Intellectuals, Scholars, and the Value of Science

2019 ◽  
pp. 535-556
Author(s):  
Gangolf Hübinger
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Construct ◽  
Understanding Of Science ◽  
Raymond Aron ◽  
Scientific Ethos ◽  
Final Question

This chapter covers Weber’s understanding of science as a cultural construct having intrinsic value and the decisive part played by the sciences in the “rational mastery of the world.” A complex modernity would demand a complex social and cultural scientific paradigm, in order to be able to understand and grasp “the reality in which we are placed.” And it discusses the habitus taken shape in the history of science that can be identified as Weberian. For example, Raymond Aron in France and Ralf Dahrendorf in Britain and Germany applied Weberian thinking to the social sciences. The final question is, how can we track down the presence of Weber’s scientific ethos from the twentieth century to the present. How can we reread Weber faced with the new problems and intellectual challenges of “global modernities” in our times?

Book Reviews: Studies in Sociology, Race Mixture, Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe, Interpretations, 1931–1932, Faith, Hope and Charity in Primitive Religion, Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science, The Reorganisation of Education in China, Social Decay and Eugenical Reform, The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Revolutionary Era, L. T. Hobhouse, His Life and Work, Corner of England, World Agriculture—An International Study, Small-Town Stuff, Methods of Social Study, Does History Repeat Itself? The New Morality, Culture and Progress, Language and Languages: An Introduction to Linguistics, The Theory of Wages, The Santa Clara Valley, California, Social Psychology, A History of Fire and Flame, Sin and New Psychology, Sociology and Education, Mental Subnormality and the Local Community: Am Outline or a Practical Program, Tyneside Council op Social Service, Reconstruction and Education in Rural India, The Contribution of the English Le Play School to Rural Sociology, Kagami Kenkyu Hokoku, President's, Pioneer Settlement: Co-Operative Studies, Birth Control and Public Health, Pioneer Settlement: Co-Operative Studies, Ourselves and the World: The Making of an American Citizen, The Emergence of the Social Sciences from Moral Philosophy, The Comparable Interests of the Old Moral Philosophy and the Modern Social Sciences, The World in Agony, Sheffield Social Survey Committee, Housing Problems in Liverpool, Council for the Preservation of Rural England, Forest Land Use in Wisconsin, The Growth Cycle of the Farm Family, The Farmer's Guide to Agricultural Research in 1931, A History of the Public Library Movement in Great Britain and Ireland, The Retirement of National Debts, Public and Private Operation of Railways in Brazil, The Indian Minorities Problem, The Meaning of the Manchurian Crisis, The Drama of the Kingdom, Social Psychology, Competition in the American Tobacco Industry, New York School Centers and Their Community Policy, Desertion of Alabama Troops from the Confederate Army, Plans for City Police Jails and Village Lockups

1933 ◽  
Vol a25 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-109
Author(s):  
R. R. Marbtt ◽  
E. E. Evans-Pritchard ◽  
E. O. Jambs ◽  
Florence Ayscough ◽  
C. H. Desch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Psychology ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Agricultural Research ◽  
Public Library ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pioneer Settlement

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauri L. Hyers
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Thick Description ◽  
Diary Data ◽  
Popular Medium ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bear Witness

This introductory chapter discusses the history of the diary in popular culture and as a research method in the social sciences Over the last several centuries, diary keeping has evolved into a popular medium through which diarists can bear witness to their experiences and events of the world. The diary is a treasure trove, containing the riches of first-hand testimony on a wealth of subjects: from the adventures of travel to the despairs of prison, from the mundane ruminations of adolescence to the horrors of the battlefield. The embedded and contextualized nature of diary data appeals to those in the humanities and social sciences who are seeking the “thick description” that is the hallmark of qualitative research (Geertz, 2003).

Marxist Historiography Today

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Hobsbawm
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Methodology Of Science ◽  
The Way

This chapter discusses Marxist historiography in the present times. In the interpretation of the world nowadays, there has been a rise in the so-called anti-Rankean reaction in history, of which Marxism is an important but not always fully acknowledged element. This movement challenged the positivist belief that the objective structure of reality was self-explanatory, and that all that was needed was to apply the methodology of science to it and explain why things happened the way they did. This movement also brought together history with the social sciences, therefore turning it into part of a generalizing discipline capable of explaining transformations of human society in the course of its past. This new perspective on the past is a return to ‘total history’, in which the focus is not merely on the ‘history of everything’ but history as an indivisible web wherein all human activities are interconnected.

scholarly journals Observations on the Intellectual History of Ethnology and other Social Sciences in Yugoslavia

1969 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel M. Halpern ◽  
E. A. Hammel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Complex Societies ◽  
Folk Theory ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

As anthropologists turn increasingly to the study of complex societies, they are led to reflect on the role that social science plays in national ideologies and the ways in which the current state and development of social science reflect other cultural states and processes. Indeed, such reflections can usefully be turned on our own society. One sees that it is much more appropriate to discard old notions of the distinction between ‘science’ and ‘folklore’ and to regard the social science of a particular society, however sophisticated and presumably objective, as an important part of its subjective ideology about itself and the world and thus a part of its own folk theory about the relations of man to society and of men to men. This paper is a sketch of some of the interrelationships between Yugoslav social science and other aspects of Yugoslav culture, with primary emphasis on ethnology.

From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the Pre-History of Modernity

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 410-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Washbrook
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cotton Textile ◽  
Global History ◽  
The West ◽  
Comparative Sociology ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opening Up

AbstractThe concept of Modernity is presently very problematic in the social sciences. Included in those problems is a tendency to hypostasise ‘the West’ as possessed of an originary and authentic culture and history, which distinguished it absolutely from all Other and Traditional cultures and histories. These distinctive qualities laid a unique pathway to Modernity, which subsequently became ‘universally’ available to the rest of the world. This paper explores historical conditions in Britain and India at one of the key moments of Modernity's ‘emergence’: the mechanisation of cotton textile manufacturing. It argues that Britain's modernisation is inconceivable except in a broader global context of which India already comprised a vital part. And, reciprocally, that India's role in the construction of Britain's Modernity, so far from opening up possibilities of it following the same course itself, conveyed imperatives which took its society towards a reverse process of ‘Traditionalisation.’

German Engineers and American Social Theory: Historical Perspectives on Professionalization

1988 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 550-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. W. R. Gispen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Technical Education ◽  
Engineering Profession ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

When historians turn to the social sciences for help with the task of ordering their data or making their sources speak more clearly, the results can be rewarding in unexpected ways. So it is if one applies the twin concepts profession and professionalization to the German context-in particular, to the history of German engineers in the nineteenth century. At first sight, an idea like the “professionalization of the German engineers” seems straightforward enough. In tandem with the growth of Germany's science-based industries and unparalleled system of technical education, it suggests the emergence of the men who occupied the critical positions in these institutions and embodied technological progress. A notion such as the “rise of the German engineering profession,” therefore, stirs visions of a grand metamorphosis, in which the land of poets and thinkers—and of Junkers, bureaucrats, and mandarins—turned into the world of Siemens, Porsche, Mannesmann, Bosch, Diesel, Daimler-Benz, etc.

scholarly journals The international congress as scientific and diplomatic technology: global intellectual exchange in the International Prison Congress, 1860–90

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nir Shafir
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Communication ◽  
International Congress ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Scientific

AbstractIn the 1870s, the American prison reformer E. C. Wines attempted to bring together representatives from every country and colony in the world to discuss the administration and reform of the prison, under the auspices of the International Prison Congress. This article tackles the challenge by exploring how the international congress operated as both a social scientific technology and a diplomatic forum that emerged from this short-lived world of amateur social science and diplomacy. It argues that the exigencies of the international congress as a social scientific space forced it to take on diplomatic and political functions that both imprinted a logic of comparability onto the burgeoning international diplomatic system and also caused the eventual exclusion of non-European polities from the congresses. It engages with recent scholarship in history of science specifically to understand the international congress as a technology that mediated intellectual exchange and scientific communication. By examining the challenges posed by the inclusion of non-Western polities in such communication, it attempts to reveal the multiple global histories of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century.

The problem of periodization of the history of religion

1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Role Of Religion

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.

Myriad Aspects of Secular Thinking on Malayali Cuisine

GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-206
Author(s):  
SAJITHA M
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Social Indicators ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Healthy Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civilized Society

Food is one of the main requirements of human being. It is flattering for the preservation of wellbeing and nourishment of the body.  The food of a society exposes its custom, prosperity, status, habits as well as it help to develop a culture. Food is one of the most important social indicators of a society. History of food carries a dynamic character in the socio- economic, political, and cultural realm of a society. The food is one of the obligatory components in our daily life. It occupied an obvious atmosphere for the augmentation of healthy life and anticipation against the diseases.  The food also shows a significant character in establishing cultural distinctiveness, and it reflects who we are. Food also reflected as the symbol of individuality, generosity, social status and religious believes etc in a civilized society. Food is not a discriminating aspect. It is the part of a culture, habits, addiction, and identity of a civilization.Food plays a symbolic role in the social activities the world over. It’s a universal sign of hospitality.[1]

Towards a Contemporary Philosophy of Islamic Science

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Anwar Ibrahim
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Single Observation ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Stephen Hawking ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Physicist ◽  
Islamic Science ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
Understanding Of Science

Our understanding of science itself as a body of knowledge and as asystem of analysis and research has changed over the last decades, just asover the last two centuries, or especially after the age of Enlightement inEurope, science has become more powerful, more sophisticated and complex.It is rather difficult to determine where science ends and where technologybegins. In fact there is a gmwing awareness that the physical or nam sciences,as a means of studying and understanding nature, are relying on the more“humanistic“ and cultural approaches adopted by the social sciences or thehumanities. The tradition of natural science is being challenged by newdiscoveries of the non-physical and non-natural sciences which go beyondthe physical world.Certainly research is vital for the growth and development of all sciencesthat attempt to discover and understand the “secrets” of nature. The validityof any scientific theory depends on its research and methodological premisesand even that-its proposition or theories (in the words of a leading cosmologistand theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking) -is tentative. Hawlung says: “Anyphysical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis:you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experimentsagree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the resultwill not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theoryby finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions ofthe theory.”The history of Western science is rooted in the idea of finding the ’truth’by objectivity. Nothing can be believed until there is a scientific proof ofits existence, or until it can be logically accepted by the rational mind. Theclassical scenario of scientific work gives you an austere picture of heroicactivity, undertaken against all odds, a ceaseless effort to subjugate hostileand menacing nature, and to tame its formidable forces. Science is depicted ...

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