scholarly journals The convergent processes of the religious life of our time

2005 ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Eduard Martynyuk
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Comparative Religion ◽  
German Scholar ◽  
Structure And Functions

The most common tendencies in religious life of the second half of the twentieth century, which I propose to call "convergent processes". The term "convergence" (from the Latin. Convergentio, convergo - converge, approach) was first used by German scholar Henry Frick in his work Comparative Religion. In seeking to approximate the terminology of the natural sciences and social sciences, begun by DF Schlemmacher, G. Frick used the term in the sense in which it was already used primarily in biology, where this concept characterizes the process of appearance of similarities in the structure and functions in distant the origin of the organisms as a result of their adaptation to the same conditions of existence. The term was used by the researcher to refer to similar processes in different religions

scholarly journals A Non-Naturalised Methodology for Social Sciences

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-194
Author(s):  
Omobola Olufunto Badejo
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Philosophical Argumentation ◽  
Philosophy Of Social Sciences

At the rise of the twentieth century, armed with the success of natural sciences, the school of naturalism argued that the appropriate methodology for all disciplines, including social sciences, is that of natural science. The paper argued that social sciences cannot be naturalised and has its own appropriate methodology. The paper examined the arguments for naturalism and non-naturalism of the method of philosophy of social sciences. The paper employed both primary and secondary sources of data. Data collected were subjected to critical analysis and philosophical argumentation. The results showed that the nature of social sciences is such that it cannot be subjected to only scientific methods. The paper concludes that there is a need for a methodology that understands the subject matter of social sciences to address issues in social sciences. The paper addressed some key issues in philosophy of social sciences. Keywords: Methodology, Natural sciences, Naturalism, Social sciences.

The Search for a Foundation of the Human Sciences and the Social Sciences in Neo-Kantianism and Dilthey, and Husserl’s Exploration of Consciousness

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Hösle
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Laboratory Work ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Traditional Concept ◽  
Wilhelm Dilthey ◽  
The Social

This chapter begins with a discussion of Neo-Kantianism. It then covers the works of Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), the most important representatives of the second branch of Neo-Kantianism, the Baden School, which is concerned with the philosophical grounding of the human sciences and the social sciences as distinct from the natural sciences. It also looks at the work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) who had, before Neo-Kantianism, attempted to ground the human sciences in an “understanding psychology” that was not based on laboratory work but guided by a philosophy focused on the meaning of life; and that of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the most important critic and stimulator of Dilthey, and probably the twentieth-century thinker who remained most loyal to the traditional concept of reason.

Religion in the Age of the Anthropocene

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arianne F. Conty
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Risks And Benefits ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Contemporary Christian ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
Forms Of Life

Though responses to the Anthropocene have largely come from the natural and social sciences, religious responses to the Anthropocene have also been gaining momentum and many scholars have been calling for a religious response to complement scientific responses to climate change. Yet because Genesis 1:28 does indeed tell human beings to ‘subdue the earth’ monotheistic religions have often been understood as complicit in the human exceptionalism that is thought to have created the conditions for the Anthropocene. In distinction to such Biblical traditions, indigenous animistic cultures have typically respected all forms of life as ‘persons’ and such traditions have thus become a source of inspiration for ecological movements. After discussing contemporary Christian efforts to integrate the natural sciences and the environment into their responses to the Anthropocene, this article will turn to animism and seek to evaluate the risks and benefits that could ensue from a postmodern form of animism that could provide a necessary postsecular response to the Anthropocene.

Environmental engineering education in conjunction with or as Part of social sciences curricula

2000 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.H. Hahn
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Engineering Education ◽  
Business Administration ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Environmental Engineering ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
Basic Training ◽  
The University ◽  
Engineering Programme ◽  
Environmental Infrastructure

Traditionally in Germany environmental engineering education took place within the context of a civil engineering programme. There were reasons for this: the beginning of much of what we understand today to be environmental works fell within the parameters of city engineering. There were and are advantages mostly in view of the necessary planning, construction and operation of environmental infrastructure. There are also disadvantages which become more and more pronounced as the field of environmental protection expands: the civil engineer frequently lacks basic training in disciplines such as biology and chemistry and carries a large and sometimes burdensome knowledge of other less relevant subjects. Thus, educators begin to look for alternatives. This paper deals with an alternative that was developed some ten years ago and therefore has proven viable and successful: at the University of Karlsruhe students may choose to major in environmental engineering within the context or on the basis of an economics and business administration curriculum. The basic question here is as to what extent the student masters the field of environmental engineering if he or she has predominantly a solid background in social sciences and very little in natural sciences. The paper will describe the curriculum in structure and intensity and evaluate the accumulated knowledge and suitability of these students in terms of actual environmental problems. This will be done in terms of examination performance parallel and/or relative to traditionally trained civil environmental engineers as well as in terms of topics successfully treated in Masters' theses. In conclusion, it is argued that such combination of curricula should not be confined to economic sciences and environmental engineering but also be planned for legal sciences and environmental engineering.

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.

The Anthropological Lens

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Morton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Social Accountability ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Local People ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Encounters ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
Insight Into

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) is widely considered the most influential British anthropologist of the twentieth century, known to generations of students for his seminal works on South Sudanese ethnography Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (OUP 1937) and The Nuer (OUP 1940). In these works, now classics in the anthropological literature, Evans-Pritchard broke new ground on questions of rationality, social accountability, kinship, social and political organization, and religion, as well as influentially moving the discipline in Britain away from the natural sciences and towards history. Yet despite much discussion about his theoretical contributions to anthropology, no study has yet explored his fieldwork in detail in order to get a better understanding of its historical contexts, local circumstances or the social encounters out of which it emerged. This book then is just such an exploration, of Evans-Pritchard the fieldworker through the lens of his fieldwork photography. Through an engagement with his photographic archive, and by thinking with it alongside his written ethnographies and other unpublished evidence, the book offers a new insight into the way in which Evans-Pritchard’s theoretical contributions to the discipline were shaped by his fieldwork and the numerous local people in Africa with whom he collaborated. By writing history through field photographs we move back towards the fieldwork experiences, exploring the vivid traces, lived realities and local presences at the heart of the social encounter that formed the basis of Evans-Pritchard’s anthropology.

Rhythm

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lexi Eikelboom
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemporary Philosopher ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Theoretical Category

This book argues that, as a pervasive dimension of human existence with theological implications, rhythm ought to be considered a category of theological significance. Philosophers and theologians have drawn on rhythm—patterned movements of repetition and variation—to describe reality, however, the ways in which rhythm is used and understood differ based on a variety of metaphysical commitments with varying theological implications. This book brings those implications into the open, using resources from phenomenology, prosody, and the social sciences to analyse and evaluate uses of rhythm in metaphysical and theological accounts of reality. The analysis relies on a distinction from prosody between a synchronic approach to rhythm—observing the whole at once and considering how various dimensions of a rhythm hold together harmoniously—and a diachronic approach—focusing on the ways in which time unfolds as the subject experiences it. The text engages with the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara alongside thinkers as diverse as Augustine and the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and proposes an approach to rhythm that serves the concerns of theological conversation. It demonstrates the difference that including rhythm in theological conversation makes to how we think about questions such as “what is creation?” and “what is the nature of the God–creature relationship?” from the perspective of rhythm. As a theoretical category, capable of expressing metaphysical commitments, yet shaped by the cultural rhythms in which those expressing such commitments are embedded, rhythm is particularly significant for theology as a phenomenon through which culture and embodied experience influence doctrine.

scholarly journals The Decline of Religious Life in the Twentieth Century

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 388
Author(s):  
Anton Lingier ◽  
Wim Vandewiele
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Potential Reason ◽  
First Category ◽  
Cyclical Pattern

The decline in numbers of religious in the West is discussed in numerous studies. While there is a consensus about the statistical reality of decreasing numbers, scholars disagree about the alleged reasons for this decline. This article maps the field and presents a survey of four categories of answers to the question of why religious life declined during the twentieth century. A distinction is made between theories that ascribe the decline to (1) historical, (2) societal, (3) ecclesial, and (4) theological reasons. The first category views the decline as part of a historical-cyclical pattern of growth and decline. The second encompasses explanations that focus on secularization, professionalization, or new societal opportunities for women. Thirdly, post-conciliar church-organizational reasons will be discussed. Finally, pre-conciliar theology is investigated as a potential reason for the decline. While none of the reasons discussed here can be excluded from at least contributing to the decline, we demonstrate that some authors are mistaken in their conclusions due to misinterpreting data in a way that obscures the possibility of an emerging decline before the statistics peak in 1965 (which marks the end of the Council). We also demonstrate how theology has been an underestimated but significant influence on the statistics of religious life.

Guide to Africa Bibliography

2020 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. xxix-xxx
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Development Studies ◽  
Environmental Sciences ◽  
African Government ◽  
The Social ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Cover Material

This bibliography records publications on Africa of interest to students of Africa, principally in the social and environmental sciences, development studies, humanities and arts. Some items from the medical, biological and natural sciences are included. The criterion used is potential relevance to a reader from a social sciences/arts background. The whole continent and associated islands are covered, with selective coverage of the diaspora. This volume aims to cover material published in 2019 together with items from earlier years not previously listed. The editor is always very glad to hear of any items omitted so that they may be included in future volumes. He would be particularly pleased to receive notification of new periodicals, print or online. African government publications and works of creative literature are not normally listed.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document