The 2020 Aronov Lecture with Dr. Annette Yoshiko Reed

In this edition of The Interview, Annette Yoshiko Reed(New York University) joins Bulletin editor RichardNewton for a conversation and discussion as part of the University of Alabama’s 18th annual Aronov Lecture. The Aronov Lecture invites an accomplished and internationally renowned research scholar in the field of religion to bring insights that can inform the larger work of the human sciences. Reed discusses her work on the tensions, rhetoric, and myths involved in the construction of Jewish and Christian identities in the late antique Mediterranean and beyond, as well as her current thinking about how we approach the past through remembering and forgetting. She shares with the audience engaging stories, thought-provoking scholarship, and practical advice on navigating academia and the development of research interests.

Fusing Approaches in Educational Research: Data Collection and Data Analysis in Phenomenological Research

One of the aims of human sciences seek to understand the essences and meanings of human experiences by focusing on philosophical, epistemological, methodological, and linguistic principles through transcendental phenomenology and hermeneutics, two philosophies and research methodologies central to qualitative research. Therefore, fusing approaches provides a space where both epistemology and methodology within both traditions can merge to yield meaning and understanding, and at the same time, offer a new approach to dealing with data collection and data analysis without neglecting or distorting original leading concepts. Fusing approaches comes into being as the merging of overlapping and deferring epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical assumptions that a researcher brings into play and actually puts into practice sustaining a purposeful and explicit sense of neutrality to assure methodological trustworthiness. Moved by my sensitivity to lived experience, in this paper, I explicate in a step-by-step fashion the combination of Moustakas’ modification of Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen method of phenomenological analysis and Van Manen’s (1990) hermeneutic approach to phenomenology in data collection and analysis. In fusing approaches, I encourage researchers to generate knowledge and show understanding emanated from both transcendental phenomenology and hermeneutics sustaining a deep sense of neutrality, co-creation, thoughtfulness, and rigor.

Einführung: Erzählen, eine Ressource zur imagefördernden (Selbst)Darstellung von Unternehmen

ZusammenfassungErzählen ist als ein „anthropologisches Grundbedürfnis des Menschen“ in den verschiedensten Kulturen und Epochen allgegenwärtig. In der Wissenschaft ist es mit dem narrative turn in den 1970/80er-Jahren zu einem interdisziplinären Forschungsfeld avanciert (The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences, Kreiswirth 1994). Im Zuge der Erkenntnis, dass dem Erzählen eine zentrale Rolle zukommt, der Welt und dem eigenen Dasein Sinn abzugewinnen, Ereignisse in zeitliche und kausale Zusammenhänge einzubinden und so Kohärenz zu erzeugen, ist das Interesse daran geradezu inflationär gestiegen. Infolge unterschiedlicher Forschungsperspektiven auf das Untersuchungsobjekt ,Erzählen‘ rücken verschiedene Phänomene und jeweils spezifische Merkmale des Erzählens in den Vordergrund.

A study of contemporary concepts of Jesus' human knowledge

The question of the knowledge of Jesus is one of the most vividly debated issues in Christology today. The dynamics of this debate is caused by the lack of dogmatic declarations, the modern discoveries of human sciences and critical approach to the concept of omniscience resulting from the beatific vision (visio beatifica) of Jesus, which for many centuries was adopted almost on a par with dogma. The article compares contemporary theories of Jesus' knowledge cross-sectional, points to theologians' mutual inspirations, and analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the most important concepts. The primary role in the article is played by the historical-critical method, which makes it possible to show and analyse the changes in the ideas of Jesus' knowledge, which gradually abandoned the attribution of omniscience to Him. The theologians of the Reformed Churches, who were the first to recognise the paradoxes of Christ's omniscience as part of kenotic considerations, had a particular share in these developments. They wondered why, if the Incarnate God renounces His divine attributes, He would not also relinquish omniscience. Their reflections and the progressive development of the human sciences were an inspiration for many Catholic theologians, who in the 20th century also gradually began to notice the limitations of Thomas Aquinas' theory ascribing omniscience to Jesus. They have developed new ideas drawing on recent anthropology, philosophy, psychology and the human sciences. The most interesting of the theories are the hypotheses based on the mystical experiences of Jesus, which, without undermining the dogmas of His fully human nature, try to explain how He was able to contact the Father and gain knowledge of His mission. The development of new theories of Christ's knowledge by Catholic theologians, on the one hand, made it possible to approximate positions on this issue with the theologians of the Reformed Churches. On the other hand, it paradoxically opens up prospects for dialogue with some defenders of the visio beatifica concept, who allow its reinterpretation through the category of mystical experience.

The Islamization of Knowledge and Its Efforts to Neutralize The Idea of Liberal Islām: A Descriptive Study

This study deals with the conflict between the Islamization of knowledge and the liberalism of Islam. The necessity of the project of Islamization of knowledge is to be purifying from Western influences and elements in thought and human sciences because they do not suitable the Islamic world view. The phenomenon of liberal Islam became one of the challenges of Islamization of knowledge to reach its goals. The study aims to present the efforts that have been made to neutralize the idea of liberal Islam. The study was based on the descriptive approach by studying the concept of Islamization of knowledge and liberal Islam and tracing the history of them in Indonesia and Malaysia. From the results of the study: The researchers concluded that the Islamization of knowledge project has exerted its efforts in various activities to implement the neutralization of the elements that are affected by the Western world view in science and thought generally. Most of the activities revolved around editorial and publishing activities, discussions, lectures and scientific debates, and the establishment of social and scientific institutions or organizations.

Some Remarks on the History of the Introduction of Alexandre Koyré in Brazil

This article intends to briefly reconstitute the history of the introduction of Alexandre Koyré’s work in Brazil. I do not seek to make a general analysis but just to focus on two pathways by means of which his work was introduced in this country. I endeavor to reconstitute the history of the translation of his books into Portuguese and identify the main vectors and intellectual contexts responsible for his works’ acclimatation in Brazil. Those two pathways roughly correspond to two distinct geographies and intellectual cartographies; in Rio de Janeiro, interest in his work stemmed from the introduction of French epistemological thinking in the wake of philosophers’ readings Louis Althusser’s works after the 1960s; in São Paulo, it was linked to university institutionalization of the history of science, starting in the late 1950s, initially promoted by scientists. That history enables an understanding of the major lines and forms that the history of science assumed in Brazil. Furthermore, the study permits the comprehension of the logic of the international circulation of ideas and the history of the translation of human sciences books as forms of cultural appropriation.

A Constitution for the Anthropocene Body Politic Environment, Culture, and the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century

The following article is a slightly revised version of Serenella Iovino’s Keynote Address at the 2021 European Conference for the Humanities, jointly organised in Lisbon (5-7 May) by the UNESCO Social and Human Sciences Programme, the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPSH), and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The theme of the Conference Section inaugurated by this lecture was “The Humanities in the Twenty-First Century”. By acknowledging the official approval of the BRIDGES Project on education for sustainability as a partner of the UNESCO Management of Social Transformation Program, Iovino evaluated the role of the Environmental Humanities in the agenda of the so-called ‘New Humanities’, paying special attention to their relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this framework, Venice emerged both as a symbol and as a very concrete object of care, proving to be “a thinking machine” for contemporary natural-cultural dynamics, as Salvatore Settis has defined it. The lecture ended with the invitation to turn the current crisis into a constitutive moment for the ‘Anthropocene body politic’, namely, the earthly collective of agents and of processes, both human and nonhuman, natural and technological.