The Development of the Social Sciences in the Nineteenth Century and their Influence on Education

Author(s):  
Denis Lawton ◽  
Peter Gordon
2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 491-508
Author(s):  
Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa

Abstract Oscar Nerval de Gouvêa was a scientist and teacher in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whose work spanned engineering, medicine, the social sciences, and law. This paper presents and discusses a manuscript entitled “Table of mineral classification,” which he appended to his dissertation Da receptividade mórbida , presented to the Faculty of Medicine in 1889. The foundations and features of the table provide a focus for understanding nineteenth-century mineralogy and its connections in Brazil at that time through this scientist. This text was Gouvêa’s contribution to the various mineral classification systems which have emerged from different parts of the world.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 616-618
Author(s):  
Diego Mazzoccone ◽  
Mariano Mosquera ◽  
Silvana Espejo ◽  
Mariana Fancio ◽  
Gabriela Gonzalez ◽  
...  

It is very difficult to date the birth of political science in Argentina. Unlike other discipline of the social sciences, in Argentina the first distinction can be made between political thought on the one hand, and political science in another. The debate over political thought—as the reflection of different political questions—emerged in our country in the nineteenth century, especially during the process of constructing the Argentine nation-state. Conversely, political science is defined in a general way as the application of the scientific method to the studies on the power of the state (Fernández 2001).


Author(s):  
Robert A. Segal

The ‘Introduction’ examines and compares modern theories of myth by applying them to the famous myth of Adonis. It is only in the modern era—specifically, only since the second half of the nineteenth century—that these theories have purported to be scientific, for only since then have there existed the social sciences. Of these, anthropology, psychology, and sociology have contributed the most to the study of myth. Each discipline harbours multiple theories of myth, but what unites them is the questions asked: those of origin, function, and subject matter. Is myth universal? Is myth true? Along with these other questions, it defines myth as a story.


Author(s):  
Wayne C. Myrvold

This chapter begins with a puzzle: how is it that reliable prediction is ever possible, in physics? The reason that this is puzzling is that, even if the systems we are making predictions about are governed by deterministic laws that are known to us, the information available to us is a minuscule fraction of what might in principle be required to make a prediction. The answer to the puzzle lies in the phenomenon of statistical regularity, first identified in the social sciences. In a sufficiently large population, reliable predictions can be made about the total number of events that, taken individually, are unpredictable. Aggregate order arises out of individual disorder. This means that, as James Clerk Maxwell perceived already in the nineteenth century, all observed regularities are statistical regularities. To understand these requires the use of probabilistic concepts. This means that probabilistic reasoning is required even in our most certain predictions. Probability permeates physics, and we are going to have to make sense of it.


2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (01) ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Laurence De Cock

Abstract This paper argues that a discipline taught in schools is more than a mere copy of scientific knowledge. It investigates the relationship between scholarly and pedagogic knowledge from the end of the nineteenth century, when the teaching of history was tasked with participating in the construction of a shared national culture. In fact, it is only by mobilizing tools from the social sciences that the complexity of history teaching can be understood. The repeated accusations directed at the teaching of history in schools therefore reflect a trite and hackneyed understanding of its nature and mission.


1981 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angus McLaren

“Phrenology is of German origin: Vienna was its birthplace, Gall and Spurzheim its progenitors. But it was in France that it acquired its European eclat”, stated George Lewes in 1857. But he went on to declare that it was in America and Britain that the pseudo-science had its widest popularity amongst the “general thinking public”. The writing of the history of phrenology has also broken along national lines. Its impact on America and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century has attracted the attention of a generation of young social historians, whereas its progress in France has drawn the interest only of historians of medicine.


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