lead to a peaceful coexistence and cultural tolerance among civilizations


1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-164
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Dhaouadi

There is no question that contemporary western civilization has beendominant in the field of science since the Renaissance. Western scientificsuperiority is not limited to specific scientific disciplines, but is rather anovetall scientific domination covering both the so-called exact and thehuman-social sciences. Western science is the primary reference for specialistsin such ateas as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, economics,psychology, and sociology. It is in this sense that Third World underdevelopmentis not only economic, social, and industrial; it also suffersfrom scientific-cultutal underdevelopment, or what we call "The OtherUnderdevelopment" (Dhaouadi 1988).The imptessive progress of western science since Newton and Descartesdoes not meari, however, that it has everything tight or perfect. Infact, its flaws ate becoming mote visible. In the last few decades, westernscience has begun to experience a shift from what is called classical scienceto new science. Classical science was associated with the celestialmechanics of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, the new physics of Galileo,and the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes introduced a radical divisionbetween mind and matter, while Newton and his fellows presented a newscience that looked at the world as a kind of giant clock The laws of thisworld were time-reversible, for it was held that there was no differencebetween past and future. As the laws were deterministic, both the pastand the future could be predicted once the present was known.The vision of the emerging new science tends to heal the division betweenmatter and spirit and to do away with the mechanical dimension ...


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-150

The springboard for this essay is the author’s encounter with the feeling of horror and her attempts to understand what place horror has in philosophy. The inquiry relies upon Leonid Lipavsky’s “Investigation of Horror” and on various textual plunges into the fanged and clawed (and possibly noumenal) abyss of Nick Land’s work. Various experiences of horror are examined in order to build something of a typology, while also distilling the elements characteristic of the experience of horror in general. The essay’s overall hypothesis is that horror arises from a disruption of the usual ways of determining the boundaries between external things and the self, and this leads to a distinction between three subtypes of horror. In the first subtype, horror begins with the indeterminacy at the boundaries of things, a confrontation with something that defeats attempts to define it and thereby calls into question the definition of the self. In the second subtype, horror springs from the inability to determine one’s own boundaries, a process opposed by the crushing determinacy of the world. In the third subtype, horror unfolds by means of a substitution of one determinacy by another which is unexpected and ungrounded. In all three subtypes of horror, the disturbance of determinacy deprives the subject, the thinking entity, of its customary foundation for thought, and even of an explanation of how that foundation was lost; at times this can lead to impairment of the perception of time and space. Understood this way, horror comes within a hair’s breadth of madness - and may well cross over into it.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147490412098838
Author(s):  
Nafsika Alexiadou ◽  
Linda Rönnberg

This article examines the national and European policy contexts that shaped the Swedish internationalisation agenda in higher education since 2000, the policy ideas that were mobilised to promote it, and the national priorities that steered higher education debates. The analysis highlights how domestic and European policy priorities, as well as discourses around increasing global economic reach and building solidarity across the world, have produced an internationalisation strategy that is distinctly ‘national’. Drawing on the analysis of the most recent internationalisation strategies we argue that the particular Swedish approach to internationalisation has its ideational foundations in viewing higher education as a political instrument to promote social mobility and justice, as well as a means to develop economic competitiveness and employability capacity. In addition, internationalisation has been used to legitimise national reform goals, but also as a policy objective on its own with the ambition to position Sweden as a competitive knowledge nation in a global context.


2021 ◽  
pp. 073112142199004
Author(s):  
Cary Wu

A large literature has suggested that education leads to higher trust. In this article, I argue that how education and trust are associated at the individual level may depend on the level of risk and uncertainty of each institutional setting. Trust involves not only individuals’ risk-taking propensity and capability but also their perception of how uncertain or risky the situation they are in. I test this micro–macro interactive approach by analyzing data from the World Values Survey, the European Social Survey, and the World Bank. Results show that the education and trust association can change from positive to negative both cross-nationally and within national contexts over time in response to the social and political stability at the macro level. In stable and low-conflict societies, the association between education and trust is highly positive. However, the association becomes negative in transitional societies where social and political risks are widespread. Supporting the risk-taking and risk awareness mechanisms underpinning the interactive process, I show that education has varying impacts on risk-taking propensity and risk awareness across different institutional contexts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 340
Author(s):  
Kirsi Tirri

This special issue on “Contemporary Teacher Education: A Global Perspective” contains eleven articles focused on varied current topics in teacher education all over the world [...]


2021 ◽  
Vol Publish Ahead of Print ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Johannsen ◽  
Karim Brohi ◽  
Pär I. Johansson ◽  
Ernest E. Moore ◽  
Ann-Kristin Reinhold ◽  
...  

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