The publication of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (since now on referred to as Revolutions) marked the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Christian doctrine played a key ...role for the emergence of the scientific turning point, that brought about the transition from a qualitative to a quantitative approach to natural phenomena. Although the Polish scientist was not a philosopher in the ordinary sense of the term, he shared with many other protagonists of modern science the idea of the universe as mathematical harmony created by God. In this sense, modern scientific thought completed the development that took place since the Scholastic Age. In the historical period between the XII and the XVII century, indeed, Christianity proved a fundamental factor for a considerable growth in natural knowledge.
The Ekumen cycle is a set of science-fiction books written between 1966 and 2002 by the american author Ursula le Guin. By telling stories of new worlds discoveries which reconsiders the ...mankind/nature, man/woman dualisms and dominations, the writer is involved in the creation of eco-feminist demands and ideas ; thus the Ekumen tales may qualify as eco-feminist fiction. The revelation of possible new worlds allows the setting-up of marginal groups during the second half of the 20th century, which establish themselves as critics of the modern age western world. The acknowledgement of the existence of other worlds in an elsewhere enables opportunities of imagining, then creating new worlds at the very core of the reality that one wishes to modify. Thus, the Ekumen eco-feminist fictions are regarded as generating new narratives offering the power to create the future or the present of the possible end of a certain world.
Eörs Szathmáry and John Maynard Smith famously argued that the evolution of life on earth has been marked by a series of transitions to greater complexity, the last being from primate to human ...societies. I argue that this last transition, covering all of human evolutionary history, in turn comprises two phases: the first defined by increases in the capacity of the human brain/mind to structurally integrate causal inferences and selectively apply them to construct increasingly sophisticated sociocultural niches; the second defined by manipulation of the universal Darwinian mechanisms driving sociocultural evolution. During the first phase, hominin cognitive structure passed through three key transitions to produce the brain/mind of archaic Homo sapiens. The fourth transition, to fully modern Homo sapiens sapiens equipped with symbolic cognition and language, marks the fulcrum that leveraged the second phase in which changes in the scope and rate of niche construction were primarily driven by manipulation of sociocultural evolutionary mechanisms. The fifth transition to sedentary living enabled new selection pressures to be exerted through the concentration and application of social power, while the sixth transition multiplied the cognitive variation available to construct more elaborate sociocultural niches. Finally I note that decreasing intervals between transitions creates a pattern of accelerating sociocultural change.
As a master narrative for understanding the emergence of the modern world, the concept of a seventeenth-century scientific revolution has been central to the history of science. It is generally ...believed that this key analytical framework was created in Europe and became widely used for the first time during the Cold War through the writings of Herbert Butterfield and Alexander Koyré. This view, however, is mistaken. The scientific revolution is largely a product of debates about social reconstruction in the United States in the aftermath of World War I. Promoted in a pioneering book by the Austrian immigrant Martha Ornstein, highlighted in a provocative bestseller by the historian James Harvey Robinson, the scientific revolution was taught in thousands of interwar high schools and colleges. Based on John Dewey’s advocacy of “the scientific method” and on evolutionary psychology and anthropology, the concept underpinned campaigns for women’s rights, racial equality, secular humanism, and global peace. These progressive political ambitions were abandoned after World War II, when the scientific revolution became fundamental not only to forging the history of science as a discipline but also to redefining what it meant to be “modern” during an era of decolonization and the consolidation of global capitalism.
Astronomy, a paradigmatic observational discipline of early modern ‘science’, relied on epistolary communication for coordinating practitioners across the world, publishing discoveries and theories, ...and seeking their confirmation from other virtuosi. Epistolary form ‘travelled’ from an individual exchange between scholars, via the print publication of such letters for the benefit of a wider readership, to the framing of bespoke isagogic textbooks. This article explores the affordances of Restoration printed astronomical letters, contrasting their performance of familiarity between sender and recipient with the public nature of the communication. By reference to letters published in the Philosophical Transactions, individual print letters, and letter‐books, including Christiaan Huygens's Cosmotheoros, the article shows how each type utilizes the familiar and the formal aspects of the letter form differently. The print letter emerges as a form uniquely suited for performing individual authority and fashioning an expert community, as well as communicating expert knowledge to non‐specialists.
In contrast to Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, the economic discipline appears to progress in a piecemeal, path dependent way continuously being dominated by the same paradigm. ...Instead of paradigmatic shifts, the history of economic thought is characterized by considerable paradigmatic resilience.
Drawing on the philosophy of science of Ludwik Fleck, this article demonstrates the basis of this resilience, as well as potential dangers to which it gives rise, and-while giving special consideration to research on the employment impact of minimum wages recently introduced in Germany-examines whether a necessary "thought style compulsion" may eventually turn into a "harmony of illusions."
The principal source of the ecological ruptures planet Earth is currently experiencing—the unfolding climate emergency above all—is a story a small subset of humans have been telling themselves and ...living according to the precepts for about 300 years. Slowly and often reluctantly the number of adherents to this story has grown until there are few places on the planet where the story does not hold at least partial sway. Over the past 300 years, the Story of Progress has evolved from a possibility to an article of faith. Examining the history of the Story of Progress makes visible the degree to which the idea of Progress has become woven into language itself, making it difficult to articulate other possibilities—and, therefore, difficult to escape the story that has produced a catastrophic climate crisis.
Thomas Kuhn's famous model of the components and dynamics of scientific revolutions is still dominant to this day across science, philosophy, and history. The guiding philosophical theme of this ...article is that, concerning actual revolutions in neuroscience over the past 60 years, Kuhn's account is wrong. There have been revolutions, and new ones are brewing, but they do not turn on competing paradigms, anomalies, or the like. Instead, they turn exclusively on the development of new experimental tools. I adopt a metascientific approach and examine in detail the development of two recent neuroscience revolutions: the impact of engineered genetically mutated mammals in the search for causal mechanisms of "higher" cognitive functions; and the more recent impact of optogenetics and designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs (DREADDs). The two key metascientific concepts, I derive from these case studies are a revolutionary new tool's motivating problem, and its initial and second-phase hook experiments. These concepts hardly exhaust a detailed metascience of tool development experiments in neuroscience, but they get that project off to a useful start and distinguish the subsequent account of neuroscience revolutions clearly from Kuhn's famous model. I close with a brief remark about the general importance of molecular biology for a current philosophical understanding of science, as comparable to the place physics occupied when Kuhn formulated his famous theory of scientific revolutions.
Objective
The emergence and growth of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) in the behavioral sciences has been characterized as a “scientific revolution” (e.g. Buss, 2020). According to Kuhn's framework, a ...scientific revolution in a discipline is marked by the emergence of a new, dominant school of thought, which eclipses all the other theories. The aim of this study was to assess quantitatively if EP may be regarded as a "scientific revolution"
sensu
Kuhn.
Method
I performed a bibliometric analysis of the prevalence of EP (broadly defined) in Psychology, and contrasted it with the prevalence of the socio-cultural approach, known as the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).
Results
My analysis reveals that the SSSM enjoys significantly greater prominence than EP and is growing at a swifter pace. My analysis also suggests that a “cultural evolutionary” approach, which integrates evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives, is still underdeveloped.
Conclusions
Despite being sympathetic to the claim that EP can potentially lead to a paradigm shift in the behavioral sciences, I argue that a prudent approach may involve recognizing the current state of affairs, envisioning realistic change, and building a more conceptually and methodologically heterogeneous research community in EP.
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