James and Medicine: Reckoning with Experience

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J. Croce
Keyword(s):  
Depth Psychology ◽  
Harvard Medical School ◽  
William James ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Professional Psychology ◽  
Scientific Medicine ◽  
Medical Practices ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Different Parts

Throughout his career in psychology and philosophy, William James consistently based his insights on natural facts. He began his career as a scientist, earning a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1869 on his path toward learning physiology for psychological understanding. In his youth and for the rest of his life, he also engaged in alternative medical practices. He found value in both scientific and “sectarian” medicine, with each attending to different parts of natural experience and each empirical, with experimental and experiential access to natural facts. From scientific medicine, he learned methods of rigorous specialized inquiry and the importance supporting speculation with factual material evidence, and from sectarian medicine, he learned about the range of lived natural experiences and their interactions. Most significantly, immersion in the medical marketplace of his time encouraged his non-dualist way of understanding the natural world with interaction of material facts and non-material mind and emotions. His immersion in medical practices prepared him for both his contributions to professional psychology and philosophy, and his explorations of alternative consciousness in religious beliefs and depth psychology. Throughout, he maintained fidelity to the facts of experience.

scholarly journals Terra sigillata in southern Latium. The evidence from the Pontine Region Project, 1987-2014

2021 ◽  
pp. 203-272
Author(s):  
G.W. Tol ◽  
T.C.A. De Haas ◽  
P.A.J. Attema
Keyword(s):  
Market Integration ◽  
Contextual Analysis ◽  
Economic Networks ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Published Evidence ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Geomorphological Units ◽  
Surrounding Areas ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Different Parts

This contribution is the first of a series of publications by the authors to systematically disclose the wealth of material evidence collected during some 30 years of fieldwork in the Pontine region by the Pontine Region Project. This project has, since its inception in the mid-1980s, investigated more than 36 km2 of terrain across all major geomorphological units of the region, largely by means of systematic surface investigations. During these investigations, close to 200 000 artefacts were collected for further study, including c. 1 660 fragments of (Italian) terra sigillata, the emblematic, shiny red fine table ware of the Early Imperial period. In this article, we present a detailed spatial and contextual analysis of the terra sigillata fragments that have been gathered within the Pontine Region Project and discuss the results in light of economic issues (market integration, economic growth). We then supplement this evidence by published evidence of name stamps from surrounding areas to further expose to what extent, and in what ways, the different parts of southern Latium were embedded in the long-distance economic networks of the period.

Specimen Collectors

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-188
Author(s):  
Reed Gochberg
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Louisa May Alcott ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Comparative Zoology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Philosophical Writings

This chapter examines the early history of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and broader conversations about the representation of the natural world as fixed and stable. While the museum’s founder, Louis Agassiz, emphasized the value of preserved specimens to research and teaching, many collectors and writers questioned such practices. After donating turtles to the museum, Henry David Thoreau contemplated the ethical and scientific implications of freezing nature for extended study. In children’s fiction, Louisa May Alcott emphasized the relationship between collecting specimens and moral order, while highlighting the growing gendered divide between scientific practice in the museum and the parlor. And in philosophical writings, William James drew on classification to consider more flexible possibilities to fixed theories. These accounts show how writers sought to promote a deeper understanding of flux and change both within the museum and beyond.

Livestock plagues in late antiquity, with a disassembling of the bovine panzootic of A.D. 376-386

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 490-508
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Newfield
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Animal Health ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Livestock Disease ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Roman Period ◽  
Material Evidence

The history of late-antique animal plagues requires a fresh start. Over the last 30 years, scholars have amassed copious quantities of written and material evidence for major shifts in the natural world experienced, or reported, as disasters in late antiquity. They have read textual passages more critically and interwoven written with physical data more meticulously than researchers before them. As a result, much more is known now about human plagues, climatic downturns and tectonic perturbations in the Late Roman period. Yet knowledge of late-antique livestock disease remains pretty much where animal health specialists left it in the 18th and 19th c. There are, to be sure, histories of late-antique animal plagues, but they are long out of date, unreliable and altogether of poor quality.

On some ancient Greek Medical Vases for containing Lykion; &c., and on the modern use of the same drug in India

1852 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 47-54
Author(s):  
James Young Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Medical Practices ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Roman Medicine

Professor James Young Simpson, with apologies for an article about Greek antiquities rather than Scottish ones, wrote an article to bring attention to several examples of Greek medical vases with inscriptions referring to lycium, a medicine that he found mention of in Galen and Dioscorides, among others. The professor wished to remark on the bottles because there was so little material evidence of Ancient Greek medical practices, in comparison especially with Ancient Roman medicine. The meeting minutes for March 8, 1852 are appended on, mainly a list of donations mades to the Society.

Approaches to the Origins of Agriculture

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Barker
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Domestic Animals ◽  
Cultivated Plants ◽  
Restricted Range ◽  
Origins Of Agriculture ◽  
Hunting And Gathering ◽  
The World ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Different Parts

Humans have occupied our planet for several million years, but for almost all of that period they have lived as foragers, by various combinations of gathering, collecting, scavenging, fishing, and hunting. The first clear evidence for activities that can be recognized as farming is commonly identified by scholars as at about 12,000 years ago, at about the same time as global temperatures began to rise at the end of the Pleistocene (the ‘Ice Ages’) and the transition to the modern climatic era, the Holocene. Subsequently, a variety of agricultural systems based on cultivated plants and, in many areas, domesticated animals, has replaced hunting and gathering in almost every corner of the globe. Today, a relatively restricted range of crops and livestock, first domesticated several thousand years ago in different parts of the world, feeds almost all of the world’s population. A dozen crops make up over 80 per cent of the world’s annual tonnage of all crops: banana, barley, maize, manioc, potato, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet, sugar cane, sweet potato, and wheat (Diamond, 1997: 132). Only five large (that is, over 100 pounds) domestic animals are globally important: cow, sheep, goat, pig, and horse. The development of agriculture brought profound changes in the relationship between people and the natural world. Archaeologists have usually theorized that, with the invention of farming, people were able to settle down and increase the amount and reliability of their food supply, thus allowing the same land to support more people than by hunting and gathering, allowing our species tomultiply throughout the world. The ability to produce food and other products from domesticated plants and animals surplus to immediate subsistence requirements also opened up new pathways to economic and social complexity: farming could mean new resources for barter, payment of tax or tribute, for sale in a market; it could mean food for non-food producers such as specialist craft-workers, priests, warriors, lords, and kings. Thus farming was the precondition for the development of the first great urban civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, China, the Americas, and Africa, and has been for all later states up to the present day.

Narrative and Clinical Neuroscience: Can Phenomenologically Informed Approaches and Empirical Work Cross-Fertilise?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Cole ◽  
Shaun Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Heart Disease ◽  
Physical Mechanism ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scientific Medicine ◽  
Clinical Neuroscience ◽  
Physical Mechanisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Reductionist Approach

Science (from the Latin, scientia) originally meant knowledge, so that ‘natural science’ meant knowledge of the natural world and of its laws. The term has since come to mean empirical, experimentally acquired knowledge and, as such, refers to some of the most powerful tools we have for understanding the world and indeed our own physiology. Scientific medicine has led to huge improvements in outcomes from a variety of conditions, from infectious diseases to cancer and heart disease. These advances have come, largely, from a mechanistic or reductionist approach to illness, which focuses on putting the body, understood as a physical mechanism or collection of physical mechanisms, right.

Multiverse Theories: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Cleaver
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
William James ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Scientific Concept ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
Science Philosophy ◽  
Four Levels

The term multiverse is derived from multiple universes. A multiverse is a theoretical concept denoting a collection of universes that are causally disconnected and whatever may exist beyond or between the boundaries of these universes. In essence, it is the totality of physical reality, whatever form that may take. An equivalent term is megaverse. The physically distinct universes composing a multiverse are often referred to as alternative, alternate, quantum, parallel, or bubble universes. The American philosopher William James invented the specific term multiverse in 1895, not in a cosmological context but in reference to his view of the natural world. In the 20th century the application of the term was broadened from James’s original intent to a range of areas including cosmology, religion, philosophy, and psychology. More recently, David Lewis (1941–2001) considered philosophical implications of a multiverse from his modal realism perspective. In fact, the concept of a cosmological multiverse and its philosophical and religious implications were actually considered more than a millennium prior throughout various societies and religions. The scientific implications have predominantly been analyzed since the early 20th century. In efforts to answer fundamental questions about the origin and properties of our universe, many cosmologists have converged on a scientific concept of a multiverse of one form or another. Multiverses with vastly different properties have been developed. To organize the collection of multiverses in a consistent way, in 2003, MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark proposed a multiverse taxonomy. Tegmark argued that all multiverses can be fit into four classes, which he designated as Levels 1 through 4. A given higher level multiverse contains a set or sets of lower level multiverses. In 2007, string theorist Brian Greene of Columbia University refined Tegmark’s classification system. Each of Greene’s nine classes fit within one of Tegmark’s four Levels. While theoretical multiverses take many forms, common to most all of them is the idea that a vast number of universes exists outside the limits of our observable region. Given that a multiverse beyond our universe is not currently (and perhaps never will be) empirically testable or detectable, the multiverse concept is very controversial. This is especially so within and among the science, philosophy, and religion communities. There is disagreement regarding the question of the existence of the multiverse and whether the multiverse is a proper subject of scientific inquiry. Some argue that a multiverse is a philosophical concept, rather than a scientific one. Alternatively, some scientists believe that most or all multiverse proposals present a deconstructionist science that avoids providing answers grounded in meaningful science. In contrast, many theoretical physicists (especially cosmologists) and some philosophers affirm that a multiverse offers a more likely and more robust resolution to fundamental cosmological issues that a sole (even infinite) universe cannot answer.

A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science and its implications for replication

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Gantman ◽  
Robin Gomila ◽  
Joel E. Martinez ◽  
J. Nathan Matias ◽  
Elizabeth Levy Paluck ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Behavioral Measurement ◽  
The World ◽  
Pragmatist Philosophy

AbstractA pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.

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