Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences: Revie

This paper deals with ways history can be interpreted and influences different interpretations have on society and individuals. This is explored through

Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. […] the metaphysician confuses [science and art] and produces a structure which achieves nothing for knowledge and something inadequate for the expression of attitude. (P.80)

We are only a brief second in the long history of the universe; many things have preceded us to make us the most complex creatures that ever walked the Earth. We are a “new level of complexity” which makes us different from all other creatures that have come before us. Our species has only been around for 250,000 years, a short time compared to the formation of the Earth at 4.5 billion years ago and the creation of the Universe at 13.7 billion years ago, but the time we have had on this Earth has greatly affected the outcome of history. In an attempt to provide an overview of human history in his book This Fleeting World, David Christian introduces it in the context of the history of the universe and then systematically breaks it down

In Wittig's “One is Not Born a Woman,” biology is a classifier that naturalizes gender distinction between women and men based on the physical discrepancies. Biology, as a field of science associated with historical evidence, constructs social conventions of gender difference and instills the idea as a permanent fact. The differing role of women and men throughout history is justified by the term “biological predisposition” and “holds onto the idea that the capacity to give birth (gender role based on biological function) is what defines a woman” (Wittig 10). The notion of biology in this term defers authority to the image of science -reasoning that concludes to a fixed and proven answer. The deference

Two law professors, Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover, in their novel, Death of Discourse illustrate the near tyrannical pleasure that Americans live under and the effects of this bliss in dulling the intellectual values of communication. Collins and Skover’s purpose is to enlighten the audience of how America’s glorified first amendment is warped into a means of blinding the public of society’s malfeasance. The two take on an edifying and forthright tone in order to allow the readers to gain clarity on how the media is warping american society; to show americans just exactly how the first amendment is misused.

In this essay I will argue that science and pseudoscience cannot be clearly demarcated: rather that there’s great difficulty and complication on the fringes when asserting strict criteria that distinguishes the two. I will give a brief overview and draw on the arguments made by philosophers of science throughout history and explain why perhaps their criteria are problematic. I will look in depth into ‘creation science’ and why we strongly consider this as pseudoscientific and analyse the more ambiguous peripheries of science such as Freudian psychoanalysis or even economics.

This piece has a lot of valuable information about journals. The author teaches at a community college that is attended by mostly black students, and the problem he wanted to tackle was the disconnect between black students’ home discourse and the academic discourse that was foisted upon them in college, that their black English wasn’t valued, and that academic discourse, being so different from their home discourses, was paralyzing and “alienating”. He had long used journals as an afterthought in his composition courses, but in dealing with this problem, he decided to make them more central and important. He describes the results as “edifying” and “transcendent”.

Hasker, W. (1983). Metaphysics: Constructing a World View. (1st ed.). Downers Grove: IL: InterVarsity Press.

Father of Modern thought and mental symbol of how many western thinkers today process the world they live in, Rene Descartes, developed a dualistic way of thought that steals the attention away from other modes of further developed thought now held in Post-Modernistic and even contemporary types of viewing reality. His theory of Cartesian dualism of thought brings about two distinct realities people, supposedly to Descartes, inhabit throughout their daily lives. These include the existence of a Res Cogitans, the domain of thinking things, and a Res Extensa, the domain of matter or exterior world. This split creates causal paradigms in cultures that begin to pick one domain over the other wherein hopefully this paper will inspect the shift in

In the critique of pure reason, Kant states, “All alternations occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect.”1 This statement is interpreted in two different ways: weak readings and strong readings. The weak readings basically suggest that Kant's statement only refer to “All events have a cause”; however, the strong readings suggest that “the Second Analogy is committed not just to causes, but to causal laws as well.”2 To understand the difference between the readings, it is helpful to notice Kant's distinction between empirical laws of nature and universal transcendental principles. Empirical laws have an empirical element that universal transcendental principles cannot imply. On the other hand, empirical experiences require necessity to become a law, accordingly, “the transcendental laws “ground” the empirical laws by supplying them with their necessity.”3In this paper, according to this distinction, I first, argue that the second analogy supports the weak reading, second, show how in Prolegomena he uses the concept of causation in a way that is compatible to the strong reading, and third, investigate whether this incongruity is solvable.

Human history is marked by discovery and change, either challenging, or affirming our perceptions, confronting and changing our views as new light is shed on our perceptions of the world. Bryson’s ‘A short history of nearly everything’, Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ and Graeme Manson’s ‘Orphan Black’ all accept the potentially destructive implications of scientific or subjective discovery in process and result. As such, it affirms their transformative possibilities of discovery and gently oppose us if we are willing to lay aside our assumptions or our entrenched world views.

Hayashi, Y. Science and Religion in “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”. Retrieved March 9, 2014, from http://www.kushiroct.ac.jp/library/kiyo/kiyo37/hayashiscience37.pdf

Act and potency and their distinction are an important and fundamental theory in philosophy. It helps approach questions in metaphysics concerning substance, essence, and causation. In this essay, I will be using this theory of act and potency to show how the four causes and the theory relate to each other. Thus, the four causes: formal cause, material cause, efficient cause, and final cause are related to each other and can be explained through the theory and concepts of act and potency.

It was developed by Mills in a time of great social upheaval – industrialisation, globalisation and capitalism meant that the social phenomena were different to those previously experienced. The meta-narrative of science and ‘scientism’, previously used to develop theories of society, began to be presenting more moral questions and

As with many philosophers worth studying, a common theme present amongst René Descartes, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant is the fact that all three philosophers challenged the traditional ways of thinking about philosophy respective to their eras. In certain aspects, all three of these philosophers also grappled with understanding, discovering, and logically explaining the power of the mind to shape whole truths. From Descartes’ foundational work with methodological doubt to Kant’s contribution to previous philosophical concepts such as synthetic judgments, all three men made undeniably valuable advances in epistemological thought despite the occasional controversies associated with their forward thinking during their time.