SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE AS THE MEANS BACK TO PHRONETIC (WISE) LAW

[The tomorrow of knowledge hangs in the balance between mysticism and logic, science and mathematics, of feeling and knowing, of believing and thinking. There is the need for a reconsideration of our 'inerrant' scientific method, or yet, another weltanschauung, a worldview that will stitch into perfection our methods of knowledge acquisition, or dismiss into the trash can of history our epistemic dogmatism for a better synthesis of our sensibilities]

The British Journal for the History of Science, 2012

Academia Letters, 2021

The article evaluates the normally rather dry subjects of Medical Law and Medico-Legal studies from aspects which give much life and colour to a topic, few people would consider as titillating. The author, an OBGYN professor describes how having sub-specialised in the subject in his late years discovered numerous crucially important spin-offs of the subject. The basic tenet of limiting the specialty by binning it off as simply 'medical litigation' is to miss out on many potential and exciting applications across the board of medical disciplines. Like Pathology, medico-legal studies have the potential to serve as a common link to all specialties with the ultimate goal of guiding towards Good Practice, diminish the practice of defensive medicine and arm the practitioner with much confidence in an era riddled with litigation. The author also maintains that the frequent hurdles encountered in controversial jurisprudence such as related to cerebral palsy and intrapartum CTG should be well aired to serve as further catalysts to relevant research. Furthermore, the article firmly puts forward the concept of the unique potential role inherent in medico-legal studies as a major medium of teaching, both at under and postgraduate medical studies.

Zygon®, 2007

Talk about "religion and science" these days and chances are that you'll come across what journalists are calling "The New Atheism." They refer to an avalanche of books, articles, interviews-a media blitz, by a number of leading scientists and others who are influenced by science-all to the effect that religion is intellectually confused and dangerous, with some calls to eradicate religion altogether. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science has given little attention to the furor that has arisen in the wake of this movement of New Atheism. In his guest editorial in this issue, Gregory Peterson gives his take on this current discussion. The journal's Statement of Perspective printed on the last page of backmatter in every issue asserts Zygon's hypothesis that religious traditions of "long-evolved wisdom" can be yoked with "scientific discoveries about the world and human nature" in constructive ways for enhancing human life. The key is constructive interrelationships-something that the current New Atheism debate seldom acknowledges. Zygon does not focus on the conflicts between religion and science so much as on the constructive possibilities in their relationship. What we call long-evolved wisdom is not only central to the Zygon proposition; it also highlights an issue that needs to receive more attention. The issue is this: When modern science engages traditional religions and humanistic traditions, a fundamental question arises: How does our contemporary experience and knowledge relate to the whole of premodern, prescientific traditions of wisdom? Restricting ourselves to our history as literate creatures, we may say that we are in possession of four millennia of experience exploring and trying to understand our world and our own human nature and fashioning strategies for survival. Our forebears, even four thousand years ago, were our equal in quality of mind and seriousness of intention, and they confronted just as urgent pressures from their environment as we do. The experience of those four millennia, together with our entire evolutionary history, has brought us to where are today. That experience has made us what we are, and it is embodied in our genotypes and in our behaviors-in what Donald

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.