Science Reason And Anthropology

Author : James Lett
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2000-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780585080567

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Science, Reason, and Anthropology by James Lett Pdf

For courses on anthropological theory, history, and methods... Science, Reason, and Anthropology explores the philosophical foundations of anthropology and identifies the fundamental principles of rational inquiry upon which all sound anthropological knowledge is based. As a field guide to critical thinking, with examples throughout, it is devoted to a thorough explication and analysis of the nature of reason and the practice of anthropological inquiry. Chapter one reviews the historical context of the contemporary debate between scientific and humanistic perspectives in anthropology, highlighting essential differences between the two approaches. Chapter two examines the nature of knowledge and explains the essential elements of epistemological analysis. Chapter three describes the basic features of the scientific method; it defines science as an objective, logical, and systematic approach to propositional knowledge, and explains each feature in detail. Chapter four applies the fundamental principles of critical thinking to an analysis of contemporary anthropological theory. Chapter five suggests a reconciliation between the scientific and humanistic approaches, arguing that the essential elements of sound reasoning are common to both perspectives. Science, Reason, and Anthropology argues forcefully for the preeminent value of the scientific approach in anthropology, but it does so while recognizing the inherent worth and innate appeal of the humanistic perspective. Even those who are not predisposed to share the author's conclusions will appreciate the clear and forthright manner with which he presents his arguments.

Author : James William Lett
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Pub Incorporated
Page : 151 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0847685926

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Science, Reason, and Anthropology by James William Lett Pdf

Science, Reason, and Anthropology explores the philosophical foundations of anthropology and identifies the fundamental principles of rational inquiry upon which all sound anthropological knowledge is based.

Author : Tobias Rees
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2016-05-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520963177

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Plastic Reason by Tobias Rees Pdf

Throughout the twentieth century, neuronal researchers knew the adult human brain to be a thoroughly fixed and immutable cellular structure, devoid of any developmental potential. Plastic Reason is a study of the efforts of a few Parisian neurobiologists to overturn this rigid conception of the central nervous system by showing that basic embryogenetic processes—most spectacularly the emergence of new cellular tissue in the form of new neurons, axons, dendrites, and synapses—continue in the mature brain. Furthermore, these researchers sought to demonstrate that the new tissues are still unspecific and hence literally plastic, and that this cellular plasticity is constitutive of the possibility of the human. Plastic Reason, grounded in years of fieldwork and historical research, is an anthropologist’s account of what has arguably been one of the most sweeping events in the history of brain research—the highly contested effort to consider the adult brain in embryogenetic terms. A careful analysis of the disproving of an established truth, it reveals the turmoil that such a disruption brings about and the emergence of new possibilities of thinking and knowing.

Author : Carles Salazar,Joan Bestard
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2015-01-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781782384892

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Religion and Science as Forms of Life by Carles Salazar,Joan Bestard Pdf

The relationships between science and religion are about to enter a new phase in our contemporary world, as scientific knowledge has become increasingly relevant in ordinary life, beyond the institutional public spaces where it traditionally developed. The purpose of this volume is to analyze the relationships, possible articulations and contradictions between religion and science as forms of life: ways of engaging human experience that originate in particular social and cultural formations. Contributions use this theoretical and ethnographic research to explore different scientific and religious cultures in the contemporary world.

Author : Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 1990
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : UOM:39015018315732

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Anthropology and Historiography of Science by Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya Pdf

Whether history or anthropology is the most fundamental social science remains still a controversial and undecided issue. For a proper understanding of this instructive controversy, the presuppositions of these two disciplines need to be critically and philosophically reviewed. Otherwise the true perspective of the controversy remains undisclosed and therefore unintelligible. A close and comprehensive understanding of language as the basic form of the life-world provides the cues necessary to show correctly the complementary relation between anthropology and history. That synchronic or sociological and diachronic or historical perspectives of science are mutually supportive ways of representing the same social activities has been persuasively argued in this book. Chattopadhyaya has pointedly examined in this connection the conflicting views of Sartre and Levi-Strauss. Also, he has selectively drawn upon, critically assessed, and brought the theories of Husserl, Heidegger, Popper, Quine, and Kuhn to bear upon the problem. The author's conclusion centers around his own concept of human universals. The positive thesis of the book rejects the trichotomy of three cultures: scientific, humanistic, and technological. That this view is not a theoretical creature but a historical and cultural finding has been plausibly reasoned by Chattopadhyaya. The main trend of his reasoning clearly shows that the gulf between analytic philosophers and phenomenologists is either imaginary or highly exaggerated. In this specific case, the author, a student of Popper, perceptively aruges to the effect that if theorizations is primarily problem-oriented rather than "school-based," one can see one's way to rational solution in the convergent light of different but affine human or cultural origins. But his presentation and assessment of the views and arguments of Husseri, Popper, Quine and Kuhn are likely to prove controversial.

Author : Anthony Stavrianakis,Gaymon Bennett,Lyle Fearnley
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0823265935

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Science, Reason, Modernity by Anthony Stavrianakis,Gaymon Bennett,Lyle Fearnley Pdf

Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary provides an introduction to a legacy of philosophical and social scientific thinking about sciences and their integral role in shaping modernities, a legacy that has contributed to a specifically anthropological form of inquiry. Anthropology, in this case, refers not only to the institutional boundaries of an academic discipline but also to a mode of conceptualizing and addressing a problem: how to analyze and diagnose the modern sciences in their troubled relationships with lived realities. Such an approach addresses the sciences as forms of life and illuminates how the diverse modes of reason, action, and passion that characterize the scientific life continue to shape our existences as late moderns. The essays provided in this book--many of them classics across disciplines--have been arranged genealogically. They offer a particular route through a way of thinking that has come to be crucial in elucidating the contemporary question of science as a formal way of understanding life. The book specifies the historical dynamics by way of which problems of science and modernity become matters of serious reflection, as well as the multiple attempts to provide solutions to those problems. The book's aim is pedagogical. Its hope is that the constellation of texts it brings together will help students and scholars working on sciences become better equipped to think about scientific practices as anthropological problems. Includes essays by: Hans Blumenberg, Georges Canguilhem, John Dewey, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Kant, Paul Rabinow, Max Weber.

Author : Paul Rabinow
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2021-05-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781400851799

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Essays on the Anthropology of Reason by Paul Rabinow Pdf

This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinow's pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality, emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show how their claims to truth are linked to particular social practices, hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature. This book moves in new directions by posing questions about how scientific practice can be understood in terms of ethics as well as in terms of power. The topics include how French socialist urban planning in the 1930s engineered the transition from city planning to life planning; how the discursive and nondiscursive practices of the Human Genome Project and biotechnology have refigured life, labor, and language; and how a debate over patenting cell lines and over the dignity of life required secular courts to invoke medieval notions of the sacred. Building on an ethnographic study of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction--which enables the rapid production of specific sequences of DNA in millions of copies Rabinow, in the final essay, reflects in dialogue with biochemist Tom White on the place of science in modernity, on science as a vocation, and on the differences between the human and natural sciences.

Author : Marshall Sahlins
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2023-12-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691215938

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The New Science of the Enchanted Universe by Marshall Sahlins Pdf

One of the world’s preeminent cultural anthropologists leaves a last work that fundamentally reconfigures how we study most other cultures From the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Gods, spirits, and ancestors have left us for a transcendent beyond, no longer living in our midst and being involved in all matters of everyday life from the trivial to the dire. Yet the vast majority of cultures throughout human history treat spirits as very real persons, members of a cosmic society who interact with humans and control their fate. In most cultures, even today, people are but a small part of an enchanted universe misconstrued by the transcendent categories of “religion” and the “supernatural.” The New Science of the Enchanted Universe shows how anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink these cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights. In this, his last, revelatory book, Marshall Sahlins announces a new method and sets an exciting agenda for the field. He takes readers around the world, from Inuit of the Arctic Circle to pastoral Dinka of East Africa, from Araweté swidden gardeners of Amazonia to Trobriand Island horticulturalists. In the process, Sahlins sheds new light on classical and contemporary ethnographies that describe these cultures of immanence and reveals how even the apparently mundane, all-too-human spheres of “economics” and “politics” emerge as people negotiate with, and ultimately usurp, the powers of the gods. The New Science of the Enchanted Universe offers a road map for a new practice of anthropology that takes seriously the enchanted universe and its transformations from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary America.

Author : James Woolcock
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 1883
Category : Anthropology
ISBN : OXFORD:591070493

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Studies in Anthropology by James Woolcock Pdf

Author : E. Mendelsohn,Y. Elkana
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9789400984295

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Sciences and Cultures by E. Mendelsohn,Y. Elkana Pdf

Anthropological approaches to the sciences have developed as part of a broader tradition concerned about the place of the sciences in today's world and in some basic sense concerned with questions about the legitimacy of the sciences. In the years since the second World War, we have seen the emergence of a number of different attempts both to analyze and to cope with the successes of the sciences, their broad penetration into social life, and the sense of problem and crisis that they have projected. Among the of movements concerned about the earlier responses were the development social responsibility of scientists and technological practitioners. There is little doubt that this was a direct outgrowth of the role of science in the war epitomized by the successful construction and catastrophic use of the atomic bomb. The recognition of the deep social utility of science, and especially its role as an instrument of war, fostered curiosity about the earlier develop ment of scientific disciplines and institutional forms. The history of science as an explicit diSCipline with full-time practitioners can be seen as an attempt to locate science in temporal space - first in its intellectual form and second ly in its institutional or social form. The sociology of science, while certainly having roots in the pre-war work of Robert K.

Author : H. Sidky
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2020-11-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781793606525

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Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World by H. Sidky Pdf

At the end of 2019, Americans were living in an era of post-truth characterized by fake news, weaponized lies, alternative facts, conspiracy theories, magical thinking, and irrationalism. While many complex interconnected factors were at work, this post-truth era was partly the culmination of a cadre of anthropologists and other academics in American universities and colleges during the 1980’s and 1990’s. In Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World, H. Sidky examines how their untoward dalliance with problematic and dangerous ideas by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard informed and empowered a forceful assault on science and truth in the following decades by corporate organizations, politicians, religious extremists, and right-wing populists.

Author : Peter of Greece and Denmark
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 89 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2011-07-12
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783111560151

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The Science of Anthropology by Peter of Greece and Denmark Pdf

Author : Sigurd Bergmann,Forrest Clingerman
Publisher : Brill
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : Art
ISBN : 9004355359

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Arts, Religion, and the Environment by Sigurd Bergmann,Forrest Clingerman Pdf

With-In : Towards an Aesth/Ethics of Prepositions / Sigurd Bergmann -- Wonder and Ernst Haeckel's Aesthetics of Nature / Whitney Bauman -- The Black Wood : Relations, Empathy and a Feeling of Oneness in Caledonian Pine Forests / Reiko Goto and Tim Collins

Author : Murray J. Leaf,Dwight Read
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2020-12-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781793632388

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Introduction to the Science of Kinship by Murray J. Leaf,Dwight Read Pdf

In Introduction to the Science of Kinship, Murray J. Leaf and Dwight Read show how humans use specific systems of social ideas to organize their kinship relations and illustrate what this implies for the science of human social organization. Leaf and Read explain that every human society has multiple social organizations, each of which is associated with a distinct vocabulary. This vocabulary is associated with interrelated definitions of social roles and relations. These roles and relations have four specific logical properties: reciprocity, transitivity, boundedness, and imaginary spatial dimensionality. These properties allow individuals to use them in communication to create ongoing, agreed-upon, organizations. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and mathematics.

Author : Lawrence A. Kuznar
Publisher : AltaMira Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2008-09-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780759112346

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Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology by Lawrence A. Kuznar Pdf

This second edition of Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology arrives at just the right time, as new advances in science increasingly affect anthropologists of all stripes. Lawrence Kuznar begins by reviewing the basic issues of scientific epistemology in anthropology as they have taken shape over the life of the discipline. He then describes postmodern and other critiques of both science and scientific anthropology, and he concludes with stringent analyses of these debates. This new edition brings this important text firmly into the 21st century; it not only updates the scholarly debates but it describes new research techniques—such as computer modeling systems—that could not have been imagined just a decade ago. In a field that has become increasingly divided over basic methods of reasearch and interpretation, Kuznar makes a powerful argument that anthropology should return to its roots in empirical science.