(The interpretation of contemporary religious phenomena from Weber’s point of view: some notes inspired on a critical reading of The New Map of Religions ) - DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2011v9n23p674 Resumo Dentre alguns usos equivocados recorrentes das contribuições teóricas de Weber apresentadas em A Ética Protestante e o Espírito do Capitalismo , podemos citar: tratar suas interpretações como conhecimento nomotético e não ideográfico, como o pretendido pelo autor; o tratamento dos tipos ideais de capitalismo e das éticas das religiões puritanas, bem como (...) o do catolicismo analisados no livro citado, como se fossem realidades empíricas, e não construtos conceituais abstratos; a busca da replicação contemporânea da relação, inclusive concebida como monocausal, encontrada entre a ética protestante e o surgimento e o desenvolvimento do capitalismo que surgiu na Inglaterra e Alemanha. Nesse artigo pretendemos apresentar parâmetros para a interpretação de fenômenos religiosos contemporâneos a partir das contribuições teórico-metodológicas de Weber, chamando a atenção para equívocos comuns ligados ao entendimento inadequado da proposta epistemológica weberiana apresentada e exercitada no livro citado . Fazemos isso seguindo a estrutura básica de um ensaio, no qual apresentamos uma leitura crítica da análise apresentada no artigo intitulado Novo Mapa das Religiões . Palavras chave : Weber. Metodologia. Religião no Brasil.This article aims to provide parameters for the interpretation of contemporary religious phenomena from the theoretical and methodological contributions of Weber, drawing attention to common misconceptions related to inadequate understanding of his theoretical and epistemological proposals presented in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . Among some of the recurring misuses of the theoretical contributions made by Weber are: a) the treatment of his interpretations as nomothetic knowledge rather than ideographic, as intended by the author; b) the treatment of ideal types of the capitalism, of the puritan religious beliefs, and of the Catholicism as if they were empirical realities and not abstract constructs; c) the search for the contemporary replication of the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the emergence and development of Capitalism in England and in Germany. In short, this essay presents a critical reading of the analysis presented in the article titled New map of religions . Keywords : Weber. Methodology. Religion in Brazil. (shrink)

Delivery riders became frontline workers who assisted everyone in getting their daily supplies. They transported them to their destinations when the pandemic started, and everyone had to stay home to stop the COVID-19 virus from spreading. Thus, this study explores the experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms of 15 Female Delivery Riders in Bulacan, Philippines. The study employed Heideggerian Phenomenology and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Further, the following themes arise: (1) The Realist, (2) The Accommodated, (3) The Vulnerable, and (4) The (...) Determined. These themes highlighted the experiences and challenges faced by the participants. Moreover, it is highly suggested that female employees should be given preferential assistance given their physical capabilities and role in the family. Thus, local government units should provide an alternative source of income that will allow them to have quality time with their family, especially their children. (shrink)

Wie werden in einzelnen Disziplinen Heureka-Effekte hervorgerufen? Wann leuchtet Wissenschaftlern in einem Fach ein Argument, ein Gedanke ein, wie werden sie davon überzeugt. Was sind die disziplinären Standards und wie sieht die Praxis im akademischen Alltag dazu aus? 15 Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aus den Natur-, Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften geben hierauf ihre Antworten in diesem Buch in einer Weise, dass alle, die das wissen wollen, sie auch verstehen.

This article explores Muslim conversion to Christianity using a body of hagio-graphical sources in Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, and Latin. Through these lives of Christian martyrs, the article seeks to understand why Muslims undertook the surprising journey from “mosque to church” in the early centuries after the conquests. Many studies of Islamization are teleological, aiming to explain the large-scale conversion of the Middle East by the end of the Crusades. In contrast, this article aims to show why Islamization—especially in (...) the Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid periods—could be highly contingent, even fragile, at a time when Muslims formed a numerical minority in many regions under their control. (shrink)

Research in the fields of complex problem solving (CPS) and dynamic decision making using microworlds has been mainly conducted in Western industrialized countries. This study analyzes the CPS process by investigating thinking‐aloud protocols in five countries. Participants were 511 students from Brazil, Germany, India, the Philippines, and the United States who worked on two microworlds. On the basis of cultural‐psychological theories, specific cross‐national differences in CPS strategies were hypothesized. Following theories of situatedness of cognition, hypotheses about the specific frequency of (...) problem‐solving strategies in the two microworlds were developed. Results of the verbal protocols showed (a) modification of the theoretical CPS model, (b) task dependence of CPS strategies, and (c) cross‐national differences in CPS strategies. Participants’ CPS processes were particularly influenced by country‐specific problem‐solving strategies. (shrink)

Applied Christian Ethics addresses selected themes in Christian social ethics. Part one shows the roots of contributors in the realist school; part two focuses on different levels of the significance of economics for social justice; and part three deals with both existential experience and government policy in war and peace issues.

Through the ability to preview the future , people can anticipate how best to think, feel and act in just about any setting. But exactly what factors determine the contents of prospection? Extending research on action identification and temporal construal, here we explored how action goals and temporal distance modulate the characteristics of future previews. Participants were required to imagine travelling to Egypt to climb or photograph a pyramid. Afterwards, to probe the contents of prospection, participants provided a sketch of (...) their imaginary experience. Results elucidated the impact of goal type and temporal distance on mental imagery. While a climbing goal prompted participants to draw a larger pyramid in the near than distant future, a photographic goal influenced only the compositional complexity of the sketches. These findings reveal how action goals and temporal distance shape the contents of future simulations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the Hyperbole Identification Procedure, a first systematic method for identifying linguistic hyperbole in discourse. We start by comparing existing definitions of linguistic hyperbole. Based on the commonalities shared by these definitions, we provide our operational definition of hyperbole as “an expression that is more extreme than justified given its ontological referent.” The next section argues why it is useful to identify hyperbole, as with metaphor in Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit, at the level of lexical units, and (...) subsequently introduces the steps of HIP. We follow up with two sample analyses of HIP in practice. First, we show how to unitize and analyze one complete sample sentence. Second, we present sample analyses of a number of selected cases. Then we present data showing that HIP can be reliably applied to a sample corpus of Dutch news texts. We end with discussing applications and implications of using HIP in corpus research. (shrink)

The gravitational influence of Jupiter on Saturn produces, among other things, non-negligible changes in the eccentricity of Saturn that affect the magnitude of error of Ptolemaic astronomy. The value that Ptolemy obtained for the eccentricity of Saturn is a good approximation of the real eccentricity—including the perturbation of Jupiter—that Saturn had during the time of Ptolemy's planetary observations or a bit earlier. Therefore, it seems more probable that the observations used for obtaining the eccentricity of Saturn were done near Ptolemy’s (...) time, and rather unlikely earlier than the first century AD. Even if this is not quite a demonstration that Ptolemy used observations of his own, my argument increases its probability and practically discards the idea that Ptolemy borrowed values or observations from astronomers further back than the first century AD, such as Hipparchus or the Babylonians. (shrink)

Diagrams in medieval manuscripts of Greek mathematical and astronomical works can seem peculiar for a modern reader, given their persistent and widespread tendency to represent more geometric regularity than the argument requires and their usual visual inaccuracy in depicting the mathematical objects discussed in the text. Although most scholars believe that these tendencies go back to the original Greek authors, in a recent paper I argued that these odd features should not be attributed to Greek authors, but to transmission. My (...) main argument there is based on experiments made with university students who played the role of copyists. In this paper, I show that the vestiges of the changes caused by transmission are present in the very diagrams of the extant manuscripts. I analyze four diagrams taken from Aristarchus's On Sizes. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the coincidence of the prediction of the Earth–Sun distance carried out by Ptolemy in his Almagest and the one he carried out, with another method, in the Planetary Hypotheses. In both cases, the values obtained for the Earth–Sun distance are very similar, so that the great majority of historians have suspected that Ptolemy altered or at least selected the data in order to obtain this agreement. In this article, I will provide a reconstruction of some (...) way in which Ptolemy could have altered or selected the data and subsequently will try to argue in favor of its historical plausibility. (shrink)

The book of Aristarchus of Samos, On the distances and sizes of the sun and moon, is one of the few pre-Ptolemaic astronomical works that have come down to us in complete or nearly complete form. The simplicity and cleverness of the basic ideas behind the calculations are often obscured in the reading of the treatise by the complexity of the calculations and reasoning. Part of the complexity could be explained by the lack of trigonometry and part by the fact (...) that Aristarchus appears unwilling to make some simplifications that could be simply taken for granted. But an important part of the complexities is due to some unnecessary inconsistencies, as recently discovered by Berggren and Sidoli (Arch Hist Exact Sci 61:213–254, 2007). In the first part of this paper, I will try to show that some of these inconsistencies are just apparent. But the complexity of the calculations and reasoning is not the only reason that could disturb a reader of the treatise. The great inaccuracy—even for the measurement methods and instruments available at those times—of one of the three input values of the treatise is really astonishing. In the sixth and last hypothesis, Aristarchus states that the moon’s apparent size is equal to 2∘\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$^{\circ }$$\end{document}, while the correct value is one-fourth of that. Some attempts have been made in order to explain such a big value, but all of them have problems. In the second part of this paper, I will propose a new speculative but plausible explanation of the origin of this value. (shrink)

This article analyzes the angular spacing of the degree marks on the zodiac scale of the Antikythera mechanism and demonstrates that over the entire preserved 88° of the zodiac, the marks are systematically placed too close together to be consistent with a uniform distribution over 360°. Thus, in some other part of the zodiac scale (not preserved), the degree marks have been spaced farther apart. By contrast, the day marks on the Egyptian calendar scale are spaced uniformly, apart from minor (...) errors. A solar equation of center is apparent which rises by nearly 2.7° over the preserved portion of the zodiac. The placement of the degree marks indicates that, in the preserved portion of the zodiac, the Sun was considered to run at a uniform pace of about 30° per synodic month, which is consistent with the Sun’s speed in the fast zone of the Babylonian solar theory of System A. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 5-56.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

To assert that the ancient planetary theory proposed by Ptolemy was irrefutable – at least until the telescope discovery – is a bit of a cliché. The aim of this paper is to analyze in what sense it could be said that the epicycle and deferent model proposed by Ptolemy to explain the planetary movement is irrefutable and in what sense it is not. To do this, we will use the conceptual framework developed by the Structuralist Conception, and in particular, (...) the Moulines’ analysis of the “guiding principles”. • DOI:10.5007/1808-1711.2010v14n2p211. (shrink)

The eighth book of Martianus Capella’s famous De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii deserves a prominent place in the history of astronomy because it is the oldest source that came down to us unambiguously postulating the heliocentrism of the inner planets. Just after the paragraph in which Capella asserts that Mercury and Venus revolve around the Sun, he describes a method for calculating the size of the Moon, as well as the proportion between the size of its orbit and the size (...) of the Earth. It is possible to find some descriptions of the argument in general histories of astronomy or in books dedicated to Capella’s work, but usually they do not try to make sense of the argument. Rather, they limit themselves to describe or paraphrase what Capella says. As far as I know, there is no single study of the argument itself. The explanation for this absence is simple: the calculation offers many difficulties in its interpretation, for it shows obvious inconsistencies in the steps of the argument and apparent arbitrariness in the selection of the data used. In this article, I offer an interpretation that tries to discover, behind Capella’s confusing presentation, a well-sound argument for calculating the Moon’s absolute size. Interestingly, we have no records of this argument in other sources, at least in the form described by Capella. (shrink)

Tycho's star catalog enjoyed enormous prestige for centuries due to its accuracy. The entire catalog depends on the coordinates of one single star, Hamal (α Arietis), which explains why Tycho was so scrupulous in determining its coordinates using two different methods applied to more than 50 observations, as he described in his Progymnasmata. One of them proposed an ingenious way of dealing with refraction and parallax, two factors that he knew he could not control. Selecting particular observations, he was able (...) to cancel out the effects of both refraction and parallax. Still, the entire calculation starts from the coordinates of the Sun calculated from his solar model. But Tycho's solar model assumes too large of an eccentricity, producing errors in the predictions of the solar longitude that can reach up to 8'. In this paper, I analyze Tycho's method for calculating the coordinates of α Arietis and explain how the method he proposed unintentionally avoided transferring the error of his solar model to his catalog. (shrink)

In 1975, Imre Lakatos and Elie Zahar claimed that the determination of planetary distances represents excess empirical content of Copernicus's theory over that of Ptolemy. This claim provoked an interesting discussion during the first half of the 1980s. The discussion started when Alan Chalmers affirmed that it is not correct to attribute this advantage to the Copernican system over the Ptolemaic. Other scholars criticized Chalmers's assertion, reaffirming the position of Lakatos and Zahar: one went even further, asserting that Copernicus has (...) not one but two methods for calculating distances, even though this claim was subsequently also criticized. But all participants assumed that Ptolemy has no method for calculating planetary distances. In this article, I argue that this is not correct. I argue, in fact, that Ptolemy has two independent methods for calculating the distances of some of the planets and, therefore, as far as the calculation of planetary distances is concerned, Ptolemy's system surpasses that of Copernicus. (shrink)

Tycho Brahe was not just an observer; he was a skilled theoretical astronomer, as his lunar and solar models show. Still, even if he is recognized for proposing the Geoheliocentric system, little do we know of the technical details of his planetary models, probably because he died before publishing the last two volumes of his Astronomiae Instaurandae Progymnasmata, which he planned to devote to the planets. As it happens, however, there are some extant drafts of his calculations in Dreyer’s edition (...) of Tycho’s Opera Omnia under the name Calculi ad Corrigenda Elementa orbitae Saturni, which, to the best of my knowledge, have not yet been analyzed before. In these manuscripts, Tycho starts with calculations based on the Prutenic Tables and makes a series of adjustments to the mean longitude, the longitude of the apogee, and the eccentricity to fit a series of observations of oppositions. In doing that, Tycho describes and applies a new method for obtaining accurate values for the parameters of the superior planets, he develops a divided eccentricity model of Saturn, similar to the one we know Longomontanus and Kepler applied to Mars, and finally he realizes that the true position of the Sun somehow affects the motion of Saturn around the zodiac and develops a method to correct the position of Saturn as a function of solar equation of anomaly. So, a close analysis of the calculations reveals details of the Tychonic planetary models unknown until now. The present study analyzes these drafts. (shrink)

It is well known that heliocentrism was proposed in ancient times, at least by Aristarchus of Samos. Given that ancient astronomers were perfectly capable of understanding the great advantages of heliocentrism over geocentrism—i.e., to offer a non-ad hoc explanation of the retrograde motion of the planets and to order unequivocally all the planets while even allowing one to know their relative distances—it seems difficult to explain why heliocentrism did not triumph over geocentrism or even compete significantly with it before Copernicus. (...) Usually, scholars refer to explanations of sociological character. In this paper, I offer a different explanation: that the pre-Copernican heliocentrism was essentially different from the Copernican heliocentrism, in such a way that the adduced advantages of heliocentrism can only be attributed to Copernican heliocentrism, but not to pre-Copernican heliocentrism proposals. (shrink)

This book introduces students and practitioners to important ethical concepts through the lives of major thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, John Stuart Mill to the Dalai Lama.

This essay emphasizes and explicates factors and forces that led to the creation of the Tulip futures market. It considers whether critics of that market were correct about Tulip Mania. The introductory section describes briefly the Dutch economy and states the thesis that the Dutch developed an innovative futures market. The principal section describes the forces and factors at work in the Tulip futures market. The concluding normative section assesses the bases for criticism and approves of the workings of the (...) market.Cet article met en avant et explique les facteurs et les forces qui ont conduit à la création d’un marché de futures de la Tulipe. Il examine si les analyses de ce marché étaient correctes concernant la Tulipe Mania. La section introductive décrit brièvement l’économie hollandaise et explique que les Hollandais ont développé un marché de futures innovant. La section principale décrit les forces et les facteurs qui opèrent sur le marché financier des Tulipes. La section normative de conclusion évalue les fondements des critiques et défend le fonctionnement du marché. (shrink)

This paper assumes that there is a distinction between empirical and non-empirical science. It also assumes that empirical science has two complementary parts, namely, theorization and experimentation. The paper focuses strictly on the experimental aspect of science. It is a call for reformation in African experimental science. Following a deep historical understanding of the revolution that brought about experimental philosophy this paper admits that magic was the mother, not just the “bastard sister” of empirical science. It uncovers the fact that (...) magic added the dimension of experimentation to science. This paper somewhat maintains that most of the ideas presented by some African scholars contain vestiges of the magical tradition in them. Even though this might not be a flaw by any reasonable standard, the paper still argues that there is a genuine need to separate magic from science, if we ever crave for any form of material/physical progress in Africa. I insist that the thrust of the call for paradigm shift in this paper is centered basically on experimentation. The issue of theoretical entities was introduced only to the extent such entities enhance experimental realism in the practice of African science. Of course, reformation can equally take place at the level of scientific theorization, but that is strictly beyond the scope of this paper. The fact is that those who are versed on the issues of experimentation should begin to get more focused on that aspect; and those who are given to theorization should settle with the formulation of well-structured theories. Time has indeed come for us to properly streamline our thoughts and make progress in the direction of African experimental science. In making this clarion call, we adopted a combined approach of hermeneutics and analysis. Keywords : Magic, African science, experimental science, paradigm, African thought. (shrink)

Varied theories and models of development have been advanced by many scholars to explain the failure of developmental theories and policies in Africa. This paper critically reviews the existing literature on the bane of development in Africa, arriving at what it considers as the most fundamental twin minions of underdevelopment in the continent. The two implicated interrelated issues are thought predicament and unwillingness to act. Whereas thought predicament affects the intellectual faculty, unwillingness to act is the defect of the volitional (...) and affective faculties. This paper strongly claims that without first rectifying these three core faculties of the African person, the continent can at best be chasing shadows. This, however, does not suggest that all other reasons for underdevelopment are insignificant or implausible. Well-planned educational system and deliberate conscientiousness towards enhancing the intellectual, volitional and affective faculties of humans are key to sustainable development of any state in Africa. Keywords : Thought Predicament, Unwillingness to Act, Underdevelopment, Africa. (shrink)