scholarly journals Australian landscapes from Eocene to Anthropocene

2021 ◽  
Vol 133 (1) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Peter Bridgewater

The 65-million-year journey from the demise of the dinosaurs to the present day is characterised by changing climes, periods of species extinctions and, finally, the appearance of Homo sapiens. As an island from the start of this period, Australia’s landscapes were isolated from the rest of the world and to this day are characterised by a unique biodiversity. Since their arrival, First Nations peoples have somehow understood this special landscape, living in conformity with it, changing along the way as the climate and landscape changed. That all changed with the arrival of people from Europe, who were more familiar with a weedy landscape recovering from deep glaciation. Over the last 250 years, a lack of understanding of the uniqueness of the Australian landscape, and of First Nations connections with that landscape, has wrought both biological and cultural disruptions. Looking ahead, more conversations between all Australians on how to manage this country into an uncertain future, respecting the range of world views that exist, and rebuilding a viable biocultural diversity, remains a significant but achievable challenge.

2021 ◽  
pp. 389-410
Author(s):  
Anjali Albuquerque ◽  
Neha P Chaudhary ◽  
Gowri G Aragam ◽  
Nina Vasan

Stanford Brainstorm, the world’s first lab for mental health innovation, taps into the combined potential of academia and industry—bridging medicine, technology, and entrepreneurship—to redesign the way the world views, diagnoses, and treats mental illness. Convergence science has facilitated Brainstorm’s emergence as a pivotal protagonist in the history of the mental health innovation field. In turn, Brainstorm has catalyzed innovation within mental health by applying convergent approaches to tackle the scope, immediacy, and impact of mental illness. Stanford Brainstorm’s thinking about mental health represents a shift in the discipline of psychiatry from a focus on one-to-one delivery to collaborative and sustainable solutions for millions.


2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Roy

In the near 20 years since the Oslo peace process began, Palestinians have suffered losses—socially, economically and politically—arguably not seen since 1948. This altered reality has, in recent years, been shaped by critical paradigm shifts in the way the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is understood and addressed. These shifts, particularly with regard to international acceptance of Palestine's territorial fragmentation, the imperative of ending Israel's occupation, the de facto annexation of West Bank lands to Israel, and the transformation of Palestinians into a humanitarian issue—have redefined the way the world views the conflict, diminishing the possibility of a political resolution.


Author(s):  
Harvey Cox
Keyword(s):  

This introductory chapter provides a background of secularization, an epochal movement that marks a change in the way men grasp and understand their life together. Secularization is the loosening of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed world-views, and the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols. It represents what another observer has called the “defatalization of history,” the discovery by man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that he can no longer blame fortune or the furies for what he does with it. Secularization is man turning his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time. However, the forces of secularization have no serious interest in persecuting religion. Secularization simply bypasses and undercuts religion and goes on to other things.


Antiquity ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Ian Tattersall

Early in their book A story of us, the evolutionary psychologists Leslie Newson and Peter Richerson remark of very early hominins that “we can't know what it is like to experience life with a brain so very different from our own” (p. 34). These words neatly encapsulate an unfortunate reality that confronts anyone who tries to understand or reconstruct the evolution of human cognition: we humans are so completely imprisoned within our own cognitive style as to be incapable of fully imagining what was going on in the minds of extinct hominins who were behaviourally highly sophisticated, but who nonetheless did not think like us—which basically includes all of them. The reason for this difficulty is that we modern Homo sapiens are entirely unique in the living world in the way in which we manipulate information about our exterior and internal worlds. We do this symbolically, which is to say that we deconstruct those worlds into vocabularies of mental symbols that we can then combine and recombine in our minds, according to rules, to make statements not only about the world as it is, but as it might be. And evidence in the archaeological record for the routinely symbolic behaviours that are our best proxies for the apprehension of the world in this fashion is at best very sparse indeed prior—and even for some time subsequent—to the initial appearance of Homo sapiens.


2011 ◽  
Vol 366 (1567) ◽  
pp. 1080-1089 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Foley ◽  
M. Mirazón Lahr

The abundant evidence that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa within the past 200 000 years, and dispersed across the world only within the past 100 000 years, provides us with a strong framework in which to consider the evolution of human diversity. While there is evidence that the human capacity for culture has a deeper history, going beyond the origin of the hominin clade, the tendency for humans to form cultures as part of being distinct communities and populations changed markedly with the evolution of H. sapiens . In this paper, we investigate ‘cultures’ as opposed to ‘culture’, and the question of how and why, compared to biological diversity, human communities and populations are so culturally diverse. We consider the way in which the diversity of human cultures has developed since 100 000 years ago, and how its rate was subject to environmental factors. We argue that the causes of this diversity lie in the distribution of resources and the way in which human communities reproduce over several generations, leading to fissioning of kin groups. We discuss the consequences of boundary formation through culture in their broader ecological and evolutionary contexts.


Think ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (27) ◽  
pp. 73-76
Author(s):  
Christian H. Sötemann

Philosophers have been known to sometimes conjure up world-views which seem dazzlingly at odds with our everyday take on the world. Among the more, if not most drastic ‘-isms’ to be found in the history of philosophy, then, is the standpoint of solipsism, derived from the Latin words ‘solus’ (alone) and ‘ipse’ (self). What is that supposed to mean? It adopts a position that only acknowledges the existence of one's very own mind and opposes that there is anything beyond the realm of my mind that could be known. What a drastic contradiction to the way we normally view the world, indeed. Allow me to emphasize some implications that would arise were one really to take the solipsist view for granted. The aim is to briefly adumbrate how a solipsist view would cut us off from the social world and from the existential dimension of our own death.


Horizons ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-115
Author(s):  
Kenneth P. Kramer

Traditionally, western theologies have been systematic, orthodox, dogmatic, and ecclesiastical. Recently, however, liberal, neo-orthodox, philosophical, and radical theologians have begun to reform the theological enterprise, and in turn to prepare the way for what has been called “world theology.” Whereas the traditional theologian viewed other faith communities as less truthful than his or her own, the world theologian is the Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist who views other theologies and world views non-exclusivistically, and from within the other's viewpoint.W. C. Smith captures the Janus-nature of this emerging world theology in one sentence—“All theology is self-theology, and yet it must exclude no one.” According to this assessment, today's theological task must be autobiographical (self-theology) and world-oriented (excluding no one). Each person's life-story is significantly related to each other's, for without personal history (autobiographical and biographical) theology reverts to a scholasticism of structures, rules, and restrictions, and without a world-orientation, theology retreats into exclusivistic, specialized edifices, and thereby surrenders any claim to speak to and for all humans.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (S367) ◽  
pp. 190-193
Author(s):  
Basilio Solís-Castillo

AbstractThe language we speak, the culture in which we grew up and where we come from have a tremendous impact on the way we learn astronomy. Additionally, the historical predominance of Western culture has influenced the way our modern society sees the world, and of course, the sky. In this work, we will share author’s experience working as science advisor in an outreach institution, where he explored different strategies to reach diverse communities and bring astronomy closer to broader audiences.Even though the construction of world-renowned astronomical observatories in Chile has boosted the interest in astronomy on the community, many challenges have not yet been addressed. One of them is to raise awareness about the ancestral heritage of Chilean’s first nations. Finally, we would like to highlight the importance of learning astronomy in our own language and therefore assure inclusion, diversity, and equity in our countries.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Allan Feinstein
Keyword(s):  

This paper takes a look at how we have developed devices to create and transmit meaning. It looks at how these devices have been designed and used to present a view of the world to the viewer. It also looks at what the tendencies within the functioning of media devices are and how that changes the way we perceive information and create world views. Furthermore, it asks how the nature of these devices determine how we communicate through them and what are the tensions they create. Lastly, we ask what this means for present and future use of such technology in an experiential and informative environment.


2003 ◽  
Vol 358 (1435) ◽  
pp. 1285-1291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Zimmer

The relationship between people and art is complex and intriguing. Of course, artworks are our creations; but in interesting and important ways, we are also created by our artworks. Our sense of the world is informed by the art we make and by the art we inherit and value, works that, in themselves, encode others' world views. This two-way effect is deeply rooted and art encodes and affects both a culture's ways of perceiving the world and its ways of remaking the world it perceives. The purpose of this paper is to indicate ways in which a study of abstraction in art can be used to discover insights into, to quote the call for papers for this issue, ‘our perception of the world, acquired through experience’ and ‘the way concepts are formed and manipulated to achieve goals’.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document