scholarly journals Specialized Science

2014 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 1355-1360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arturo Casadevall ◽  
Ferric C. Fang

ABSTRACTAs the body of scientific knowledge in a discipline increases, there is pressure for specialization. Fields spawn subfields that then become entities in themselves that promote further specialization. The process by which scientists join specialized groups has remarkable similarities to the guild system of the middle ages. The advantages of specialization of science include efficiency, the establishment of normative standards, and the potential for greater rigor in experimental research. However, specialization also carries risks of monopoly, monotony, and isolation. The current tendency to judge scientific work by the impact factor of the journal in which it is published may have roots in overspecialization, as scientists are less able to critically evaluate work outside their field than before. Scientists in particular define themselves through group identity and adopt practices that conform to the expectations and dynamics of such groups. As part of our continuing analysis of issues confronting contemporary science, we analyze the emergence and consequences of specialization in science, with a particular emphasis on microbiology, a field highly vulnerable to balkanization along microbial phylogenetic boundaries, and suggest that specialization carries significant costs. We propose measures to mitigate the detrimental effects of scientific specialism.

1964 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans J. Morgenthau

The nuclear age has ushered in a novel period of history, as distinct from the age that preceded it as the modern age has been from the Middle Ages or the Middle Ages have been from antiquity. Yet while our conditions of life have drastically changed under the impact of the nuclear age, we still live in our thoughts and act through our institutions in an age that has passed. There exists, then, a gap between what we think about our social, political, and philosophic problems and the objective conditions which the nuclear age has created.This contradiction between our modes of thought and action, belonging to an age that has passed, and the objective conditions of our existence has engendered four paradoxes in our nuclear strategy: the commitment to the use of force, nuclear or otherwise, paralyzed by the fear of having to use it; the search for a nuclear strategy which would avoid the predictable consequences of nuclear war; the pursuit of a nuclear armaments race joined with attempts to stop it; the pursuit of an alliance policy which the availability of nuclear weapons has rendered obsolete. All these paradoxes result from the contrast between traditional attitudes and the possibility of nuclear war and from the fruitless attempts to reconcile the two.


Author(s):  
Natalia Pilgui

The scientific article presents the first results of the study of the English parable in the diachronic aspect from the synergetic point of view. The research started from the Middle Ages, illustrated and analyzed the first English texts with parable elements, dating from the XIII-XIV centuries. The scientific work is based on historical events, specific writers and their individual style; the development of a parable as an independent type of text and discourse took place under the influence the mentioned above. It is determined that during this period it is difficult to distinguish the English parable in a separate genre of literature of that time, but the authentic English parable confidently functioned as metatext in the great texts of the Middle Ages. Several parable contexts were observed in one text. The article outlines the results of the study and gives examples of texts of a certain era. The general stylistic and synergetic characteristics of the investigated texts are singled out and their classification according to thematic groups is presented: condemnation of negative human traits, relations of God and mankind, interpretation of spiritual truth and moral values. From the synergetic point of view, thematic groups are thematic attractors that contribute to the development and existence with its functional meta-texts with parable elements. The study of English parable texts allowed us to identify of a number of stylistic devices and stylistic features. It is noted that stylistic attractors of the Middle Ages parables are as follows: prose and poetic form, rhetorical and logical-expressive style. The results of scientific work determine the broad perspectives of further research, in particular the study of the English parable in diachrony from the synergetic point of view, as well as the analysis and comparison of the texts of the following centuries with the systematization of their general and specific features


1970 ◽  
Vol 42 (117) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Michael Böss

WRITING NATIONAL HISTORY AFTER MODERNISM: THE HISTORY OF PEOPLEHOOD IN LIGHT OF EUROPEAN GRAND NARRATIVES | The purpose of the article is to refute the recent claim that Danish history cannot be written on the assumption of the existence of a Danish people prior to 19th-century nationalism. The article argues that, over the past twenty years, scholars in pre-modern European history have highlighted the limitations of the modernist paradigm in the study of nationalism and the history of nations. For example, modernists have difficulties explaining why a Medieval chronicle such as Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum was translated in the mid-1600s, and why it could be used for new purposes in the 1800s, if there had not been a continuity in notions of peoplehood between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. Of course, the claim of continuity should not be seen as an argument for an identity between the “Danes” of Saxo’s time and the Danes of the 19th-century Danish nation-state. Rather, the modern Danishness should be understood as the product of a historical process, in which a number of European cultural narratives and state building played a significant role. The four most important narratives of the Middle Ages were derived from the Bible, which was a rich treasure of images and stories of ‘people’, ‘tribe’, ‘God’, King, ‘justice’ and ‘kingdom’ (state). While keeping the basic structures, the meanings of these narratives were re-interpreted and placed in new hierarchical positions in the course of time under the impact of the Reformation, 16th-century English Puritanism, Enlightenment patriotism, the French Revolution and 19th-century romantic nationalism. The article concludes that it is still possible to write national histories featuring ‘the people’ as one of the actors. But the historian should keep in mind that ‘the people’ did not always play the main role, nor did they play the same role as in previous periods. And even though there is a need to form syntheses when writing national history, national identities have always developed within a context of competing and hierarchical narratives. In Denmark, the ‘patriotist narrative’ seems to be in ascendancy in the social and cultural elites, but has only partly replaced the ‘ethno-national’ narrative which is widespread in other parts of the population. The ‘compact narrative’ has so far survived due the continued love of the people for their monarch. It may even prove to provide social glue for a sense of peoplehood uniting ‘old’ and ‘new’ Danes.


1952 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Smith

As in the Middle Ages in the West, so in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) men were fond of explaining the hierarchical society in which they lived by comparing it to an organism. Social classes, Confucian scholars said, were like parts of the body: each had a vital function to perform, but their functions were essentially different and unequal in value. In this scheme the peasants were second in importance only to the ruling military class. Just as the samurai officials were the brains that guided other organs, so the peasants were the feet that held the social body erect. They were the “basis of the country,” the valued producers whose labor sustained all else. But, as a class, they tended innately to backsliding and extravagance. Left alone they would consume more than their share of the social income, ape the manners and tastes of their betters, and even encroach upon the functions of other classes to the perilous neglect of their own. Only the lash of necessity and the sharp eye of the official could hold them to their disagreeable role. They had to be bound to the land; social distinctions had to be thrown up around them like so many physical barriers; and, to remove all temptation to indolence and luxury, they had to be left only enough of what they produced to let them continue producing.


Author(s):  
Rita Copeland

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 658-659
Author(s):  
BEN-ZION GARTY

Five things have been said about garlic: it assauges hunger, warms the body, brings joy, increases virility and destroys intestinal lice. There are those who say that it engenders love and dispels envy. —Babylonian Talmud: Baba Kama (first gate) page 82 Garlic (Liliaceae Allium sativum) has been used for centuries by many cultures as a remedy for a variety of illnesses. Herodotus spoke about the medical use of garlic in Egypt, 3000 years BC. Hippocrates, in the fifth century BC, used garlic to treat a variety of infections, including leprosy, intestinal disorders, and chest pain. In the Middle Ages garlic was used for protection against the plague.


PMLA ◽  
1916 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 664-712
Author(s):  
John K. Bonnell

By the term ‘sepulehrum’ is designated that device or structure employed in churches—especially in the middle ages—to symbolize, or in more complete manner to represent, the tomb of Christ. This sepulchrum, so named in the liturgy, first appears in connection with the ancient office of the Depositio Crucis, or burial of the cross, which after mass on Good Friday typified the burial of Christ. Complementing and completing the Depositio was another office, privately celebrated by the priest and clergy before matins on Easter Sunday, typifying the resurrection, and called the Elevatio Crucis. When, after the tenth century, troping of the Introit for Easter morning—the famous Quem Quaeritis—developed into a little liturgical play with the impersonation of the angel or angels, and of the three Maries coming to anoint the body of the Lord, there was naturally a development of the heretofore symbolic sepulchrum in the altar, into what resulted finally in a separate structure.


2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Caballero-Navas

This article presents a brief analysis of the ways in which women’s healthcare was understood by medieval Jews, as well as how this sphere of medical activity was learned, practised and disseminated among western Jewish communities during the Middle Ages. It examines the paths of transmission and reception of theories and notions of female physiology, health and disease within the Hebrew medical corpus, and it analyses the influence of the Arabic and Latin traditions in this process. In connection with the understanding of women’s healthcare, it pays some attention to adornment and decoration of the body, as part of the technology that focused on intervening in the functioning of the body. It also discusses succinctly the process through which medical ideas and concepts, as well as healing practices, were received, and integrated or refused, by Jews.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document