scholarly journals Funding Bodies and Late Modern Science

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 887-898
Author(s):  
Noortje Jacobs ◽  
Pieter Huistra
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Late Modern

Throughout the twentieth century, funding bodies have become a dominant force in scientific practice, influencing the success of certain types of research as well as certain types of researchers. As a late modern institution, they are part of a process of rationalization and planning in science. At the same time, however, funding bodies draw upon resources such as trust and familiarity that are usually identified as premodern.

scholarly journals Rockefeller Bureaucracy and Circumknowing Science in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 779-796
Author(s):  
Michael J. Barany
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Scientific Investigation ◽  
South American ◽  
Institutional Conditions ◽  
Operating Strategies ◽  
Late Modern ◽  
Warren Weaver

This article examines evaluation principles and techniques and their associated bureaucratic practices from the early decades of Rockefeller science philanthropy. I characterize the distinctive kinds of expertise about science that such philanthropy presumed and cultivated based on analyses of, first, documents connected to interventions in European and South American mathematics and, second, a 1946 handbook prepared by Warren Weaver to guide new programme officers. Rockefeller officers developed elaborate infrastructures for understanding and intervening in the personal and institutional conditions of scientific investigation, while deliberately diverting attention away from the particulars of the science they supported. Their approach, indicative of operating strategies and assumptions for scientific funding bodies in this period, shaped access and authority across the major enterprises of late modern science, defining both what science and which scientists could benefit from new resources and opportunities.

Instruments of Science or Conquest? Neocolonialism and Modern American Astronomy

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leandra Swanner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Sacred Lands

This essay is indebted to Mary Jo Nye’s scholarship spanning the history and philosophy of the modern physical sciences, particularly her efforts to situate scientists within their social, political, and cultural contexts. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, members of the Hawai‘i astronomy community found themselves grappling with opposition to new telescope projects stemming from the rise of environmental and indigenous rights movements. I argue that the debate over the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) can best be understood as an exemplar of “neocolonialist science.” For indigenous groups who object to science on sacred lands, science has effectively become an agent of colonization. As the TMT controversy illustrates, practicing neocolonialist science—even unknowingly—comes at a high cost for all parties involved. Although scientists are understandably reluctant to equate their professional activities with cultural annihilation, dismissing this unflattering neocolonialist image of modern science has both ethical and practical consequences: Native communities continue to report feeling victimized while scientists’ efforts to expand their research programs suffer social, legal, and economic setbacks. This essay is part of a special issue entitled THE BONDS OF HISTORY edited by Anita Guerrini.

scholarly journals Playing Entropy Mastermind can Foster Children’s Information-Theoretical Intuitions

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elif Özel ◽  
Jonathan D. Nelson ◽  
Lara Bertram ◽  
Laura Martignon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mathematics Education ◽  
Probability Distribution ◽  
Primary School ◽  
Probability Distributions ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
School Intervention ◽  
Science And Society ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Information Today

Conceptual descriptions and measures of information and entropy were established in the twentieth century with the emergence of a science of communication and information. Today these concepts have come to pervade modern science and society, and are increasingly being recommended as topics for science and mathematics education. We introduce a set of playful activities aimed at fostering intuitions about entropy and describe a primary school intervention that was conducted according to this plan. Fourth grade schoolchildren (8–10 years) played a version of Entropy Mastermind with jars and colored marbles, in which a hidden code to be deciphered was generated at random from an urn with a known, visually presented probability distribution of marble colors. Children prepared urns according to specified recipes, drew marbles from the urns, generated codes and guessed codes. Despite not being formally instructed in probability or entropy, children were able to estimate and compare the difficulty of different probability distributions used for generating possible codes.

Science as the Key to Modern Progress

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Motoe Sasaki
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women Missionaries ◽  
New Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Modernization Process

This chapter shows how the notion of modern science brought to China by American New Women missionaries in the form of medicine and nursing generated concrete responses from their Chinese counterparts. The notion of science as a universally applicable and fundamentally egalitarian element for the development of a modern society and its constituents was increasingly influential in both the United States and China during the early twentieth century. Consequently, American New Women missionaries were able to establish their status as scientific professionals whose expertise could contribute to China's modernization process. At the same time, however, their faith in the new notion of science brought with it the idea of “separate but equal” gender roles, which brought them into conflict with many of their male counterparts from the United States who wanted to compete with other imperial powers to gain influence in China.

Great Risk for the Kingdom

2016 ◽  
pp. 236-248
Author(s):  
Mark Alan Charles Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Great Risk ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Prosperity Theology ◽  
Charismatic Christianity ◽  
Late Modern

Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity (“PCC”) has successfully navigated the challenges modernity poses to religion, growing rapidly in the twentieth century. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, neoliberalism began its ascent to its current hegemonic status. Neoliberalism reconfigures social institutions as marketized practices with a measurable ‘payoff'. PCC adapted to this challenge in the form of a “growth churches,” adopting many of the characteristics of neoliberalism. In adopting a homogenous model and method of ‘best practice' in order to facilitate growth; offering a ‘prosperity' theology that fits well with the development of human capital; and endorsing the universalization of risk through modelling “pastorpreneur” leadership, it is argued in this chapter that growth churches are a paradigmatic example of a late modern religious phenomenon accommodating neoliberalism in a largely uncritical manner. The chapter concludes with some observations that critique this association between neoliberalism and growth churches.

The Theological Mediation

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-41
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Theology Of The Cross ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
Hans Urs Von Balthasar ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Reformation Theology ◽  
Late Modern

This chapter examines late modern reappropriations of the classical theology of the cross. In continuity with medieval and Reformation theology, these hold that Christ’s suffering was a divinely willed redemptive act, in vicarious satisfaction for human sin. The neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, in line with the Reformed tradition, emphasizes election and covenant. The theme of divine kenosis, found in nineteenth century German an English thinkers, is taken up into Orthodox trinitarian soteriology by the Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov, with strong attention to Patristic dogma. Hans Urs von Balthasar stresses Christ’s “descent into hell” as the central symbol of the divine entry into the lost human condition. Jürgen Moltmann sees the suffering of God as the only possible theological response to the horrors of the twentieth century, especially the Holocaust.

Religion and the Modern American University, 1910-1928

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. C. Kemeny
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Graduate Training ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
National Interests ◽  
American University ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Society ◽  
Mainline Protestantism ◽  
The University

Princeton, read a trustees’ report in January 1927, “has always recognized a dual obligation to its undergraduates.” One side of this commitment involved providing “a curriculum which will meet the needs of a modern university” and the other involved creating within students “those spiritual values which make for the building of character.” Wilson had reshaped Princeton into a modern university and had left as his legacy an unyielding commitment to serving national interests. Undergraduate education, graduate training, and a variety of impressive specialized research programs enabled the university to help meet the nation’s need for liberal, civic-minded leaders and the demand for science and practical technology. Wilson and his successors in early-twentieth-century Princeton continued to insist, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, that Protestantism was indispensable to the public good and that civic institutions, such as Princeton, served public interests when they sought to inculcate students with a nonsectarian Protestant faith. In this way, the university, they believed, helped mainline Protestantism play a unifying and integrative role in a nation of increasing cultural and religious diversity. By doing so, they reasoned, Princeton, like other private colleges and universities, would maintain its historic religious mission to advance the Christian character of American society. During the presidency of Wilson’s successor, John G. Hibben, controversies challenged the new configuration of Princeton’s Protestant and civic missions. These controversies, however, helped to strengthen the new ways in which the university attempted to fulfill its religious mission in the twentieth century. In liberal Protestantism, the university found a religion that was compatible with modern science and the public mission of the university. Those traditional evangelical convictions and practices that had survived Wilson’s presidency were disestablished during Hibben’s tenure. Fundamentalists’ criticisms of the university hastened this process in two ways. Sometimes fundamentalist attacks upon the university convinced the administration to adopt policies that guaranteed the displacement of traditional evangelical convictions and practices. This was the case, for example, when fundamentalists’ condemnations of the theological liberalism of the university’s Bible professor accelerated the administration’s approval of a policy of academic freedom.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
East European ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Late Modern

This is a critical study of late modern ethical thought in Europe, from the French Revolution to the advent of modernism. I shall take it that ‘late modern’ ethics starts with two revolutions: the political revolution in France and the philosophical revolution of Kant. The contrast is with ‘early modern’. Another contrast is with ‘modernism’, which I shall take to refer to trends in culture, philosophy, and politics that developed in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and lasted into the twentieth century—perhaps to the sixties, or even to the collapse of East European socialism in the eighties....

India's Physics and Chemistry Nobel Prize nominators and nominees in colonial and international context

2007 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajinder Singh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Third World ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
International Context ◽  
Nobel Prizes

In India the development of modern science is closely related to its colonial background, a subject well documented by historians. So far as the prestigious Nobel Prizes are concerned, little has been mentioned in the colonial context. This article shows that in the first half of the twentieth century only a few Indian physicists and chemists were either nominees or nominators. Some of them were Fellows of the Royal Society. A comparison of Indian Nobel Prize nominators and nominees with other so-called Third World countries and colonies suggests some interesting results, for example the similarities of development of physics and chemistry in the colonized and ruling countries. The present article also suggests that the election of the Fellows of the Royal Society from India, in the fields of physics and chemistry, reveals a pattern comparable with that of Nobel Prize nominations and nominees.

Later Empiricism and Logical Positivism

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Logical Empiricism ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Late Modern

The empiricist approaches to mathematics discussed in this article belong to an era of philosophy which we can begin to see as a whole. It stretches from Kant's Critiques of the 1780s to the twentieth-century analytic movements which ended, broadly speaking, in the 1950s—in and largely as a result of the work of Quine. Seeing this period historically is by no means saying that its ideas are dead; it just helps in understanding the ideas. That applies to the two versions of empiricism that were most prominent in this late modern period: the radical empiricism of Mill and the “logical” empiricism associated with the Vienna Circle positivism of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Mill and the logical positivists shared the empiricist doctrine that no informative proposition is a priori.

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