scholarly journals A “We” Problem for Bioethics and the Social Sciences

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Informed Consent ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

In her article “The ‘We’ in the Me: Solidarity in the Era of Personalized Medicine,” Barbara Prainsack develops an earlier interest in the relationship between solidarity and autonomy and the way that these notions operate once passed through the lens of bioethical thought and practice. In his response to this article, Simpson introduces the perspective of two South Asian physicians on these issues. The piece highlights issues of personhood upon which the informed consent transaction is based and draws attention to the culturally specific versions of how people conceive of relationality, duty, care, and the obligations they feel they owe to others. The piece highlights the pronomial shifts between the “we” and the “me” and the way that these dispositions emerge in sociopolitically configured spaces. By paying careful attention to the settings and situations in which the movements between different positions actually take place, the ways in which the fabric of ethical life is made rather than simply given is revealed. Ethnographic inquiry is seen as crucial in understanding this process because it points to disjunctions between the categories that we are provided to apprehend the world and what it is actually like to live in that world.

Marxist Historiography Today

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Hobsbawm
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Methodology Of Science ◽  
The Way

This chapter discusses Marxist historiography in the present times. In the interpretation of the world nowadays, there has been a rise in the so-called anti-Rankean reaction in history, of which Marxism is an important but not always fully acknowledged element. This movement challenged the positivist belief that the objective structure of reality was self-explanatory, and that all that was needed was to apply the methodology of science to it and explain why things happened the way they did. This movement also brought together history with the social sciences, therefore turning it into part of a generalizing discipline capable of explaining transformations of human society in the course of its past. This new perspective on the past is a return to ‘total history’, in which the focus is not merely on the ‘history of everything’ but history as an indivisible web wherein all human activities are interconnected.

Ethics and aesthetics: the social theory of barbershop harmony

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Garnett
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Relative Paucity ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Until recently, the world of the British barbershop singer was a self-enclosed community whose existence went largely unrecognised both by musicians involved in other genres and by the public at large. In the last few years this has started to change, chiefly due to the participation of barbershop choruses in the televised competition ‘Sainsbury's Choir of the Year’. Encouraged by the success of Shannon Express in 1994, many other choruses entered the 1996 competition, four of them reaching the televised semi-finals, and two the finals. During this increased exposure, it became apparent that television commentators had little idea of what to make of barbershoppers, indeed regarded them as a peculiar, and perhaps rather trivial, breed of performer. This bafflement is not surprising given the genre's relative paucity of exposure either in the mass media or in the musical and musicological press; the plentiful articles written by barbershoppers about their activity and its meanings are almost exclusively addressed to each other, to sustain the community rather than integrate it into wider musical life. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to follow the theme of these intra-community articles in arguing that barbershop harmony should actually be regarded as a serious and worthy art, or to explain to a bewildered world what this genre is actually about; rather, it aims to explore the way that barbershop singers theorise themselves and their activity to provide a case study in the relationship between social and musical values. That is, I am not writing as an apologist for a hitherto distinctly insular practice, but exploiting that very insularity as a means to pursue a potentially very broad question within a self-limited field of enquiry.

Defending Reason

Beyond Reason ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 52-84
Author(s):  
Sanjay Seth
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Jurgen Habermas ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Knowledge ◽  
Way Of Knowing

This chapter provides a postcolonial critique of those defenders of a universal and singular Reason who, forced to acknowledge that modern knowledge has been shaped by its historical and cultural contexts, nonetheless seek to provide reasons why the presuppositions undergirding the social sciences have a claim to transhistorical and transcultural validity. Engaging in detail with the defenses of Reason mounted by Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and John Rawls, it argues that these are not persuasive because they presuppose that which they seek to validate or “ground.” It concludes that modern knowledge is a historically and culturally specific way of knowing and being in the world, that there are good reasons to doubt that it transcends these particularities, and that while modern Western knowledge has become global, that does not validate the claim that it is universal.

scholarly journals Speculative Empiricism, Nature and the Question of Predatory Abstractions: A Conversation with Didier Debaise

2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642110520
Author(s):  
Didier Debaise ◽  
Thomas P. Keating
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

In conversation 1 with Didier Debaise, this piece thinks transversally across Nature as Event (2017a) and Speculative Empiricism (2017b) to explore some of the key stakes in his philosophy, namely: the relationship between the task of thinking a speculative empiricism and the problem of the bifurcation of nature. Engaging with the themes of nature, abstraction, dualism, pragmatism, and the role of stories in dramatizing our sensitivity to the world, the conversation develops Debaise’s contribution to theorising alternative modes of knowledge and experience capable of admitting those infra-sensible, inaudible, or imperceptible qualities of events. Distinctly, Debaise introduces here the problem of ‘predatory abstractions’ as one way to understand the problem of bifurcation. Ethically, the question of predatory abstractions makes new demands on the social sciences: to story new abstractions capable of deepening our experience of nature.

scholarly journals Film og samfund

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-147
Author(s):  
Carsten Bagge Laustsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Studies ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Being There ◽  
The Relationship

The article is an investigation of the relation between social studies and movies and in turn the relevance of movies to the social sciences. The relationship between the world of movies and reality is analyzed through the movies Being there and Storytelling. Three different approaches are presented: The movie society, socio-fiction and movies as ambiguos cultural products.

Critical Issues in the Social Sciences and Their Implications for Mission Studies

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul G. Hiebert
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Global Mission ◽  
The Social ◽  
Age Of Exploration ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Global Church ◽  
The Way

Missionaries and anthropologists have been at the forefront of the West's encounter with other peoples since the Age of Exploration. In this encounter their views of these people have changed as they learned to know and understand these Others better. The shift from Other as Savage and Pagan to Other as Primitive and Ancestor, and then to Other as Native and Unreached has shaped the way Western scholars and missionaries have theorized about and related to people from other parts of the world. As missiologists, we must move beyond the current views of others that dominate current anthropological and missiological thinking, and recognize that the Scriptures affirm that we are one humanity, that at the deepest level others are not other but us. Only such a change in attitudes will help us lay the foundations for the global mission of the global church.

Liberation in the Face of Uncertainty

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hubert J. M. Hermans
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
The Self ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
Dialogical Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Dialogical Self Theory ◽  
The Relationship

In this volume, Dialogical Self Theory is innovatively presented as a guide to help elucidate some of the most pressing problems of our time as they emerge at the interface of self and society. As a bridging framework at the interface of the social sciences and philosophy, Dialogical Self Theory provides a broad view of problem areas that place us in a field of tension between liberation and social imprisonment. With climate change and the coronavirus pandemic serving as wake-up calls, the book focuses on the experience of uncertainty, the disenchantment of the world, the pursuit of happiness, and the cultural limitations of the Western self-ideal. Now more than ever we need to rethink the relationship between self, other, and the natural environment, and this book uses Dialogical Self Theory to explore actual and potential responses of the self to these urgent challenges.

Perspectivism in the Social Sciences

Philosophy ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 60 (233) ◽  
pp. 373-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
General Question ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Social Inquiry ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Rational Thought ◽  
The Way

The general question to which this paper is addressed is whether knowledge and rationality carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. Some of those who set out in search of knowledge come to believe as a result of their inquiries that the object of their quest is not what they had taken it to be; seeking to discover the way the world actually is, they are led to conclude that all they can hope to find is a reflection of their own needs and interests; the grail is but a beaker. Similarly, some of those whose aim is to formulate the principles of rational thought are led by reason to deny that any beliefs can be rationally justified; reasons are never reasons for believing but mere epiphenomena, produced by but not producing events whose only begetter is the passions; the quest is just another power struggle. The particular question I wish to ask is whether this picture is an accurate representation of social inquiry.

Defending the Difference

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Natural Entities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Methodological Difference ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The One

Dreyfus argues that there is a basic methodological difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences, a difference that derives from the different goals and practices of each. He goes on to argue that being a realist about natural entities is compatible with pluralism or, as he calls it, “plural realism.” If intelligibility is always grounded in our practices, Dreyfus points out, then there is no point of view from which one can ask about or provide an answer to the one true nature of ultimate reality. But that is consistent with believing that the natural sciences can still reveal the way the world is independent of our theories and practices.

Benson and Miller in Perspective

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Stock Of Knowledge

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

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