Unity of science

Author(s):  
Jordi Cat

How should our scientific knowledge be organized? Is scientific knowledge unified and, if so, does it mirror a unity of the world as a whole? Or is it merely a matter of simplicity and economy of thought? Either way, what sort of unity is it? If the world can be decomposed into elementary constituents, must our knowledge be in some way reducible to, or even replaced by, the concepts and theories describing such constituents? Can economics be reduced to microphysics, as Einstein claimed? Can sociology be derived from molecular genetics? Might the sciences be unified in the sense of all following the same method, whether or not they are all ultimately reducible to physics? Considerations of the unity problem begin at least with Greek cosmology and the question of the one and the many. In the late twentieth century the increasing tendency is to argue for the disunity of science and to deny reducibility to physics.

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-150
Author(s):  
Deonna Kelli

Identity politics has become the catch phrase of the postmodern age. Withconcepts such as "exile," "migrancy," and "hybridity" acquiring unprecedentedcultural significance in the late twentieth century, the postcolonial age givesway to new identities, fractured modes of living, and new conditions of humanity.Literature is a powerful tool to explore such issues in an era where a greatdeal of the world is displaced, and the idea of a homeland becomes a disrupted,remote possibility. The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact onContemporary Literature, is an attempt to discuss how Muslims negotiateidentity at a time of rapid and spiritually challenging transculturation. The bookuses fiction written by Muslims to critique the effects of colonialism, counteractmodernity, and question the status of Islamic identity in the contemporaryworld. It also can be considered as the primary introduction of contemporaryIslamic literature into the postcolonial genre. Muslim writers have yet to submit a unique and powerful commentary on postcolonial and cultural studies;this work at least softens that absence.The Postcolonial Crescent was conceived as a response to The SatanicVerses controversy. Therefore, it is “intimately involved in the interchangebetween religion and the state, and demonstrates that the roles Islam is playingin postcolonial nation-building is especially contested in the absence of broadlyacceptable models” (p. 4). Conflicting issues of identity are approached byinterrogating the authority to define a “correct” Islamic identity, the role ofindividual rights, and the “variegation of Islamic expression within specificcultural settings, suggesting through the national self-definitions the many concernsthat the Islamic world shares with global postcoloniality” (p. 7) ...


1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-273
Author(s):  
Constance Lever-Tracy ◽  
David Ip

This article explores two new and related phenomena of the late twentieth century that will surely play a major role in shaping the world of the twenty-first: the economic development and opening up of China, and the emergence onto the world economic stage of diaspora Chinese businesses, producing a significant, identifiably Chinese current within global capitalism. Each of these has, we believe, been crucial and perhaps indispensable to the other.


1997 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 256
Author(s):  
Frank Hodges ◽  
R. J. Johnston ◽  
Peter J. Taylor ◽  
Michael J. Watts

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton

This article reports on some of the findings of a study into fear of crime among a group of Australians, examining the relationship between assessments of personal risk of being a victim of six specified crimes and worry about being a victim of these crimes. The findings revealed that while the two are related, assessments of risk tended to be higher than assessments of worry in relation to the same crime. Participants drew on their perception of their own vulnerability based on such attributes as gender, age and everyday routines, their personal experiences of crime, knowledge of others' experiences and media accounts to explain their assessments. Also underlying their notions of risk and fear were two paradoxical discourses on victimisation. The first discourse represents individuals as able to control their destiny and responsible for protecting themselves from crime. The second represented victimisation as a product of fate, against which it was impossible to fully protect oneself. It is argued that these notions of victimisation are underpinned by wider discourses in western societies that emphasise the vulnerability of individuals to risk and danger but also the importance of approaching the world as an active, entrepreneurial subject who refuses the victim status.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Ilana Rosen

Contemporary Israeli literature is presently preoccupied with the past diasporic lives of the previous generation, the one that came to Israel from practically all four winds in the mid-late twentieth century. Hungarian-Israeli writers—e.g., Yoel Hoffmann, Judith Rotem, Yael Neeman and Esti G. Hayim—constitute a distinct group within this stream of 1.5 and second generation poets and novelists who have written about immigration and State foundation, often using a documentary or fictionalized memoirist mode. This article highlights the components of these writers' complex burden of a whole world destroyed, in most cases, not long before they were born and which they strive to restore or at least re-imagine in their oeuvre as contemporary Israeli writers. These components include: Holocaust trauma and its transference to the second generation, Hungarian speaking families within the Israeli multicultural setting, the ties of these families with their Hungarian foreign relatives, and household objects related to this past.


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
Joel Michael Reynolds ◽  

Awaiting execution, Socrates asks, “Is life worth living with a body that is corrupted and in a bad condition (μοχθηροῦ καὶ διεφθαρμένου σώματος)?” “In no way (Οὐδαμῶς),” replies Crito. While one can only conjecture whether Heidegger would agree with this precise formulation, the specter of (the corruptibility of) the body loomed large during his later years and in much scholarship to follow. Among the many scholars who have addressed the question of the body in Heidegger, nearly all agree that he—early, middle, and late—maintains that Dasein’s or the mortal’s openness to being/beyng is the ground of the fleshly or bodily (das Leibliche), not the reverse. Adducing the discussion of Sein-zum-Tode in §§51-53 of Being and Time and the role of der Sterbliche in the Bremen Lectures, I argue that this relation is instead mutually reciprocal, for Heidegger’s own accounts of the role of mortality demonstrate that corporeal variability is constitutive of Dasein’s openness to being. I term what this thinking proffers a corpoietic understanding of the body, and I conclude by discussing what light this might shed on past indictments of Heidegger’s (non)treatment of the body and on late twentieth-century attempts to think bodily difference.


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