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Although terrorism has a complex genealogy as a political concept, contemporary discussions on “new terrorism” use a reductionist discourse on the legitimacy of violence. In this article, I discuss...

This article assesses possible unintended consequences of a targeted funding model for school education by analysing a Scottish Government policy operationalized via the Pupil Equity Fund (PEF) all...

Theories concerned with plagiarism issues recognise the need for a holistic approach. However, the literature reviewed does not propose such a theory but relies on reductionist approaches. In this ...

Recent scholarship has analyzed Hegel’s account of life in the Logic in some detail and has suggested that Hegel provides ways of thinking about organic phenomena that might still be fruitful for u...

Reductionism is an old doctrine desperate for new direction. With nomologically constructed theories commanding less attention in the life sciences, concern for the twentieth-century tradition of a...

This paper proposes a new reductive theory of modality, called the moodless theory of modality. This theory, and not modal realism, is the closest modal analogue of the tenseless theory of time. So...

As Black, White, Latinx, and Asian people pour into the streets to protest the police killing of unarmed Black men and women, many wonder whether this will be the time that the United States effect...

In eschewing reductionist segmentation in backpacker research, this study employs multi-dimensional concepts of social identity, motivation and sustainable behaviour to understand different groups ...

Psychoanalysis prioritizes the subjective experience of the mind. Neuroscience studies the objective aspects of the brain. These different focuses are the advantage—and the difficulty—of a dialogue...

The article focuses on the identity transformation of “the people” in the right-wing populist movement PEGIDA as a social force shaping populist discourse in Germany. The methodical approach, assum...

The term ‘inclusive education’ has evolved to connote various meanings and recently, neoliberalism has impacted how ‘inclusion’ is understood and enacted. In this paper, we use a disability studies...

The classic approach to research on toponymy is limited to a linguistic focus. This reductionism has had a negative impact on the study of the toponymy of intercultural and indigenous territories, ...

This article articulates a robust study of potentially harmful trend toward personalized nutrition through an examination of contemporary conversations and theories surrounding genetic science, rac...

This paper addresses the generally neglected topic of Vandana Shiva’s ontology. It is argued that there is a significant ontological component to Shiva’s ecofeminist philosophy and that this ontolo...

Essentialism manifests itself in a diversity of forms and is used in multiple ways. Yet it is always potentially dangerous — even when it is mobilised strategically and in apparently worthy forms for purposes of overcoming oppressive structures. As the first in a collection of articles focused on various manifestations of essentialism, this article offers a brief historical outline of how social anthropology deployed essentialist thinking, even amongst its canonical exponents. It examines how Durkheimian theorisations and the structuralist traditions to which they gave rise — in particular assumptions of the singular and homogeneous symbolic classification of society — lent themselves to essentialism. It considers the example of South Africa where essentialist social theories contributed to inhumane political formations. Given that essentialism always carries a latency to be used for pernicious ends, the article concludes by considering social anthropological approaches that might permit an understanding of individuals and society in ways that neither lead to nor need essentialist thinking, and instead recognise the contradictoriness, flux and incompleteness inherent in social life. Postprint

Where do a child’s morals come from? Interactions with other human beings provide arguably the primary contexts for moral development: family, friends, teachers and other people. It is the artistic products of human activity that this essay considers: literature, film, art, music. Specifically, I will consider some philosophical issues concerning the influence of folk and fairy tales on moral development. I will discuss issues of representation and reduction: in particular, how far should stories for children elide the complexities inherent to many folk and fairy tales? Drawing on a distinction between a problematic reductionism and an appropriate pedagogical reduction, I suggest that pedagogical issues of representation require us to think about how to represent complexity in ways that are reductive without being reductionist, that can delight and engage without being horrifying or tedious. While there is a place for horror and for boredom, it is primarily a matter of timing...

Introduction: Even though there have been substantial advances in our understanding of biological systems, research in drug discovery is only just now beginning to utilize this type of information. The single-target paradigm, which exemplifies the reductionist approach, remains a mainstay of drug research today. A deeper view of the complexity involved in drug discovery is necessary to advance on this field.Areas covered: This perspective provides a summary of research areas where cheminformatics has played a key role in drug discovery, including of the available resources as well as a personal perspective of the challenges still faced in the field.Expert opinion: Although great strides have been made in the handling and analysis of biological and pharmacological data, more must be done to link the data to biological pathways. This is crucial if one is to understand how drugs modify disease phenotypes, although this will involve a shift from the single drug/single target paradigm that remains a mainstay of drug research. Moreover, such a shift would require an increased awareness of the role of physiology in the mechanism of drug action, which will require the introduction of new mathematical, computer, and biological methods for chemoinformaticians to be trained in.

Educating medical students represents a thrilling yet challenging task. In an era of research breakthroughs but also global health setbacks, there is a risk that scientists and educators focus on highly specialized areas of knowledge, neglecting interrelated systemic issues. Here, we argue that the education of medical students should be embraced using a different strategy remodeled through what we call a 'tranS-E-3-ve' lens. In this new approach, there is no room for scientific reductionism. Instead, health disciplines should be seen from a translational, trans-disciplinary and trans-territorial scope, and should be sensitive to problems and pathways that link global phenomena to health. While current health issues cannot be approached without an equity lens, there are three interconnected dimensions of health that should pervade the content, goals, and design of academic curricula in medical schools: (1) exposome, or the understanding of the environmental contributors to health and disease; (2) identification of the mechanisms involved in the interactions between the elements that constitute complex systems; and (3) 'inner space', or the study of how cells communicate within the human body.

The detention of child soldiers is an example of an intractable policy controversy. In their advocacy of governance responses, policy-relevant actors adopt reductionist frames either of ‘vi...

In the last ten years or so, we have witnessed a shift towards so-called non-representational theories in heritage studies. In non-representational theories, one is interested in cognition,...

Instances of decolonisation can be considered processes featuring complicated interactions that are both path-dependent and open-ended. This perspective contrasts with reductionist epistemo...

Not just a reductionist representation of overpopulation, Soylent Green offers a nuanced critique of capitalism. In the course of the film, audiences learn that the seaplankton of which soylent gre...

This paper presents a unified argument against three widely held contemporary analyses of lawhood—Humean reductionism about laws, the dispositionalist view of laws, and the view of laws as ...

The current kind of isolated or reductionism research is incompetent to systematically manage the development of low-carbon tourism destination. This research takes Lhasa, a high-altitude tourist c...

The prevailing paradigm for psychopharmacology focuses on understanding brain mechanisms as the key to finding new medications and improving clinical outcomes, but frustration with slow progress has inspired many pleas for new approaches. Evolutionary psychiatry brings in an additional basic science that poses new questions about why natural selection left us vulnerable to so many mental disorders, and new insights about how drugs work. The integration of neuroscience with evolutionary psychiatry is synergistic, going beyond reductionism to provide a model like the one used by the rest of medicine. It recognizes negative emotions as symptoms, that are, like pain and cough, useful defenses whose presence should initiate a search for causes. An integrative evolutionary approach explains why agents that block useful aversive responses are usually safe, and how to anticipate when they may cause harm. More generally, an evolutionary framework suggests novel practical strategies for finding and testing new drugs. .

The complexity of our world demands that our knowledge systems shift from reductionist and mechanistic to holistic, organic, and complex approaches that consider diverse viewpoints. This is especia...

As Derrida points out in his famous polemic against Agamben in The Beast and the Sovereign I, the latter’s conceptual frivolity and historical reductionism point to the essential claim to sovereign...

In this article it will be argued that post-capitalism operates from a reductionist understanding of capitalism as a market-driven ideology with the private ownership of the means of productions as...

There is a huge literature about the Middle East. It is one of the most studied regions of the world. Yet, this popularity might not be the outcome of interest in the rich culture, the cosm...

The COVID-19 crisis offers unique challenges and opportunities for global health. The initial management of the pandemic was dominated by virologists, supported by epidemiologists who did not always meet indispensable scientific requirements. Interdisciplinary and complex global health concerns and expertise, however, did not have tangible impact on the COVID-19 debate, and even less on the strategies to contain the pandemic. As an explicitly political concept global health must safeguard its broad socio-political approach and counteract all tendency towards biomedical reductionism. Global health is universal and goes beyond health security. Above medical and biotechnological solutions, it requires the consideration of both downstream and upstream determinants of health such as the political, economic, ecological and social conditions that led to the crisis.

The ethical challenge in psychoanalytic conversations is about listening as an act of witnessing, with a willingness to surrender when called for, with a tempered reliance on the power of empathy, and with a commitment to protect the open future of the patient by refraining from reductionist interpretations, and formulations. This requires an embrace of our own vulnerability and a willingness to consider that the patient holds truths about us. These values signify, alongside our clinical expertise and clinical convictions, our ethical clinical minds at work. Holding all of this is our challenge in the face of clinical and economic pressures that encourage us toward certainty, decisiveness, and evidentiary practice.

The discursive analysis of criminal organizations’ family dynamics and ideological devices may provide important insights into the inner functioning of these groups. In this article, we describe and analyze a specific set of discursive strategies and the thematic narratives emerging from a TV interview with Giuseppe Riina, a member of Cosa Nostra and the son of one of the most important mafia bosses. Our analyses demonstrate the existence of recurring ideological devices such as reductionism, amoralism, familism, verticalism, normalism, victimism and religious relativism. The results are discussed in light of previous research that examines how discursive strategies and narratives may represent powerful tools for understanding criminal organizations. Family-related discourses, in particular, reveal meanings, values and ideas that contribute to constructing criminal organizations’ internal structure, as well as their relationship with the external world.

Precarity as a concept has come to be conceived as a distinctive experience of neoliberal development, especially in the European context. The experience of precarity, according to some, has influenced efforts aimed at living otherwise from the precepts of neoliberal development. Yet, for others, precarity is producing a ‘new dangerous class’. However, despite different perspectives of the effects and implications of precarity, the analytical purchase and political utility of the concept has received insufficient attention. In this article, we hope to contribute to critical debates on the limitations of ‘precarity’ as a concept for critical political analysis. We argue that in the dominant use of precarity as an analytic of inequality, particular experiences are rendered as historical universals. Consequently, these (particular) experiences are disconnected from global social and political relations of inequality, while at the same time reinforcing a linear and reductionist conception of development. We demonstrate that the temporal scheme represented by the notion of the ‘age of post-Fordism’, which serves as a crucial marker of the explanatory framework of precarity (in Europe), actually misconstrues the politics of global development through inequalities. Moreover, the tendency to focus on subjectification as conditioning the formation of a ‘new’ dangerous class, entails far-reaching omissions of actual transnational political struggles against domination and inequality. Instead of precarity, a critical engagement with the politics of global development ought to be the subject of analysis for understanding contested relations of affluence, insecurity and inequality.

Since the late 1960s, several nations adapted their religious education (RE) system, thereby moving from a confessional, theology-based, to a nonconfessional, religious studies-based approach. However, this shift has been criticized frequently, the main criticisms being nonconfessional RE cannot be neutral, that it leads to relativism, and that it fosters a reductionist view on religion. The author shows that these criticisms are not new but are like the criticisms at the address of the study of religion and the phenomenology of religion. To counter these criticisms in the context of RE, Robert Jackson's interpretive approach is put forward as a considerable way out.

This paper explores the suggestion that younger students and social workers are more accepting of neoliberal social work practices than their older counterparts, understanding social problems more readily as failings of individual behaviour rather than as produced by societal forces such as inequality, poverty, and punitive social policy. The suggestion is made that the acceptance of a hegemonic view of people in poverty and other difficulties, which is simple and reductionist, and therefore, easy to grasp, can only be challenged by sophisticated critical thinking. Assignment results from two modules within one social work programme which significantly correlate marks attained and student age are considered in the light of the suggestion that younger students are struggling with critical thinking, and therefore, with deconstructing the neoliberal hegemony.

Gallagher poses a phenomenologically-inspired challenge to a classical metaphysics of nature which is associated with contemporary natural sciences. This metaphysics can be reconstructed in terms o...

Shaun Gallagher calls for a radical rethinking of the concept of nature and he resists reduction of phenomenology to computational-neural science. However, classic, reductionist science, at least i...

In line with proponents of 4E cognition, Gallagher [2019] is concerned that many cognitive phenomena are not amenable to decomposition strategies since their very nature is to be constituted extens...

Resistance to the idea that phenomenology can be relevant to cognitive scientific explanation has faced two objections advanced, respectively, from both sides of the issue: from the scientific pers...

The target article criticises reductionist programs in cognitive science for failing to take into account important explanatory features of the organism's physical embodiment and task environment. ...

Concerns about women’s work were present at the advent of the modern method of national income accounting, and they have featured prominently in the most radical critiques of this method. During and after the Second World War, Phyllis Deane, a young researcher working under the supervision of Richard Stone, Austin Robinson and Arthur Lewis, grappled with the conceptual difficulties involved in measuring the ‘national’ incomes of mostly rural subsistence colonies in British central Africa. In constructing her estimates, Deane relied heavily on a multidisciplinary survey of nutrition conducted in interwar Nyasaland. Deane’s work was essentially an exercise in reductionism and bounding; she sought to extract from these data a single monetary estimate of production. Yet Deane also proved unwilling to exclude too much. She broke with her advisors’ favoured convention that activities not involved in market exchange should be excluded from the national income. Successive national income accountants aroun...

It seems that Orientalism is enjoying a resurgence, offering yet more distorted images of the Muslim world, and more specifically Muslim women. In this essay, I take Jan Goodwin’s Price of Honor as a case in point, a book which projects images that seem to galvanize around an inferior Muslim world where men are bloodthirsty, polygamous and helplessly oppressive of female members of their families. The book reiterates Edward Said’s views on the West’s creation of an “imagined” Orient, yet adds to it new charted cartographies of a reductionist Islamic world that allegedly possesses identical traits. First, the paratextual elements of Goodwin’s book are quite revealing: the cover picture of veiled Afghani women, the sensational title, chapter titles, epigraphs and maps are extremely telling of the preconceived ideas on which the book rests and which the text only supports. The language chosen and the “facts” listed in Goodwin’s account reflect an obvious Orientalist perspective and lead to erroneous overgene...

Exploring ways to develop a transformative curriculum vision for mathematics education that is inclusive to opposing perspectives and ideologies, this mindful inquiry explores “mindless” views embedded in the mathematics curriculum of Nepal; explores narrowly conceived disempowering assumptions within it; engages in dialectical interactional texturing among perspectives; and eventually emerges with its transformative potentiality. In so doing, this reflection on hegemonic worship of modernity identifies Newtonian reductionism, absolutism, and non-fluidity of language, serving mono-cultural perspectives as restraints underlying inclusive mathematics curriculum. Reflecting on this meaning-making, and in seeking an equilibrium view of reality, the inquiry hopefully offers pluralism, synergy, and montage as imperative in making mathematics education more meaningful.

Single media reductionism has dominated research which examines the relationship between digital technologies and political processes in most mature democracies. This kind of research has also tended to overhype the role of new media platforms in influencing electoral processes, thereby obfuscating the complex and sometimes unpredictable intermingling between media (both old and new forms) and contextual factors, especially in transitional societies. Using data gathered through a combination of virtual ethnography and qualitative content analysis, the study investigates how three major political parties and candidates in Zimbabwe used Facebook for campaign purposes during the so-called “watershed” 2013 elections. The results suggest that political parties and candidates appropriated Facebook to organise internal and external activities. The study also shows that although new media has partly “digitised” the Zimbabwean electoral processes and contacting practices between politicians and citizens wi...

It has been customary to think of the rivalry between Heart of Midlothian FC (Hearts) and Hibernian FC (Hibs) in Scotland’s capital city as a less well-known and diluted imitation of the rivalry between Glasgow’s so-called Old Firm of Celtic and Rangers with both rivalries being located within the context of sectarian identity politics. In fact, as argued in this article, the early history of the two Edinburgh clubs reveals a considerably closer association with sectarianism than is to be found in the initial years of the Old Firm. In support of this claim, evidence is drawn here from Hibs’ exclusively Catholic origins and from Hearts’ militaristic connections at the time of the First World War. On the other hand, as we further demonstrate, the contemporary rivalry between Hearts and Hibs owes less to religious and ethnic division than to spatial factors, or at the very least to the imagining of place, and to perceptions centred on the comparable images of the two clubs, both on and off the field of play, not least in relation to social class. With specific reference to place, while Hearts supporters are eager to celebrate their club as ‘the talk o’ the toon (town)’, one is increasingly obliged to consider which Edinburgh imaginary is implied in their famous old song and also what Hibs supporters’ celebration of the city’s district of Leith tell us about the current rivalry. Furthermore, while the Hearts-Hibs rivalry has entered a post-sectarian phase, sectarian elements do remain a feature of both clubs although these tend to manifest themselves when they are in opposition to one or other of Glasgow’s Old Firm clubs for specific political and ethnic reasons.

The aim of this article is to examine the framing of excessive consumption as a disease-like condition in the Swedish press during the years 1992–2012. Against a theoretical background discussing medicalisation, we have analysed the characteristics of problematic consumption framed as a disease, as well as the presumed causes of and responses to this problem. Alongside and intertwined with a structural and a rationalisation perspective, we find discussions and explanations of problematic consumption as a disease all through the investigated period. Class and gender are noticeable components of the core problem description, but the reductionist assumption of addiction as a brain disease seems to point to a problem beyond historical and social context. The disease conceptualisation of problematic consumption can be seen as a compensatory perspective in an individualising and consumption affirming society. However, this perspective is ultimately decided by politics and not by research. Despite being ...

This paper intends to articulate common epistemological elements between Francisco Varela’s and Contemporary psychoanalytic relational-intersubjective theories. These shared elements could be described as a common epistemological gesture, the overcome of a reductionist and dualist paradigm, instead giving away to a paradigm of complexity. In both perspectives, a phenomenological and close to experience philosophical reflection is incorporated, which can account the human experience as an irreducible and valid source of knowledge. In Varela’s theory, the notion of embodiment permit to conceive the mind as natural endowment of the body. In Contemporary psychoanalytic theories, nature of human experience is conceive as intrisically social, proposing a “two person” psychology and the intersubjective model. Finally, in line with both currents and in a preliminary way, I propose the notion of co-emergency, seeking to overcome different forms of dualisms like internal/external, subject/world, I/Other, et...

This article re-reads ELIZA, the famous computer program of early artificial intelligence created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 to test the possibility of intelligent interaction between humans and machines through language. Given newly emerging intelligent gadgets such as smart-home assistants that operate through natural language, I argue firstly for the timeliness of this program and explore the ways in which ELIZA stimulated debates concerning whether it could be considered an interlocutor for humans or a failure in exactly this regard. Secondly, I develop a feminist technoecological account of interaction at the ELIZA/user interface. In so doing, I seek to challenge the dualisms between body/mind, rationality/affectivity, and subject/object, thereby avoiding a reductionist perspective that calls into question the human subject as an autonomous agent.

This essay explores the notion that we are all fundamentally shaped by history. I suggest that psychoanalysis needs to attend not just to the history of the patient, but also to the fact that the psychoanalyst and patient alike are affected by history and its traumas. Human experience cannot be separated from the historical and cultural contexts in which we live out our lives. The approach I am describing is not an endorsement of historical determinism, the notion that the past entirely makes us who we are today. It is, rather, a plea to know history so that we might respond to what it can teach us. In making this argument, I draw on the work of the historian and psychoanalyst by training, Thomas Kohut. His work helps us to avoid reductionist views of human experience, whether in the past or the present, and teaches us to use empathy to think and feel our way into the situation of the other person. This is particularly relevant in light of the ongoing prejudices and social injustices in contemporary society.