European Enlightenment thought was the privileged model upon which intellectuals built a Chinese modernity since the decline of the Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth century. Aesthetically, a turn towards literary realism was successfully implemented. These Western legacies dominated the literary field until they lost their persuasive power in the 1990s. Beyond cultural production, the entanglements of a nation in transition with Eurocentric ideological paradigms influenced statecraft and nationalistic thought to our days. In his novel Frogs Mo Yan revisits the (...) heritage of May Fourth modernism to expose its transmogrification into the dehumanizing reality effects accompanying birth control from Mao to the Deng regime and thereafter. Employing images that suggest recent, science-based governance to have triggered local regimes of cosmic un-creation, the novel focuses on a global modernization that is perceived as socially as well as environmentally destructive. (shrink)

This article argues that deafness as disability from a medical view does not rest on the scientific aspect of medicine. Rather there are ideological biases and prejudices that are masked under the medical view of deafness as disability. The article reveals these and counters them.

An understanding of the precise nature of the scientific method of Sir William Petty has proved elusive to historians of economic thought, in no small part because of a lack of Petty's own characterization of his scientific approach. This research clarifies the nature of Petty's method, as to whether it was primarily inductive or deductive, and to what extent it relied on empirical foundations. The paper employs a two-pronged analysis. First, it examines the main sources of Petty's method: the works (...) of Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, and the synergistic influences of the Hartlib Circle, the Royal Society, the Dublin Philosophical Society, and the Mersenne group. Second, four of Petty's most noted contributions to political economy are deconstructed in order to identify his scientific method. This research concludes that Petty relied almost exclusively on deduction in his scientific approach and that his analysis does not reveal any inductive reasoning. When data was available, Petty constructed his economic theories on empirical foundations. (shrink)