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In his recently published seminar Life Death (1975–76), Derrida engages in a close reading of Heidegger's refutation of the biologistic interpretation of Nietzsche. Derrida explains that, building on his interpretation of Nietzsche as the peak of metaphysics, Heidegger wishes to rescue the latter's metaphysical discourse from its biologizing character. In this article, I argue that Derrida's reading centres on the ontological regionalism undergirding Heidegger's refutation. To develop this argument, I test the following three hypotheses. First, I show that the later exploration offered in Life Death draws on the schematic reading of Heidegger's question of being provided in Of Grammatology (1967). Second, I explain that, for Derrida, through his refutation of Nietzsche's supposed biologism, Heidegger reaffirms ontological regionalism in order to secure the whole interpretative system that interweaves together his reading of Nietzsche and Western metaphysics and his thinking of being. Finally, I highlight Derrida's emphasis on the relentlessness of Heidegger's denunciation of biologism. I demonstrate that, for Derrida, this can be explained as biology, which is a discourse on life and nature that since its beginnings touches on the blind point of regionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how adherents within the self-styled scientific side of the UFO subculture implicitly challenge the assumed dichotomy between a rationalized disenchanted modern scientific worldview, and a non-rational religious other. After providing background on the origin of the UFO subculture, ufology, and more explicitly religious forms of ufology, the article turns to the largest scientific ufological organization, MUFON, and the way in which participants within that organization engage and delineate social boundaries between religion, science, secularism, and spirituality. I argue that an enchanted ufology lurks just under the surface of this secular, scientific, rational disenchantment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous article, I examined the nature of historical consciousness. In this article, I apply it to three social issues: racism, ecological crisis, and higher education. Since the methods of historical consciousness are already in use, the aim here is not to introduce a new approach. My purpose is to make readers conscious of what they might normally do and why they are doing it. If a society fails to highlight and make explicit the methods it uses to solve the challenges it faces, the transfer of relevant skills will decline over several generations. Modern society has already reached the stage at which scientism has displaced a balance between timeless scientific rationality and historical consciousness in our approach to social issues. Without historical perspective to provide a narrative structure to the findings of science, society is likely to act in ways that are counterproductive. Unless citizens have a personal sense of participation in the stream of historical events, the knowledge they gain from science is not likely to be useful in guiding the direction of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publishing in Ambio and elsewhere, geoscientists distributed across several disciplines have both created and substantiated the Anthropocene concept since the turn of the millennium. Epochal and topically encompassing, the concept has served to focus academic and political attention on the extraordinary scale, scope and magnitude of the human impact on the Earth. The concept serves as a metaphorical 'roof' that allows a family of geoscientific terms to reside together harmoniously in the same space. The four Ambio papers evaluated here helped to both build the roof and the family. However, for all their merits, the papers form part of a wider scientific discourse that threatens to colonise the imagination of Earth present and future. A scientific framing of the Anthropocene needs to be deframed and then reframed in terms of what science misses (e.g. diverse social values, needs and wants, which imply alternate courses of possible future action). The papers assessed in this commentary have, albeit unintentionally, helped inspire this de- and reframing in wider social science, the humanities and the arts. Looking ahead, dissonant forms of knowledge and argument about Earth present and future will be key to forging a 'good Anthropocene'. In future, Ambio can help to foster this productive dissonance by loosening its own intellectual parameters while maintaining its high standards of scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around 1905, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the 'Megascope', a device through which its wearers could see 'the Far Great and the Near Small but not the Great Near.' The Great Near refers to realities that are simultaneously so near and powerful that they are usually imperceptible. Du Bois' speculative short-fiction has become a reality in the multiverse era where virtual gateways don't have to remain tied to traditional notions of technology in the physical world – they can be imaginative realms with different physics. We can see this demonstrated in the cosmogram, a cultural diagram of the Universe. This essay considers the function and style of this design across cultures and in virtual worlds. Artists such as Houston Conwill, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Xenobia Bailey, Sanford Biggers and Saya Woolfalk incorporate cosmograms in their works. Artists simulate the algorithmic qualities of the design that include physical, spiritual or ritual performances. They use the cosmogram – a diagram usually in the form of a circle – to make connections between the archetypal world of invention and the multidimensional nature of time. This essay explores these symbolic occurrences and various connections, looking to uncover a set of principles underlying and guiding Afrofuturistic production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploratory diagrams can be distinguished from statistical and explanatory diagrams in that they do not merely communicate what already exists, but provide a method of discovery, experiment and creative invention. As such, they are recommended as productive modes which can be utilized for art, education and philosophy. This paper seeks to draw out a number of key concepts and approaches to exploratory diagramming by examining three powerful diagram theories. First, A.J. Greimas' invention of the 'semiotic square'; second, C.S. Peirce's semiotic account of the diagram as icon; and third, Gilles Châtelet's retelling of scientific and mathematical discovery through diagrammatic devices. Respectively, these theories can each be identified according to a primary operative principle: opposition, relation and gesture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses how diagrammatic modes of representation are a distinct subset of images that coevolved with the scientific project to visually embody key ideals from the philosophy of science. In making diagrammatic art, artists have found various means to appropriate, exaggerate and subvert this set of characteristics unique to the diagram as part of their processes of creation and production. This is in an approach that I refer to as Romantic Objectivism. As a practicing artist with a background in biomedicine, my drawing and sculptural praxes are presented as an ongoing project to develop a visual poetics of science beyond its purely factual and functional modes, in the spirit of the Romantic-period German scientist, philosopher and poet Novalis, and his recently rediscovered, unfinished project, the Romantic Encyclopedia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artist researcher Anderson shares a series of drawings developed through the experimental interdisciplinary project 'Representing Biology as Process'. In this project Anderson and collaborators have developed a new approach to depict natural history through 'relational process drawing'. With focus on the dynamic patterns of the processes of life and guided by principles of choreography, they draw together relationships between energy, time, movement, and environment at the molecular, cellular, and organismal scale. The drawings discussed are a kind of hybrid representation – composed to varying degrees of visual, numerical and linguistic expressions – that both provide new insights and generate new questions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey) have already circumscribed their conceptions overcoming reductionism of naturalism in the forms of physicalism and scientism. Thereby they laid down grounds of pragmatist non-reductive naturalism. In connection to this as well as to conceptions of postanalytic naturalists such as Quine and Davidson, but in particular the normative turn of W. Sellars, contemporary neopragmatism develops its varieties of non-reductive naturalism: liberal naturalism (John McDowell), normative naturalism (Robert Brandom), metaphilosophical naturalism (Richard Rorty) and object/subject naturalism (Huw Price). The paper provides an analysis of these topical conceptions which are inspirational for resolution of relations between causation and normativity, nature and culture and relations between nonhuman and human realities, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case law has given rise to the concept of a single and continuous infringement providing for the consolidation of all actions and undertakings supporting an infringement into one, including those with a limited affiliation or effect. This has created a doctrine with immense practical relevance alleviating the burden of proof. Enforcers 'only' have to establish an overall anti-competitive plan that is not entirely unknown for the possible members and how they have endorsed central elements willingly. Issues remain open, eg, if the doctrine is confined to horizontal coordination, by object infringements and if it can accommodate several parallel single and continuous infringements. It even appears that the Commission occasionally pushed the doctrine to the limits commanding some scientism against elements of the doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeing the entwinement of social and epistemic challenges through COVID, we discuss the perils of simplistic appeals to 'follow the science'. A hardened scientism risks excarbating social conflict and fueling conspiracy beliefs. Instead, we see an opportunity to devise more inclusive medical knowledge practices through endorsing experiential knowledge alongside traditional evidence types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the suspicions of Gnosticism that have been cast against Michel Henry’s phenomenology, the truth is that his approach in no way belittles the earth, the nature we inhabit. The purpose of this article is to sketch an eco-phenomenology from Henry’s notion of bodily-ownness. In this sense, I show how Henry defends an intimate and intrinsic connection between the human and nature that risks being severed by the imposition of scientistic ideology. In doing so, an integral ecology emerges from Henry’s radical phenomenology. On the one hand, human beings shall abandon their selfish way of life, in the sense of ceasing to want to dominate, control and transform the world at will. On the other hand, they do so in order to regain their original connection with nature, where they exist in a radical passivity in which life is given to them and is realized more fully as a person in harmony with the earth. In this sense, contrary to some current ecological movements, the ecology that arises from Henry’s approach does not set human beings against nature. In fact, in order for nature to be respected, human beings do not have to disappear, withdraw or stop progressing in the life proper to them.

As a product of scientism and rationalism, the principle of nullum crimen sine lege has been subject to changing times and theoretical assumptions. In practice, therefore, it has not been fully able to play its role in protecting freedom and has constantly wavered over the determination of criminal punishments. Even though it has been constantly challenged, the principle of nullum crimen sine lege should be adhered to and renewed as an important principle of the modern rule of law. First, the principle of de lege lata is being questioned by theories of substantive law, and sources not in the form of law have become the de facto basis of criminal punishment. For this reason, it is necessary to reaffirm the nature of de lege lata as an exclusive source of law. Second, although the possible boundary of the meaning of criminal law texts cannot be clearly delineated empirically, one should not therefore reject the possible boundary of this meaning. The practice of delineating an objective boundary based on empirical facts should be abandoned and normative boundaries should be delineated and justified. Finally, the responsibility for judicial clarity should be recognized and accepted as a supplement to legislative clarity, and a two-tier system of legislative and judicial clarity should be developed. Here, the definite nature of criminal legislation should develop standards in terms of behavioral guidance and judicial restrictions, and clarity in criminal justice should start from the legislative text and establish general secondary rules to make the text more specific, bringing it ever closer to specific and particular case facts, and eventually establishing a relationship of subsumption between the legislative text and the facts of the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a narrative on the emergence of the concept of complexity in Friedrich A. Hayek's work. We show that complexity emerges from Hayek's methodological concerns and, specifically, from his texts that compose the first two parts of the Abuse of Reason Project. Namely, a) 'Individualism: True and False', from 1946; b) 'Scientism and the Study of Society', published between 1942 and 1944; and c) 'The Counter Revolution of Science', from 1941. In this paper, we aim to expose that the concept of complexity emerges gradually and organically and is integrated with the Hayekian research program from the 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 20th century was marked by the rise of scientism in the political, economic and social spheres. Brazil had just become a Republic, and groups were disputing the important mission of building a new national identity. Armed with the new world productions, writers like Monteiro Lobato established contact with relevant scientists. This article seeks to discuss issues related to the figure of Jeca Tatu as a fundamental piece in the process of creating a Brazilian national identity, which brings us a rural culture that was fading with the fury of science and the progress sought by the new political regime. To this end, we discussed the author's representations of the Brazilian bumpkin, mainly in the pages of "Urupês" (1914) and "Problema vital" (1918). The analysis of the sources reveals that the Paulista writer has appropriated the scientific discussions around man and Brazilian nature to build his projects of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positivist philosophy is focused on the problem of science and especially on its cognitive results and applications. We can say that Polish intellectual circles of this era glorified science. In her article, Barbara Szotek presents this phenomenon through the figure of Aleksander Świętochowski, the most famous representative and ideologist of scientific positivism. His works best illustrate the evolution of positivist views on science and its social role [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that a common view of Habermas's theory of public reason, which takes it to be similar to Rawls's 'proviso', is mistaken. I explain why that mistake arises, and show that those who have made it have thus overlooked the distinctiveness of Habermas's theory and approach. Consequently, I argue, they tend to wrongly infer that objections directed at Rawls's 'proviso' apply also to Habermas's 'institutional translation proviso'. Ironically, Habermas's attempt to rebut those objections leads him to advance a peculiar, and ultimately indefensible, thesis about the cognitive requirements of democratic citizenship for secular citizens. I argue that the underlying problem that Habermas takes the peculiar thesis to solve is not that the public reason requirements of the secular state are unfair towards religious citizens, or biased towards secular views of the world, but that the nature of religious arguments, and of scientism, as Habermas understands these, prevents citizens who adhere to them from participating in discourse. I end by suggesting a simpler, less controversial solution to that problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Problems / Problemos is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The capability of traditional Scholastic ethics to guide contemporary man in all his complexities has been called into question when Secular Humanism and, subsequently, Postmodernism have redirected attention from human acts to the agent person himself. While Secular Humanism has led to the advancement of science, and Postmodernism has instilled a resilient attitude in dealing with the issues of Modernism, the conceptual independence required in these philosophies and their corollary intellectual scientism has, at the same time, downgraded reliance on holistic and integrative knowledge, leading to a denial of the roles of faith, tradition, and authority in man's conceptual development. Karol Wojtyla's Personalism and Phenomenology emphasizes the primacy of the person without degrading the values inherent in action. Wojtyla's philosophy has bridged the ideals of traditional moral teachings with present-day pluralistic experiences when he situated freedom in the ego and when he grounded habit into the inner experience of man, rather than in character. With such freedom and self-determination, vertical transcendence becomes both experiential and personal. In this paper, I venture into how Wojtyla's thought has enhanced Thomistic philosophy by presenting an exposition of the various elements of The Acting Person vis-à-vis the discussions of the Angelic Doctor on parallel issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the semantic relation between the concepts of Republic, Revolution and Evolution in four countries of the Ibero-American Atlantic World: Brazil, Spain, Mexico and Portugal in the period 1870-1910. For this, different programmatic and ideological texts issued by defenders of the republicanism of the four countries are analyzed. The aim is to show, on the one hand, that there was a shared republican grammar in the region (although with specificities according to the different realities) and, on the other, that in this grammar, the relation between the analysed concepts acquired a different meaning and led to the formulation of new models of republic

This paper is a review of the book: Paul Robinson, The Realist Guide to Religion and Science (Leominster, Herefordshire, UK: Gracewing, 2018). According to the author, what makes the book both accessible and sensible is Robinson’s illustration of Thomist philosophy’s coherence, starting from a basis in philosophy of being. Robinson presents the philosophy of being as being appropriate to cooperate with science. This helps readers comprehend modern science’s wrong turns and possible corrections. This also makes Robinson’s book a work of apologetics, as it addresses why the Catholic faith provides the most logical belief system, and why seemingly sophisticated attacks on the Church and its beliefs by seemingly rational philosophers and scientists are not only erroneous, but actually irrational.

The article aims to analyze and evaluate the viability of the salvific hope promised by science and technology which has captured the modern mind. Traditionally the hope of salvation from the wretched human condition and passing into eudaimonic bliss hasbeen offered by religious figures and ideologies. However,the dominant idea of our times is that science and technology in its full growth can fix all human problems: poverty, disease, hunger, etc. It is pointed out that even though science and technology maybe able to solve the problems of disease and hunger, it is not adequate enough to answer our moral dilemmas or illumine our understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. Article concludes with the thoughts of S. Radhakrishnan (an Indian philosopher and statesman) that science and technology only provide the means to the ends proposed b yphilosophy or religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of modern scientism to the realm of consciousness has led many to assert that religion and religious thought are irrational and unnecessary, if not delusional and dangerous. In this essay, we counter these assertions in two ways. First, we claim that it is natural to humans to ask religious questions concerning the meaning and purpose of existence, why there is evil, and how we can find liberation and fulfillment. Second, we demonstrate that religions answer these questions through myths, relating our deepest concerns to the sacred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of the construction and articulation of knowledge according to principles that allow for universal comprehension and progressive appraisal has established itself as one of the self-distinguishing features of 'the Sciences'. An insistence on adherence to this methodological practice in the Humanities has been dubbed scientism. This article highlights how at the fulcrum of the intellectual mission of Paulin Jidenu Hountondji has been a concern for the equipment of the practices of knowledge production and transmission in Africa with scientific rigor that could render knowledge about Africa into an efficacious instrument for existential, epistemic and political self-authentication. Against the prevalent trend that has reductively cast Hountondji as an African philosopher whose name is singularly coterminous with a critique of African Philosophy as being an ethno-philosophy, I demonstrate that at the core of his intellectual praxis is an emancipatory quest for the instrumentalization of all academic knowledge in Africa – and not only philosophy – into an epistemically sovereign scientia on the ever-changing Africa. His ardent fidelity to the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Louis Althusser and the consequences of his utilization of their scientificity motif in the formulation of his philopraxis is here elucidated and critically assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical research now has a relatively high profile in organization studies, and organization theories are better represented in business history, thanks to increased interdisciplinary dialogue over the last decade. It might therefore be that the 'historic turn' has materialized in organization studies, and that business history has become significantly more conceptual in nature. We argue, however, that in terms of the original definition of the historic turn, as a rejection of scientism, acceptance of more heterogeneous forms of history, and reflexive accounts of the social construction of historicized narratives, there has been little progress. We revisit the idea of the turn in depth here, to examine the ways of doing history that might encourage a more substantial turn towards theory and towards history as a means of developing it. In particular, we suggest that an approach we term 'critical organizational history' remains underdeveloped, as a theoretically informed historicized approach to understanding how and why we come to be where we are in contemporary organized societies. Our aim is to take stock of the historic turn's progress, reminding critically oriented organizational scholars and practitioners of organizational history of the importance of completing the turn with the underlying purpose of critique. To do this, we surface seven aspects of practice and three implications of them that demonstrate the underside of theorizing historically that we suggest are central to critical analysis. Understood and practised collectively, these could provoke considerable more critical organizational history to the benefit of all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of História da Historiografia is the property of Sociedade Brasileira de Teoria e Historia da Historiografia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since the 1920's, several social trends of thought, such as scientism and nationalism, have exploded, posing new challenges to the missionary medical enterprise in China. Influenced by many factors, Dr. Robert McClure (Luo Mingyuan in Chinese), from the Canadian Presbyterian Mission, established a rural medical system in Huaiqing, north Henan province. This system not only optimized the limited medical resources in north Henan to the greatest extent, but also received much attention from foreign missionaries in China. More importantly, the way in which McClure (Luo) dealt with traditional Chinese and Western medical resources enriched our understanding of the missionary medical enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand some central presuppositions of Marx within an anti-scientistic and anti-bourgeois horizon, such as knowledge and freedom, some central elements within Leibniz and Spinosa are discussed, with a glance at Hegel. Capital turns out to be an anti-Leibnizian monad, while Das Kapital is undergirded by a Spinozist value-political treatise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology and theology are both academic disciplines, and both are under attack, along with the other humanities. Anthropology is also a science, of course, but in the present climate dominated by materialist scientism, that aspect is denied. Theologians must also marshal evidence that supports hypotheses, and demonstrate the logical coherence of arguments, although these requirements are derided by fundamentalists. Both anthropology and theology have the same subject of study, namely, human beings, and both struggle against powerful ideologies. Therefore, I argue, both disciplines can learn from each other and help in the struggle for the integrity of intellectual endeavor in both the sciences and the humanities. In particular, generative anthropology presents powerful hermeneutics in understanding human origins that are useful theologically as well, and theological methods can help interpret generative anthropology's "sense of the sacred.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positivism has had a tremendous impact on the development of the social sciences over the past two centuries. It has deeply influenced method and theory, and has seeped deeply into our broader understandings of the nature of the social sciences. Postmodernism has attempted to loosen the grip of positivism on our thinking, and while it has not been without its successes, postmodernism has worked more to deconstruct positivism than to construct something new in its place. Psychologists today perennially wrestle to find and retain their intellectual balance within the methodological, theoretical, and epistemological struggles between positivism and postmodernism. In the process, pre-postmodern criticisms of positivism have been largely forgotten. Although they remain deeply buried at the core of psychology, these early alternatives to positivism are rarely given explicit hearing today. The current piece explores some of the early critiques of positivism, particularly of its scientism, as well as early suggestions to tip the scales (back) in favor of sapientia (“wisdom”). This third option, largely overlooked within mainstream psychology, is of tremendous value today as it is both deconstructive and constructive relative to the shortcomings of positivism. It avoids the overly reductionistic “trivial order” of positivism, as well as the deeply unsatisfying and disorienting “barbaric vagueness” of postmodernism, while simultaneously embracing important core elements of both currents of thought.