How Knowledge Grows
| Author | : Chris Haufe |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 347 |
| Release | : 2022-11-01 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 026237160X |
An argument that the development of scientific practice and growth of scientific knowledge are governed by Darwin’s evolutionary model of descent with modification. Although scientific investigation is influenced by our cognitive and moral failings as well as all of the factors impinging on human life, the historical development of scientific knowledge has trended toward an increasingly accurate picture of an increasing number of phenomena. Taking a fresh look at Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in How Knowledge Grows Chris Haufe uses evolutionary theory to explain both why scientific practice develops the way it does and how scientific knowledge expands. This evolutionary model, claims Haufe, helps to explain what is epistemically special about scientific knowledge: its tendency to grow in both depth and breadth. Kuhn showed how intellectual communities achieve consensus in part by discriminating against ideas that differ from their own and isolating themselves intellectually from other fields of inquiry and broader social concerns. These same characteristics, says Haufe, determine a biological population’s degree of susceptibility to modification by natural selection. He argues that scientific knowledge grows, even across generations of variable groups of scientists, precisely because its development is governed by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, he supports the claim that this susceptibility to modification through natural selection helps to explain the epistemic power of certain branches of modern science. In updating and expanding the evolutionary approach to scientific knowledge, Haufe provides a model for thinking about science that acknowledges the historical contingency of scientific thought while showing why we nevertheless should trust the results of scientific research when it is the product of certain kinds of scientific communities.
Captives and Corsairs
| Author | : Gillian Weiss |
| Publisher | : Stanford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 606 |
| Release | : 2011-03-11 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0804777845 |
Captives and Corsairs uncovers a forgotten story in the history of relations between the West and Islam: three centuries of Muslim corsair raids on French ships and shores and the resulting captivity of tens of thousands of French subjects and citizens in North Africa. Through an analysis of archival materials, writings, and images produced by contemporaries, the book fundamentally revises our picture of France's emergence as a nation and a colonial power, presenting the Mediterranean as an essential vantage point for studying the rise of France. It reveals how efforts to liberate slaves from North Africa shaped France's perceptions of the Muslim world and of their own "Frenchness". From around 1550 to 1830, freeing these captives evolved from an expression of Christian charity to a method of state building and, eventually, to a rationale for imperial expansion. Captives and Corsairs thus advances new arguments about the fluid nature of slavery and firmly links captive redemption to state formation—and in turn to the still vital ideology of liberatory conquest.
Integrating the Inner City
| Author | : Robert J. Chaskin |
| Publisher | : University of Chicago Press |
| Total Pages | : 364 |
| Release | : 2015-11-13 |
| Genre | : Business & Economics |
| ISBN | : 022616439X |
The Chicago Housing Authority s Plan for Transformation repudiated the city s large-scale housing projects and the paradigm that produced them. The Plan seeks to normalize public housing and its tenants, eliminating physical, social, and economic barriers among populations that have long been segregated from one another. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification? Is it resulting in integration or displacement? What kinds of communities are emerging from it? Chaskin and Joseph s book is the most thorough examination of the Plan to date. Drawing on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and data, Chaskin and Joseph examine the actors, strategies, and processes involved in the Plan. Most important, they illuminate the Plan s limitations which has implications for urban regeneration strategies nationwide."
Religious Liberty in Western Thought
| Author | : Noel B. Reynolds |
| Publisher | : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 320 |
| Release | : 2003 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 9780802848536 |
This is a print on demand book and is therefore non- returnable. In this volume, several leading scholars harvest the best of Western thinking on religious liberty. An opening chapter shows how religious liberty emerged slowly in the West through centuries of cruel experience and growing enlightenment. Separate chapters thereafter take up the unique role of such titans as Marsilius, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Tocqueville, and the American framers in the Western drama of religious liberty. From widely divergent experiences, these titans discovered the cardinal principles of religious liberty -- religious pluralism and toleration, religious equality and non- discrimination, liberty of conscience and association, freedom of expression and exercise. From widely discordant convictions, they distilled the most enduring models of church and state and of religion and law in the West -- from the organic models of earlier centuries to the dualistic models of more recent times. Contributors: Brian Tierney Steven Ozment John Witte Jr. Joshua Mitchell W. Cole Durham Jr. Michael W. McConnell Ellis Sandoz Thomas L. Pangle
Religion and Violence in Western Traditions
| Author | : André Gagné |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 186 |
| Release | : 2021-09-16 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 1000409066 |
This book examines the connection between religion and violence in the Western traditions of the three Abrahamic faiths, from ancient to modern times. It addresses a gap in the scholarly debate on the nature of religious violence by bringing scholars that specialize in pre-modern religions and scriptural traditions into the same sphere of discussion as those specializing in contemporary manifestations of religious violence. Moving beyond the question of the “authenticity” of religious violence, this book brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines. Contributors explore the central role that religious texts have played in encouraging, as well as confronting, violence. The interdisciplinary conversation that takes place challenges assumptions that religious violence is a modern problem that can be fully understood without reference to religious scriptures, beliefs, or history. Each chapter focuses its analysis on a particular case study from a distinct historical period. Taken as a whole, these chapters attest to the persistent relationship between religion and violence that links the ancient and contemporary worlds. This is a dynamic collection of explorations into how religion and violence intersect. As such, it will be a key resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Theology and Religion and Violence, as well as Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Studies.
Soviet Postcolonial Studies
| Author | : Epp Annus |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 320 |
| Release | : 2017-09-05 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1351850563 |
Postcolonial studies is a well-established academic field, rich in theory, but it is based mostly on postcolonial experiences in former West European colonial empires. This book takes a different approach, considering postcolonial theory in relation to the former Soviet bloc. It both applies existing postcolonial theory to this different setting, and also uses the experiences of former Soviet bloc countries to refine and advance theory. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and presenting insights and material of relevance to scholars in a wide range of subjects, the book explores topics such as Soviet colonality as co-constituted with Soviet modernity, the affective structure of identity-creation in national and imperial subjects, and the way in which cultural imaginaries and everyday materialities were formative of Soviet everyday experience.
How Borges Wrote
| Author | : Daniel Balderston |
| Publisher | : University of Virginia Press |
| Total Pages | : 613 |
| Release | : 2018-05-03 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 0813939658 |
A distinguished poet and essayist and one of the finest writers of short stories in world letters, Jorge Luis Borges deliberately and regularly altered his work by extensive revision. In this volume, renowned Borges scholar Daniel Balderston undertakes to piece together Borges's creative process through the marks he left on paper. Balderston has consulted over 170 manuscripts and primary documents to reconstruct the creative process by which Borges arrived at his final published texts. How Borges Wrote is organized around the stages of his writing process, from notes on his reading and brainstorming sessions to his compositional notebooks, revisions to various drafts, and even corrections in already-published works. The book includes hundreds of reproductions of Borges’s manuscripts, allowing the reader to see clearly how he revised and "thought" on paper. The manuscripts studied include many of Borges’s most celebrated stories and essays--"The Aleph," "Kafka and His Precursors," "The Cult of the Phoenix," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Emma Zunz," and many others--as well as lesser known but important works such as his 1930 biography of the poet Evaristo Carriego. As the first and only attempt at a systematic and comprehensive study of the trajectory of Borges's creative process, this will become a definitive work for all scholars who wish to trace how Borges wrote.
Italy by Way of India
| Author | : Erin Benay |
| Publisher | : Harvey Miller |
| Total Pages | : 206 |
| Release | : 2022-02-28 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : 9781912554775 |
The return of a saint's body to its rightful resting place was an event of civic and spiritual significance retold in Medieval sources and substantiated by artistic commissions. Legends of Saint Thomas Apostle, for instance, claimed that the martyred saint had been miraculously transported from India to Italy during the thirteenth century. However, Saint Thomas's purported resting place in Ortona, Italy did not become a major stopping point on pilgrimage or exploration routes, nor did this event punctuate frescoed life cycles or become a subject for Renaissance altarpieces as one would expect. Instead, the site of the apostle's burial in Chennai, India has flourished as a terminus of religious pilgrimage, where a multifaceted visual tradition emerged, and where a vibrant local cult of 'Thomas Christians' remains to this day. An unlikely destination on the edge of the 'known' world thus became a surprising source of early modern Christian piety. By studying the art and texts associated with this little-known cult, this book disrupts assumptions about how knowledge of Asia took shape during the Renaissance and challenges art historical paradigms in which art was crafted by locals merely to be exported, collected, and consumed by curious European patrons. In so doing, Italy by Way of India proposes that we redefine the parameters of early modern visual culture to account for the ways that global mobility and the circulation of objects profoundly influence how cultures see and know each other as well as themselves.
