This paper argues that the emergence of humanistic values is not a purely modern phenomenon. If by humanism we refer to secular learning and the development of science, there were periods in the history of Islam when this was encouraged. Humanism in the sense of the respect for ‘human values’ such as democracy is equally widely distributed in time and space, so that the idea that the West, as heirs of Ancient Greece, has a monopoly is quite untenable. Tribal societies (...) often practise versions of direct democracy; representation is an aspect of many more complex regimes. Even with monarchical states, few can afford to neglect public opinion over the longer term. Modern representative democracies moreover often fail to consult their people on major issues such as declaring war. In any case that is only one mode of representation among others and does not have the monopoly of virtue, especially in religiously divided communities. Elsewhere it may be adopted as a legitimating device in a specific context, as I suggested had been the case with Israel. (shrink)

This entry counters the paradigmatic status of modern western science by pointing to the existence of alternative knowledges that precede this hegemonic form, and by showing the fruitfulness of alternative sciences that have emerged in contemporary times. It argues that the idea of an alternative science demonstrates that issues of knowledge determine the possibilities of a politics that connects the question of alternative lifeworlds to alternative livelihoods, lifestyles and life cycles.

The authors examined cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning among East Asian (Chinese and Korean), Asian American, and European American university students. We investigated categorization (Studies 1 and 2), conceptual structure (Study 3), and deductive reasoning (Studies 3 and 4). In each study a cognitive conflict was activated between formal and intuitive strategies of reasoning. European Americans, more than Chinese and Koreans, set aside intuition in favor of formal reasoning. Conversely, Chinese and Koreans relied on intuitive strategies more than (...) European Americans. Asian Americans' reasoning was either identical to that of European Americans, or intermediate. Differences emerged against a background of similar reasoning tendencies across cultures in the absence of conflict between formal and intuitive strategies. (shrink)

Much social theory takes for granted the core conceit of modern culture, that modern actors-individuals, organizations, nation states-are autochthonous and natural entities, no longer really embedded in culture. Accordingly, while there is much abstract metatheory about "actors" and their "agency," there is arguably little theory about the topic. This article offers direct arguments about how the modern (European, now global) cultural system constructs the modern actor as an authorized agent for various interests via an ongoing relocation into society of agency (...) originally located in transcendental authority or in natural forces environing the social system. We see this authorized agentic capability as an essential feature of what modern theory and culture call an "actor," and one that, when analyzed, helps greatly in explaining a number of otherwise anomalous or little analyzed features of modern individuals, organizations, and states. These features include their isomorphism and standardization, their internal decoupling, their extraordinarily complex structuration, and their capacity for prolific collective action. (shrink)

To mention what is called the “Silk Routes” today is to evoke more than two thousand years of history on two continents, Europe and Asia. Naturally, over such a long period and such vast territories, hundreds of products were transported, exchanged, stolen, conquered, transferred, in short, from one country to another. For some of these products, the very source of the raw materials and the techniques of production themselves were transferred.Everyone knows that the Chinese invented paper, printing, gunpowder and the (...) compass—great technological advances; as for the last three, their transmission throughout the world goes back only to the Crusades, which is quite recent. Here we are interested in transfers that are less known and more ancient, the most ancient for which precise records exist, starting from the time of the “opening” of the silk routes, which, according to Chinese classical history, was during the second century B.C. We shall stop around the eleventh century A.D., at the time of the Sung dynasty. This period includes the two most interesting epochs, in our opinion, in the history of the exchanges on these routes: the Han dynasty (from 206 B.C. to 220 A.D.) and the Tang dynasty (618-907), epochs whose time frames encompass the Western Roman empire, the Eastern Roman empire, the kou-chau empire, Sassanid Persia, and the first centuries of Islam. (shrink)

Analogies between hearing and seeing already existed in ancient Greek theories of perception. The present paper follows the evolution of such analogies until the rise of 17th century optics, with due regard to the diversity of their origins and nature but with particular emphasis on their bearing on the physical concepts of light and sound. Whereas the old Greek analogies were only side effects of the unifying concepts of perception, the analogies of the 17th century played an important role in (...) constructing optical theories by imitation of acoustic theories, or vice versa. This transition depended on several factors including the changing relations between optics, music, mathematics, and physics, the diversity of early modern concepts of sound, and the rise of a new physics based on experimentation and mechanical explanation. (shrink)

This paper considers the prospects for objectivity in reasoning strategies in response to empirical studies that apparently show systematic culture‐based differences in patterns of reasoning. I argue that there is at least one modest class of exceptions to the claim that there are alternative, equally warranted standards of good reasoning: the class that entails the solution of certain well‐structured problems which, suitably chosen, are common, or touchstone, to the sorts of culturally different viewpoints discussed. There is evidence that some cognitive (...) tasks are seen in much the same way across cultures, not least by virtue of the common run of experiences with the world of material objects in early childhood by creatures with similar cognitive endowments. These tasks thus present as similarly structured sets of claims that have similar priority: what is framed, and what is bracketed, or held constant in the background, is shown to be naturally common across cultures. As a consequence, a normative view of reasoning and, by implication, critical thinking can be defended. While this might be a modest sense of objectivity, the high level of intercultural articulation that is able to occur among people of different backgrounds suggests that it provides cognitive scaffolding for a lot of other reasoning tasks as well. (shrink)

In the second half of the 18th century, the naturalistically planted pleasure ground of England came to be known in France as le jardin anglo-chinois. What the French saw as the Oriental connection of the English landscaping revolution has been denied by English garden historians since Horace Walpole. By way of Matteo Ripa's 1724 visit to London, this paper takes a close look at the issues involved and tries to determine not only whether China was involved at all in the (...) initial change of English gardening taste, but also how specific and crucial that involvement was. (shrink)