scholarly journals Hybrid Knowledge and the Historiography of Science

Author(s):  
Alberto Bardi

Originating in the field of biology, the concept of the hybrid has proved to be influential and effective in historical studies, too. Until now, however, the idea of hybrid knowledge has not been fully explored in the historiography of pre-modern science. This article examines the history of pre-Copernican astronomy and focuses on three case studies—Alexandria in the second century CE; Baghdad in the ninth century; and Constantinople in the fourteenth century—in which hybridization played a crucial role in the development of astronomical knowledge and in philosophical controversies about the status of astronomy and astrology in scholarly and/or institutional settings. By establishing a comparative framework, this analysis of hybrid knowledge highlights different facets of hybridization and shows how processes of hybridization shaped scientific controversies.

2007 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-457
Author(s):  
C. Kavin Rowe

In the effort both to clarify and advance the present scholarly discussion, this article continues a conversation about (a) the reception history of Luke and Acts and (b) the hermeneutical implications that derive from such history . After a brief recapitulation of the status quaestionis, the article presses for a clear distinction between literary unity and reception history. It then moves to examine the cogency of the suppositions about the history of the Lukan writings prior to their reception in the second century (and beyond) and suggests a scenario that renders intelligible the later developments. Finally, the article concludes with some reflections about the pertinence of reception history to New Testament studies.


1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN C. YALDWYN ◽  
GARRY J. TEE ◽  
ALAN P. MASON

A worn Iguanodon tooth from Cuckfield, Sussex, illustrated by Mantell in 1827, 1839, 1848 and 1851, was labelled by Mantell as the first tooth sent to Baron Cuvier in 1823 and acknowledged as such by Sir Charles Lyell. The labelled tooth was taken to New Zealand by Gideon's son Walter in 1859. It was deposited in a forerunner of the Museum of New Zealand, Wellington in 1865 and is still in the Museum, mounted on a card bearing annotations by both Gideon Mantell and Lyell. The history of the Gideon and Walter Mantell collection in the Museum of New Zealand is outlined, and the Iguanodon tooth and its labels are described and illustrated. This is the very tooth which Baron Cuvier first identified as a rhinoceros incisor on the evening of 28 June 1823.


2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore

Twenty nine items of correspondence from the mid-1950s discovered recently in the archives of the University Marine Biological Station Millport, and others made available by one of the illustrators and a referee, shed unique light on the publishing history of Collins pocket guide to the sea shore. This handbook, generally regarded as a classic of its genre, marked a huge step forwards in 1958; providing generations of students with an authoritative, concise, affordable, well illustrated text with which to identify common organisms found between the tidemarks from around the coasts of the British Isles. The crucial role played by a select band of illustrators in making this publication the success it eventually became, is highlighted herein. The difficulties of accomplishing this production within commercial strictures, and generally as a sideline to the main employment of the participants, are revealed. Such stresses were not helped by changing demands on the illustrators made by the authors and by the publishers.


Author(s):  
Chris Himsworth

The first critical study of the 1985 international treaty that guarantees the status of local self-government (local autonomy). Chris Himsworth analyses the text of the 1985 European Charter of Local Self-Government and its Additional Protocol; traces the Charter’s historical emergence; and explains how it has been applied and interpreted, especially in a process of monitoring/treaty enforcement by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities but also in domestic courts, throughout Europe. Locating the Charter’s own history within the broader recent history of the Council of Europe and the European Union, the book closes with an assessment of the Charter’s future prospects.


Author(s):  
Didier Debaise

Which kind of relation exists between a stone, a cloud, a dog, and a human? Is nature made of distinct domains and layers or does it form a vast unity from which all beings emerge? Refusing at once a reductionist, physicalist approach as well as a vitalistic one, Whitehead affirms that « everything is a society » This chapter consequently questions the status of different domains which together compose nature by employing the concept of society. The first part traces the history of this notion notably with reference to the two thinkers fundamental to Whitehead: Leibniz and Locke; the second part defines the temporal and spatial relations of societies; and the third explores the differences between physical, biological, and psychical forms of existence as well as their respective ways of relating to environments. The chapter thus tackles the status of nature and its domains.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-51
Author(s):  
Debashree Mukherjee

In 1939, at the height of her stardom, the actress Shanta Apte went on a spectacular hunger strike in protest against her employers at Prabhat Studios in Poona, India. The following year, Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the extractive nature of the film industry. In Jaau Mi Cinemaat? (Should I Join the Movies?, 1940), she highlighted the durational depletion of the human body that is specific to acting work. This article interrogates these two unprecedented cultural events—a strike and a book—opening them up toward a history of embodiment as production experience. It embeds Apte's emphasis on exhaustion within contemporaneous debates on female stardom, industrial fatigue, and the status of cinema as work. Reading Apte's remarkable activism as theory from the South helps us rethink the meanings of embodiment, labor, materiality, inequality, resistance, and human-object relations in cinema.


Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mbuzeni Mathenjwa

The history of local government in South Africa dates back to a time during the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. With regard to the status of local government, the Union of South Africa Act placed local government under the jurisdiction of the provinces. The status of local government was not changed by the formation of the Republic of South Africa in 1961 because local government was placed under the further jurisdiction of the provinces. Local government was enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa arguably for the first time in 1993. Under the interim Constitution local government was rendered autonomous and empowered to regulate its affairs. Local government was further enshrined in the final Constitution of 1996, which commenced on 4 February 1997. The Constitution refers to local government together with the national and provincial governments as spheres of government which are distinctive, interdependent and interrelated. This article discusses the autonomy of local government under the 1996 Constitution. This it does by analysing case law on the evolution of the status of local government. The discussion on the powers and functions of local government explains the scheme by which government powers are allocated, where the 1996 Constitution distributes powers to the different spheres of government. Finally, a conclusion is drawn on the legal status of local government within the new constitutional dispensation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-138
Author(s):  
Dr. Bilal Ahmad Khan

Islamic economics based on specific concept of universe and the creation of man is contradictory to the concept adopted and accepted by modern science. Islamic economics postulates although ability and expertise is required for progress and growth but distribution of resources completely dependent on it would be cruel, inhuman and bereft of kindness, and lead to oppression. Islamic economics does not favor making human ability and expertise the fulcrum of resource distribution. It should be kind, considerate and based on justice and fairness. This is because according to Islamic philosophy, ownership is considered to be a trust from Allah which has been bestowed on the rich so that they may utilize it correctly. In Islamic economics the role of the individual, has inclinations and his aims and objectives occupy a central position and are vitally important. He is definitely a rational being but his level of rationality is not confined to the calculations of cost and profit. An individual does not want merely to obtain monetary profit and physical pleasure and leisure but he also wants and aims for something beyond what the material world has to offer. The main aim of the study is to find out the relationship between Islam and economics. In Islamic economics the comprehensive moral training of the individual, his technical and educational ability, his aims and his priorities are of primary importance. According to Islamic economics the means of acquiring wealth has the same importance as wealth itself. Dishonesty, abuse of trust and earning of wealth through fraudulent ways and means may perhaps increase the status of an individual but the society suffers because of it on the whole. This leads to an unjust and oppressive economic system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (152) ◽  
pp. 92-99
Author(s):  
S. M. Geiko ◽  
◽  
O. D. Lauta

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the tropological theory of the history of H. White. The researcher claims that history is a specific kind of literature, and the historical works is the connection of a certain set of research and narrative operations. The first type of operation answers the question of why the event happened this way and not the other. The second operation is the social description, the narrative of events, the intellectual act of organizing the actual material. According to H. White, this is where the set of ideas and preferences of the researcher begin to work, mainly of a literary and historical nature. Explanations are the main mechanism that becomes the common thread of the narrative. The are implemented through using plot (romantic, satire, comic and tragic) and trope systems – the main stylistic forms of text organization (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony). The latter decisively influenced for result of the work historians. Historiographical style follows the tropological model, the selection of which is determined by the historian’s individual language practice. When the choice is made, the imagination is ready to create a narrative. Therefore, the historical understanding, according to H. White, can only be tropological. H. White proposes a new methodology for historical research. During the discourse, adequate speech is created to analyze historical phenomena, which the philosopher defines as prefigurative tropological movement. This is how history is revealed through the art of anthropology. Thus, H. White’s tropical history theory offers modern science f meaningful and metatheoretically significant. The structure of concepts on which the classification of historiographical styles can be based and the predictive function of philosophy regarding historical knowledge can be refined.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document