Journal of The History of The Behavioral Sciences, 2009

The central component of Kellert's argument is that there are common themes in the borrowing process. One of the reasons why disciplines borrow knowledge is as a persuasive tactic. Social sciences such as economics and legal studies and humanities such as literary studies borrow knowledge from the natural sciences because there is a certain amount of prestige associated with these disciplines. With prestige comes the ability to persuade others. Borrowing knowledge about chaos theory during the height of its popularity worked well for these three disciplines, as chaos theory continues to appear in the disciplinary literature of all three. Essentially, borrowing knowledge serves a legitimizing function for an idea, position, or the discipline as a whole. Another reason why disciplines borrow knowledge is to develop metaphors to use in their own disciplines. Metaphors structure thinking. A metaphor such as "legal systems are strange attractors," in light of chaos theory, does not connote complete randomness; rather, it implies that the legal system has some kind of complex hidden order yet to be discovered. A third reason why disciplines borrow knowledge is to provide a rationale for values and aesthetics. Scientific facts are not the final arbiter of right and wrong, but one can use the process of science to examine the correctness and social ramifications of, for instance, legal decisions or the aesthetic properties of an author's prose.

Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science, 2015

While the title of this book might give the impression that it is a 700-page tome on a peripheral genre of late 17th-century English literature, the non-specialist readership of Reviews in History ought not to be misled. By 'histories of philosophy' Dmitri Levitin actually means neither simply writings titled as such, nor even simply writings whose content is dominated by such a narrative. His remit, really, is learned propositions made 'virtually everywhere' (p. 30) by the English in the 1640-1700 period about ancient philosophy. And what counts as 'philosophy' here? Apparently any set of universalist statements made by non-Christians in antiquity-'Zoroastrian theology' (p. 33) and Greek medicine, for example. Many readers will wonder whether these specifications result from an attempt strictly to 'examine seventeenth-century histories on their own terms' (p. 8), but they do allow Levitin to capture a wide and important slice of an indubitably central but usually sidelined realm of ideational and scholarly innovation in the later 17th century: the study of the past. Levitin's contribution is to provide an array of subtly analyzed, elaborately contextualized, extensively detailed, and often narrativally interrelated examples of the procedures and frameworks that characterized late humanist historical inquiry. He shows that English scholars used these procedures and frameworks to furnish novel accounts of the history of ancient philosophy in a wide variety of settings, from histories of philosophy proper to biblical criticism, apologetics, accounts of early Christianity, and debates on scientific

2008

For many, a central task of science is the discovery and formulation of the laws of nature. This characterisation of the scientific enterprise, although almost a commonplace today, is nevertheless of recent origin, more or less contemporary with the birth of modern science. It originated in the seventeenth century, when the leaders of the scientific revolution liked to describe their procedures as a break away from Greek science, as transmitted by the medieval scholastics. Laws of nature were introduced as a rival explanation of natural phenomena, which was meant to replace the Aristotelian categories. This article explores the characteristics of the modern concept of natural law, explains its possible biblical and theological roots and asks the extent to which this background can help us gain a renewed understanding of the scientific concept.

Akwa Ibom State University Press, 2013

2024

This essay will consider the medical drama series Proof (2015-15), created by Rob Bragin, and its multiple depictions of death to look at how they might be influenced by the historical moment from which they came, and in particular how they might have prefigured the cultural response to Covid-19. The series is about Dr Carolyn Tyler, a recently bereaved mother, who, though usually a very rational person, now feels compelled to seek evidence that there is something beyond the realm of the living. Consequently, she decides to help a billionaire inventor, who is terminally ill, with a project to search for proof that death is not the end. The narrative presents various visions of what death, or Death, might be-from a numinous realm to a creature of some kind-and yet seemingly declines to make any definitive commentary on how real any of these might be. However, as will be argued here, although Proof cannot rationally prove what an afterlife might consist of, it does strongly suggest that people need answers-or more just visions of possibilities that might give them comfort.