Palaeoanthropology in the periphery. An introduction (original) (raw)
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2006
The history of the relationship between science and religion has been the focus of a growing number of books and collections in the almost twenty years that have elapsed since the publication of the present editors' earlier volume, God and Nature. 1 Like its predecessor, the book under review starts by distancing itself from the warfare metaphor used to characterize the relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century and the ªrst seven decades of the twentieth. More recent scholarship has tended to focus on the interaction-often positivebetween the two areas rather than their conºict. The well-written essays in this book cover material from the Middle Ages through the post-Darwinian debates, highlighting science in the medieval Church, the trial of Galileo, the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century, the history of the earth and the book of Genesis, various aspects of the debates about evolution, the Scopes trial, and secularization. Most of the essays are clear, and the excellent, annotated bibliography mentions many important readings. The ªrst ªve articles deal with the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern period. The remaining seven chapters deal with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the English-speaking world. In these respects, the present volume differs from its predecessor, which devoted a larger proportion of articles to the early periods and considered a wider range of linguistic venues. This difference mirrors changes in the history of science, a ªeld in which the center of gravity has moved forward in time from the period of the scientiªc revolution to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the essays in this book largely avoid the clichés of the warfare metaphor, they tend to treat science and religion as separate entities with a history of encounters. There is little consideration of the ways in which each area has penetrated the other and informed its concepts or ways of thinking. The volume would have been enriched by discussions of how the historical approaches of Charles Lyell's geology and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution reºect the inºuence of biblical narrative rather than the Greek emphasis on harmony and form or how nineteenth-century biblical scholarship reºects the application of scientiªc and empirical methods to all areas of intellectual life. Nevertheless, Lindberg and Numbers have produced a useful collection, which does not replace their earlier volume but makes much of its content accessible to a wider, less specialized audience.
Public Understanding of Science, 2013
Atapuerca is an important prehistoric site in northern Spain that yielded the oldest hominid fossils in Europe in 1994. Since 1998 the three co-directors of the research team have in sum (co-)authored more than twenty-five popular science books, a boom without precedent in human-origins research. This paper will put forward three hypotheses. First, that these books were instrumental in achieving public recognition and financial support for the research project. Second, popular books on human origins serve as “enlarged battlefields” and as a meta-forum to expose new ideas to the scientific community. Third, the public visibility of these publications enables their authors to assume new roles that go well beyond their part as paleoanthropologists.
Some Aspects of the Controversial Nexus Between Science and Religion
2020
The present paper takes into consideration a few aspects related to the relation between the two disputed domains of knowledge: science and religion. After having pointed out the main eight warfare and nonwarfare models of interaction between science and religion, the study focuses on the motives of Eastern and Western Christianity breach, which resides on the very different attitude to Science and Nature. The main part of depicting the nexus between the two fields of research is focusing on the doctrine of creation, the one Christian theology truly revolutionized. The Christian Weltanschauung was so new in comparison with Greek cosmology that it had to raise new questions and make radical modifications, especially regarding the understanding of space and time. The Fathers of the Orthodox Church were happy to use the science and philosophy of their time in their theological thinking. However, they did not pursue a natural theology in the sense the term is often now understood based ...
This paper reviews and translates into English the author’s encounter and clashes with the epistemological project of Boaventura Souza Santos (INTRODUÇÃO A UMA CIÊNCIA PÓS MODERNA. Graal, Rio de Janeiro, 1989). It was, originally, formulated as Chapter 2 of the author’s doctoral thesis, PPGCP UFRGS, 1989. First six chapters, published (A PLANÍCIE DE ALÉTHEIA: CONTRIBUIÇÃO PARA A [RE]CONSTRUÇÃO TEÓRICA DE UMA EPISTEMOLOGIA DE SÍNTESE. Editora da UFRGS, Brazil, 2002). At the starting, the author recognizes the relevance of the known epistemologist’s critical postulations, as regards to the current state of the art in the field of epistemological studies. In the sequence, the author seeks to clarify the scope and limits of the response offered by Santos to the paradigmatic crisis, which he envisages at the threshold of postmodernity. The argument develops into accordance and divergence, respectively with the imperative of [de]dogmatization of science and its concrete postulation by Santos. After all, the antagonist content of its implied dilemma, which opposes the instrumental science and its postulated edifying application, is unveiled as a blind option. In the claim to solving the, still present epistemic crisis, Santos’ Manifesto contradicts itself by reproducing, within the paradigm in shamble, a new and perhaps even more predatory failure of science dogmatism: the attempt to validate an obscurantist politicization of science. Its objection and alternative is, then signaled regarding the rescue of the insignificant in the common sense of life, and the validation of the significant lore, which is unfolded by the main strands of understanding and knowledge, namely, religion, science, philosophy and art.
The Christian View of History and the Revival of the Liberal Arts (Conor Court Quarterly Special Edition 5/6), pp.167-182., 2012
Debate over the positive role of Medieval Catholic institutions and thinkers in the process of emergence of Western science has been rife since the nineteenth century. Advocates, such as the Pierre Duhem, and later, Alistair Crombie, were continually countered by proponents of the view that modern science arose suddenly in the seventeenth century, through a necessary rupture with, and revolution against, Medieval thought and institutions. These deniers came from both the idealist right (Koyré) and the materialist left (Haldane), as well as from champions of a definitive role for Protestantism (Merton). Historians of science have outgrown those debates, without resolving them. However, recent work on the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution provides hints about how to take seriously the role of the High Medieval heritage in the process. This paper surveys the earlier debate, arguing that Duhem and Crombie suffered from now outmoded historiographical conceptions, and also from cultural assumptions that Catholic advocates of continuity in the West, such as Christopher Dawson, properly rejected. A new form of positive solution is then sketched. It consists in reconceptualizing the precise nature of that ‘dynamic continuity’ of the Western tradition of seeking theoretically systematic and empirically reliable knowledge of nature, which runs from the High Middle Ages, through to the generations of Descartes and Newton. This historiographical strategy is based upon creative articulation back to the Middle Ages from what we now know about the Scientific Revolution itself, using the categories and interpretative frames that leading historians of that event now invoke.
Civilisation Sciences: The Theological and Historical Perspectives
International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences
In postgraduate academic studies, understanding science and civilisation is essential as a rationale for history and theology to avoid misunderstandings and clashes. Aims research to explain the role of science in supporting the civilisation that occurred, to know the history of the philosophy of science in the development of civilisation, and to know the differences in theological views on science in civilisation. This research uses qualitative methods with a literature study approach by optimising the sources of books, journals, and research reports related to the philosophy of science, history, and religion. This study's results explain that science's existence should not be considered a final thing. It needs to be criticised and studied and not be weakened and placed in the correct position to avoid absolute or consider science as scientific truth and develop in the formation of human civilisation. Philosophy 20th century is the peak of the history of the philosophy of science. The differentiation of scientific disciplines and philosophy is radicalising rationality. Reasoning moves from the problem unconscious to human science existence. The differences between civilisations and the development of science and knowledge not accurate are still fundamental. Where is religion makes differences between the social structure of humans and God, individuals, and groups so that they do not have to give birth to a conflict called the clash of civilisations. The implications as academics understand the philosophy of science requires understanding history and theology to unite science and civilisation.
Review of Peter Harrison (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (CUP, 2010)
Review of Peter Harrison's excellent volume that not only introduces and makes important contributions to a series of key issues within science and religion but also serves to stimulate further reflection on the complex ways in which the relations between science and religion have and ought to be characterised. Both are clearly urgent, with the latter of particular relevance in an intellectual landscape that is still largely dominated by either/or narratives of militantly atheistic scientists locked in a perpetual battle with gleefully anti-scientific religious believers. Time and time again Harrison’s contributors reject such antagonistic ‘conflict’ models of either science or religion, along with the related ‘independence’ model that affirms that science and religion should never be brought into conjunction with one another, but rather stand apart in sealed-off isolation one from the other (a position most commonly associated with the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of ‘non-overlapping magisteria’). Both models, conflict and independence, are critiqued as over-simplifying the rich patterns of relations between science and religion – historically and philosophically, as well as scientifically and religiously – and, crucially, as avoiding the really interesting questions raised by the unavoidable, and one should say generally unlamentable, conjunction of science and religion in contemporary intellectual life. Few would dispute the centrality of science, and the natural sciences in particular, to our intellectual landscape and to our lives more widely; notwithstanding some of the wilder claims of postmodern philosophy, ours truly is an “Age of Science.” And yet (in a theme explored by John Hedley Brooke in his chapter ‘Science and Secularization’), it is equally apparent that religion has not gone away: our Age of Science has turned out to be very different from the ‘secular millennium,’ such as that predicted by the anthropologist of religion Anthony Wallace when he wrote in 1966 that “belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge” (cited by Brooke, 106). For better or for worse, it is – and as the essays with an historical focus emphasise – always was “science and religion”, and this collection serves as an outstanding companion to the rich variety of ways in which this conjunctive relation can and has been negotiated.