Scholars East and West

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-334
Author(s):  
Jesús Mosterín

The great contribution of China to politics was the development of a bureaucratic, meritocratic civil service, based on mastery of a well-defined canon of scholarship. Civil servants were scholars. Already under the Han dynasty, Confucianism (the Rújiā or school of the scholars) was made the official ideology of the State and the basis of the competitive examination system. Europe was less advanced in political organization than China. Rulers and their courts relied on family ties and brute force. The only working bureaucracy belonged to the Catholic Church. This paper follows the parallel development of both the Western and the Chinese traditions and emphasizes their points of intersection, such as the Jesuit missions to China in the 16th and 17th centuries and the visits of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey around 1920.

Science ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 366 (6466) ◽  
pp. eaau5141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan F. Schulz ◽  
Duman Bahrami-Rad ◽  
Jonathan P. Beauchamp ◽  
Joseph Henrich

Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of many Western populations. We propose that part of this variation can be traced back to the action and diffusion of the Western Church, the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church. Specifically, we propose that the Western Church’s transformation of European kinship, by promoting small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility, fostered greater individualism, less conformity, and more impersonal prosociality. By combining data on 24 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both Church exposure and kinship, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions, and among individuals from different cultural backgrounds.


Author(s):  
Isaac Levi

Ernest Nagel was arguably the pre-eminent American philosopher of science from the mid 1930s to the 1960s. He taught at Columbia University for virtually his entire career. Although he shared with Bertrand Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle a respect for and sensitivity to developments in mathematics and the natural sciences, he endorsed a strand in the thought of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey that Nagel himself called ‘contextual naturalism’. Among the main features of contextual naturalism is its distrust of reductionist claims that are not the outcomes of scientific inquiries. Nagel’s contextual naturalism infused his influential, detailed and informed essays on probability, explanation in the natural and social sciences, measurement, history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law. It is reflected, for example, in his trenchant critiques of Russell’s reconstruction of the external world and Russell’s epistemology as well as cognate views endorsed at one time or another by members of the Vienna Circle.


2000 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 263-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Murdock

During the first half of the sixteenth century, Hungarian society underwent two dramatic changes. Firstly, Suleiman the Magnificent’s Ottoman armies advanced into the northern Balkans, causing the collapse of the Hungarian kingdom after the battle at Mohács in August 1526. Hungary subsequently became divided into three parts, with the Ottomans controlling the central and southern counties, the Habsburgs governing Royal Hungary from the Croatian coast to the mountains of Upper Hungary, and a series of native nobles elected to rule over the Transylvanian principality, which included the counties of the eastern Hungarian plain. Secondly, the spread of Protestant ideas about religious reform brought confessional division to Hungary. The initial reform was to a large degree driven by a desire to purify the Catholic Church, whose spiritual credentials were badly discredited by the Ottoman invasion. By 1570 German- and Hungarian-speaking towns and most Hungarian magnates and nobles had abandoned the Catholic Church. German-speakers and nobles in western Hungarian counties on the whole adopted Lutheranism. Calvinism meanwhile came to dominate religious life in the eastern counties, and also received broad support within Transylvania, although some Hungarian towns and Szeklers in Transylvania instead embraced anti-Trinitarianism. Confessional loyalty across Hungary was decided by a variety of factors including patterns of communication and trading networks, the pre-Reformation structures of ecclesiastical organization, and feudal, regional, and family ties. Linguistic barriers were also crucial in determining adherence to a particular religion, with Lutheranism widely supported by German-speakers whilst Calvinism was almost exclusively the preserve of Magyar-speakers. It seems clear that some sense of linguistic or ethnic community assisted both Protestant Churches to reinforce attachment to their confessions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-268
Author(s):  
Ivan Ferreira da Cunha
Keyword(s):  

Resumo Este artigo apresenta um referencial pragmatista para compreender o estatuto epistêmico da valoração que é produzida na reflexão acerca das consequências sociais de propostas científicas e tecnológicas. O problema é posto, seguindo-se as considerações de Bertrand Russell sobre o impacto da ciência na sociedade. Russell argumenta que a valoração de arranjos sociais fica fora dos limites do conhecimento, porque valorações não podem ser verdadeiras ou falsas, em sentido correspondencial. Isso leva o pensamento social a um impasse, pois não se pode saber que dado arranjo social seria indesejável ou inadequado. Este texto esboça uma alternativa, a partir dos trabalhos sobre valoração de Clarence Irving Lewis, tomados em continuidade com a teoria da investigação de John Dewey. Esse referencial alternativo assume noções epistêmicas de verdade e justificação, o que permite que valorações possam ser concebidas em contextos de investigação e, assim, como objetos de conhecimento.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 405-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. M. Kozachenko

The article highlights the life path, scientific and practical activities of the Honored Professor M. S. Bokarius and his son Professor M. M. Bokarius famous domestic scientists in the field of forensic medicine and forensic examination, whose 85th and 50th anniversaries are in 2016. Account is given of their great contribution to the creation of the forensic examination system in Ukraine, where the leading role, of course, belongs to an outstanding scientist and practitioner M. S. Bokarius, since it was he, with his inherent predictability, who saw the urgent need of the investigative and judicial bodies in an independent and objective forensic examination, which would be based on modern achievements of science.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ankit Patel

William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given us such ideas as “the stream of thought” and the baby’s impression of the world “as one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (PP 462). It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine, but his writings were from the outset as much philosophical as scientific. “Some Remarks on Spencer’s Notion of Mind as Correspondence” (1878) and “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879, 1882) presage his future pragmatism and pluralism, and contain the first statements of his view that philosophical theories are reflections of a philosopher’s temperament.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Dwi Hastuti

This study aims to determine the relationship that exists between openness to experience (one of the personality traits) and perceptions of organizational politics to workplace deviant behavior. Research was conducted by collecting 263 responses from the civil servants in Pekanbaru, Riau. Applying the latest PLS 3.0 analysis tools the results of this research identified positive correlation between openness to experience and perception of the political organization to workplace deviant behavior. The perception of the organization politics has managed to moderate the relationship between openness to experience deviant behavior in the workplace.     


2021 ◽  
pp. 145-160
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman

The pursuit of a definitive explanation of how scientists produce knowledge and what kinds of knowledge they produce became more urgent in the early twentieth century as science became increasingly important to society in the form of society-transforming technologies. As the century proceeded, philosophy of science emerged as a subdiscipline within philosophy, coordinate with the elusiveness of the goal of explaining science. By mid-century, philosophers, many trained in the physical sciences, had displaced scientists as the dominant figures in this effort. Henri Poincaré proposed a Mach-like relationalist theory of science, Bertrand Russell defended a logical atomism theory indebted to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Percy Bridgman defended a theory he called operationalism. Concurrently, William James and John Dewey developed the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce into an action- and belief-based explanation of science. But the dominant philosophy of science from the 1920s through the 1950s was logical positivism/empiricism.


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