First Published in 2004. Confusion reigns in sociological accounts of the curent condition of modernity. The story-lines from the 'end of the subject' to 'a new individualism', from the 'dissolution of society' to the re-emergence of 'civil society', from the 'end of modernity' to an 'other modernoity' to 'neo-modernization'. This book offers a sociology of modernity in terms of a historical account of social transformations over the past two centuries, focusing on Western Europe but also looking at the USA and (...) at Soviet socialism as distinct variants of modernity. A fundamental ambivalence of modernity is captured by the double notion of liberty and discipline in its three major dimensions: the relations between individual liberty and political community, betwen agency and structure, and between locally situated human lives and widely extended social institutions. Two major historical transformations of modernity are distinguished, the first one beginning in the late nineteenth century and leading to a social formation that can be called organized modernity, and the second being the one that dissolves organized modernity. It is this current transformation which revives some key concerns of the 'modern project', ideas of liberty, plurality and individual autonomy. But it imperils others, especially the creation of social identities as ties between human beings that allow meaningful and socially viable development of individual autonomy, and the possibility of politics as communicative interaction and collaborative deliberation about what human beings have in common. (shrink)

Does logic describe something or not? If not, is it a normative or practical discipline? Is there a radical division between the practical or normative level and the theoretical or descriptive level? A discipline is theoretical, we may say, if its main propositions contain descriptive expressions, such as “is” or “have”, but no normative expressions, such as “ought”, “ought not” or “may”. A discipline is normative if its main propositions are of the form “it ought to be”. (...) Theoretical propositions express what is, whereas practical propositions express what should be. So a theoretical discipline is descriptive and a normative discipline is prescriptive, but what does a theoretical discipline describe? (shrink)

In 1973, the discipline of ethology came into its own when three of its most prominent practitioners—Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch—jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Historians have shown how Lorenz and Tinbergen were central to the practical and theoretical innovations that came to define ethology as a distinct form of animal behavior research in the twentieth century. Frisch is rarely mentioned in such histories. In this paper, I ask, What is Frisch’s relationship (...) to the discipline of ethology? To answer that question, I examine Tinbergen’s relationship to Frisch’s grey card experiments between Tinbergen’s time as a student at the University of Leiden in the mid 1920s and his 1951 publication of The Study of Instinct. In doing so, I highlight previously neglected affinities between Frisch’s early career research and the program of classical ethology, and I show how Frisch’s research meant different things at different times to Tinbergen and others working in the ethological tradition. (shrink)

Dirck Coornhert was a Dutch humanist whose seminal 1587 book, Boeven-tucht, redefined issues of poverty, charity, development and crime. A transitionary document, Boeven-tucht lies on the cusp of what Michel Foucault called the 'great confinement', which took place between about 1600 and 1750 and which was the common response by local and national authorities to the social disorder concomitant upon population expansion, a widening gap between rich and poor, religious discord and war. Inspired by Boeventucht, the Amsterdam Rasphuis and Spinhuis (...) were the European prototypes of houses of correction which sprang up all over Europe, intended to apply 'a punishment more bitter than death' to all 'criminal idlers'. This introduction to the first-ever English translation of Boeven-tucht situates Coornhert's text in the space between unmediated absolutist sovereignty and full-blown modern discipline, when disciplinary techniques were as yet only gradually emerging from the monasteries and lay fraternities in which they had been incubated, and before they spread into all facets of modern society. (shrink)

The article is the first exploration of Mārganāṭyam, a new tradition in the performing arts of modern India, created from the beginning of the XXI century by an outstanding researcher of musical, theatrical and dance culture, Kalamandalam Piyal Bhattacharya and his students. It is based on the many years of the author’s personal observations, interaction, interviews and discussions with the participants of “Chidakash Kalalay. Centre of Art and Divinity”, an artistic community based on the direct transfer of knowledge and skills (...) from teacher to students, which has developed around Piyal. The features of the method of reconstruction of the ancient Indian theater, the flexible application of the legacy of the past in modern conditions are under study. Particular attention is paid to the artistic interpretation and comprehension of the Indian philosophical heritage, and above all the concepts and worldview of Nyaya and Vedanta systems, transferring them to the space of scenic images. The presented material demonstrates that an integrated approach to the artistic heritage, a metatheater, combined with individual pedagogical unfold of the personality of the artists, creates the possibility of recreating the long-vanished tradition and complex philosophical issues in a way that is well understood today, relevant and reflects the essential needs of modern creators and viewers of the Indian theater at large. (shrink)

Recent Canadian and international events have sparked dialogue and action to address racism within the nursing discipline. While the urgency to seek and implement antiracist solutions demands the attention of nurses, we contend that a contemporary analysis of the mechanisms that continue to perpetuate racism within nursing's theoretical foundation is required first. This study reconsiders the perceived functions of racism within the current state of nursing concepts and theories. In particular, we expose the role that covert racism plays by (...) inadvertently sustaining racism through nursing's theoretical foundation, and how this process strengthens white supremacy. We argue that, in the absence of exposing these covert mechanisms, the development of solutions will be futile in dismantling racism. By making visible the covert mechanisms of racism within nursing's theoretical foundation, we attempt to establish an opportunity for the nursing discipline to dismantle its racist foundation and engage in sustained antiracist action. Lastly, this study demonstrates the need to equip the discipline with a moral commitment to antiracism in an effort to emancipate nursing from its racist legacies. (shrink)

The author nationally recognized for the quality and depth of his teaching in religious studies has written the first full-scale introduction to the history and methods of the study of religion.

The Formalist tradition in late-scholastic philosophy has gone unnoticed in standard historiography. This article’s overall objective is to add the Formalist tradition to what we know about Renaissance philosophy. I first show how the Formalist tradition was born out of some innovative considerations of hierarchies of distinctions in the wake of the Franciscan John Duns Scotus’s teaching on the formal distinction in the beginning of the fourteenth century (especially Francis of Meyronnes’s model of four distinctions and Petrus Thomae’s more elaborate (...) doctrine of seven kinds of distinctions). I then trace how Formalist literature developed from being an exclusively Franciscan affair to becoming a much more widespread phenomenon. Thus, from the decades up to 1500 and onwards, authors from various late-scholastic schools (Thomism, Lullism, Averroism, and others) produced Formalist literature, i.e., treatises on multiple kinds of distinctions. I highlight particularly how one Franciscan philosopher of the sixteenth century, Jean Du Douet, proposed to view the Formalist preoccupation with distinctions as a discipline in its own right, a proper scientia formalitatum. I finally argue that while this proposal met with dismissive reactions, Du Douet’s idea does in fact reflect the role Formalism played in the scholastic curriculum in the late sixteenth century, at least in Franciscan milieus. (shrink)

The application of digital humanities techniques to philosophy is changing the way scholars approach the discipline. This paper seeks to open a discussion about the difficulties, methods, opportunities, and dangers of creating and utilizing a formal representation of the discipline of philosophy. We review our current project, the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project, which uses a combination of automated methods and expert feedback to create a dynamic computational ontology for the discipline of philosophy. We argue that our (...) distributed, expert-based approach to modeling the discipline carries substantial practical and philosophical benefits over alternatives. We also discuss challenges facing our project (and any other similar project) as well as the future directions for digital philosophy afforded by formal modeling. (shrink)

SummaryThe present paper attemps to demonstrate an analogy between the metascientific, i. e. epistemological, concepts of Niels Bohr and Jean Piaget. To make such a comparison possible a general model of an open circular process of acquiring knowledge is proposed including the following stages: generalization of a successful theory, origin of implicit assumptions, counter‐examples, disclosure of implicit and tacit assumptions ; attempts to eliminate counter‐examples, cul‐de‐sac, emergence of competing theories, explication of fundamental notions, distinction between narrower and broader theories. Parallelly, (...) historical exemplifications on each stage are given. Finally, the argument is advanced that scientific epistemology is only possible at the expense of re‐defining ≫science≪ in such a way that it would cease to be science in its strict classical sense on which the claim to this name has been based so far. (shrink)

Recalling several profound disagreements about business ethics as it is currently discussed in Western societies, I emphasize the need for business ethics as an academic discipline that constitutes the “backbone” for both teaching business ethics and improving business practice (section 1). Then I outline a conceptual framework of business ethics that promotes a “bottom-up” approach (section 2). This “problem-and action-oriented” conception appears to be fruitful in terms of both practical relevance and theoretical understanding. Finally, I argue for (section 3) (...) the relevance of discussing goals at all levels of human action (i.e., individuals, organizations, systems) as well as the indispensability of human rights, and propose Amartya Sen's “goal-rights-system” approach as a normative-ethical framework for business ethics that integrates these two fundamental aspects. (shrink)

Philosophy’s richness comes in part from the wide range of conceptual frameworks from which meaning can be made of aspects of the world. Philosophy can be done from feminist, Marxist, positivist, or Freudian standpoints. The difference in the sorts of analyses produced by these different approaches can be tricky to explain to undergraduates. Contained here are short explanations of the nature of a collection of these frameworks and a fun example of each, an analysis of the chicken crossing the road (...) joke to be used to give undergraduates a sense of the breadth of philosophical methodology. (shrink)

A partir del enfoque desarrollador del proceso de enseñanza- aprendizaje y teniendo en cuenta las dificultades que se muestran con la literatura en la asignatura Historia de Cuba I para algunos contenidos, se presenta un sistema de medios con el objetivo de resolver estas dificultades. Se concluye que el sistema que se ofrece contribuye a la motivación del estudiante por el estudio de la asignatura; eleva la calidad de la clase; proporciona la asimilación y profundización del contenido, así como el (...) desarrollo de habilidades docentes, intelectuales y específicas; permite la participación activa y reflexiva de los estudiantes en la clase y facilita un mayor nivel de organización del contenido para la realización de las tareas docentes. Taking into consideration a developmental approach to the teaching-learning process and the instructional challenges linked to literature content of Cuban History I coursework, a system of teaching aids is presented. It is suggested that the proposed system enhances student motivation to study this subject, raises the quality of instructional lessons, favors the assimilation of the content, and improves the development of educational, intellectual and specific skills. It also allows for the active and reflexive participation of students in the lessons and facilitates a greater level of content organization for successful instruction. (shrink)

Talk at the Philosophy [in:of:for:and] Digital Knowledge Infrastructures online workshop (08/09/2022).

It is relatively easy to state that information retrieval is a scientific discipline but it is rather difficult to understand why it is science because what is science is still under debate in the philosophy of science. To be able to convince others that IR is science, our ability to explain why is crucial. To explain why IR is a scientific discipline, we use a theory and a model of scientific study, which were proposed recently. The explanation involves (...) mapping the knowledge structure of IR to that of well-known scientific disciplines like physics. In addition, the explanation involves identifying the common aim, principles and assumptions in IR and in well-known scientific disciplines like physics, so that they constrain the scientific investigation in IR in a similar way as in physics. Therefore, there are strong similarities in terms of the knowledge structure and the constraints of the scientific investigations between IR and scientific disciplines like physics. Based on such similarities, IR is considered a scientific discipline. (shrink)

Recent initiatives to enhance retention and widen participation ensure it is crucial to understand the factors that predict students' performance during their undergraduate degree. The present research used Structural Equation Modeling to test three separate models that examined the extent to which British Psychology students' A‐level entry qualifications predicted: their performance in years 1–3 of their Psychology degree, and their overall degree performance. Students' overall A‐level entry qualifications positively predicted performance during their first year and overall degree performance, but negatively (...) predicted their performance during their third year. Additionally, and more specifically, students' A‐level entry qualifications in Psychology positively predicted performance in the first year only. Such findings have implications for admissions tutors, as well as for students who have not studied Psychology before but who are considering applying to do so at university. (shrink)

. Reason’s genuine historicity: the establishment of a history of philosophy as a philosophical sub-discipline in Marburg Neo-Kantianism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 29, Special Issue: Historical Thought in German Neo-Kantianism, Guest Editors: Katherina Kinzel and Lydia Patton, pp. 694-717.

This collection of revised and new essays argues that biology is an autonomous science rather than a branch of the physical sciences. Ernst Mayr, widely considered the most eminent evolutionary biologist of the 20th century, offers insights on the history of evolutionary thought, critiques the conditions of philosophy to the science of biology, and comments on several of the major developments in evolutionary theory. Notably, Mayr explains that Darwin's theory of evolution is actually five separate theories, each with its own (...) history, trajectory and impact. Ernst Mayr, commonly referred to as the "Darwin of the 20th century" and listed as one of the top 100 scientists of all-time, is Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. What Makes Biology Unique is the 25th book he has written during his long and prolific career. His recent books include This is Biology: The Science of the Living World (Belknap Press, 1997) and What Evolution Is (Basic Books, 2002). (shrink)