Stereotypes and crossed‐category evaluations: The case of gender and science education

A sample of UK adolescents (n = 1140), grouped by sex and liking of science, evaluated themselves, and girl and boy targets who did or did not like science, on masculine, feminine and gender non‐specific traits. Contrary to sociological concerns about the masculine image and appeal of science, those who liked science more rated themselves more positively on feminine and gender non‐specific—but not masculine—traits. The girl target was rated lower on feminine traits if she liked science, but the boy was rated higher on feminine traits if he liked science. Target ratings also showed in‐group enhancement based on liking of science, and a ‘black sheep’ effect: those who liked science less discriminated against the same‐sex target who liked science, especially on gender in‐group relevant traits. We argue that gender differences in science education should be attributed partly to subjective group dynamics and not solely to images of science.     

REIMAGINING DAOIST ALCHEMY,DECOLONIZING TRANSHUMANISM: THE FANTASY OF IMMORTALITY CULTIVATION IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CHINA

This article studies a new fantasy subgenre that emerged in contemporary China, xiuzhen xiaoshuo (immortality cultivation fiction), which builds imaginary worlds around the magical practice of Chinese alchemy and fuses it with science and technology. After the arrival of the modern, Western triad of science, religion, and magic/superstition, alchemical practices of the Daoist tradition were labeled as a “superstition” to be eradicated; however, they persisted and began to flourish within and beyond the realm of fantasy literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Immortality cultivation fiction has generated a magical form of transhumanism, which envisions human enhancement through techniques beyond the boundaries of “proper” science and “legitimate” religion. While transhumanism in the Euro-American West is popular among white bourgeoisie males and dominated by tendencies to reaffirm the human subject constructed by excluding the various subhuman others, magical transhumanism in Chinese fantasy explores the possibility of transcending that antagonistic relationship and making a posthuman subject and a utopian world.     

BOOK REVIEWS

This paper explores R. Jacob Emden's surprising quest for the knowledge of alchemy. This important eighteenth-century rabbinic leader searched for ancient books in the library of Göttingen University, sought living experts and read original alchemical works in German. His sustained interest in alchemy reflects an historical phenomenon far deeper than his personal curiosity. By delving into his forgotten 1736 Igeret bikoret, comparing it to his other writings, and then contextualizing it within contemporary European medical discourse, I wish to use the quarrel between competing medical world views, so typical of the early modern era, to understand R. Jacob Emden's alternative, esoteric path to modernity and the specific ties it reveals between theology, law and medical practice.     

SIMONE WEIL'S SPIRITUAL CRITIQUE OF MODERN SCIENCE: AN HISTORICAL‐CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

Simone Weil is widely recognized today as one of the profound religious thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet while her interpretation of natural science is critical to Weil's overall understanding of religious faith, her writings on science have received little attention compared with her more overtly theological writings. The present essay, which builds on Vance Morgan's Weaving the World: Simone Weil on Science, Necessity, and Love (2005), critically examines Weil's interpretation of the history of science. Weil believed that mathematical science, for the ancient Pythagoreans a mystical expression of the love of God, had in the modern period degenerated into a kind of reification of method that confuses the means of representing nature with nature itself. Beginning with classical (Newtonian) science's representation of nature as a machine, and even more so with the subsequent assimilation of symbolic algebra as the principal language of mathematical physics, modern science according to Weil trades genuine insight into the order of the world for symbolic manipulation yielding mere predictive success and technological domination of nature. I show that Weil's expressed desire to revive a Pythagorean scientific approach, inspired by the “mysterious complicity” in nature between brute necessity and love, must be recast in view of the intrinsically symbolic character of modern mathematical science. I argue further that a genuinely mystical attitude toward nature is nascent within symbolic mathematical science itself.     

Richard Popkin – A Personal Memoir

This article is an introduction to an ancient Egyptian text called The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant and an argument that it ought to be seen as a classic of political philosophy. After contextualizing the tale as part of a tradition of moral and political philosophy in ancient Egypt, I explore the methods by which the text defines the proper roles of political authority and contrast its approach to justifying political authority with the argument from the state of nature so common in modern Western political philosophy. I claim that the tale's argument from dysfunction anticipates the move in contemporary Western political philosophy towards privileging non-ideal over ideal theory. I discuss challenges in translating the key term in the tale – ma'at – in light of the fact that it can be taken to mean ‘justice’ and/or ‘truth’. Finally, I discuss how the irony at the heart of its narrative can lead us to interpret the tale as having either conservative or revolutionary implications for the political system it depicts.     

EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS CAPACITY IN THE GENUS HOMO: COGNITIVE TIME SEQUENCE

Intrigued by the possible paths that the evolution of religious capacity may have taken, the authors identify a series of six major building blocks that form a foundation for religious capacity in genus Homo. Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens idaltu are examined for early signs of religious capacity. Then, after an exploration of human plasticity and why it is so important, the analysis leads to a final building block that characterizes only Homo sapiens sapiens, beginning 200,000–400,000 years ago, when all the other cognitive and neurological underpinnings gradually came together. Because the timing of cognitive evolution has become an issue, the authors identify the time periods for these building blocks based on findings from modern cognitive science, neuroscience, genomic science, the new cognitive archaeology, and traditional stones‐and‐bones archaeology. The result is a logical, and even a likely story 55–65 million years long, which leads to the evolution of religious capacity in modern human beings.     

THE JOURNEY BEYOND ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

Abstract. John Caiazza's essay raises important controversial issues regarding the contemporary debates between science and religion. His arguments are largely presented in a dichotomous and rather adversarial mode with which I strongly disagree. Unable to present a detailed counterargument in this brief reflection, I ask, What is being spoken about, and who is speaking? What is meant by science and religion here? Neither term can be taken as a unified, essentialist category; both comprise many historical layers, possess numerous internal complexities, and invite a diversity of interpretations. I refer to the science of China, India, and the ancient Near East, all of which have fed into modern science, so that the sciences cannot be restricted to those of the modern West. Nor can religion be limited to the religious beliefs and practices of Western Christianity. I discuss the position/location/context of the author‐ Caiazza's as well as my own‐ after introducing Hans‐Georg Gadamer's idea of the “fusion of horizons,” which provides a rich vein for enhancing the debate between science and religion. To expand the respective horizons of their dialogue it will be important to move away from an adversarial, exclusionary spirit to a more collaborative and communicative framework that allows for the development of new ideals, new questions, new ways of knowing, and an ethical and socially responsible stance more centered on human needs and concerns. We may have to build an altogether new Athens and Jerusalem for this.     

TECHNO‐SECULARISM AND “REVEALED RELIGION”: SOME PROBLEMS WITH CAIAZZA'S ANALYSIS

Abstract. Instead of focusing my remarks on John Caiazza's interesting and important thesis about the way in which modern technology is drastically secularizing our culture today, I examine the frame within which he sets out his thesis, a frame I regard as seriously flawed. Caiazza's argument is concerned with the broad range of religion/science/technology issues in today's world, but the only religion that he seems to take seriously is what he calls “revealed religion” (Christianity). His consideration of religion is thus narrow and cramped, and this makes it difficult to assess properly the significance of what he calls techno‐secularism. I suggest that employing a broader conception of religion would enable us to see more clearly what is really at stake in the rise of techno‐secularism. Instead of defining the issues in the polarizing terms of revealed religion versus secularity, I argue for a more integrative approach in which concepts are developed that can bring together and hold together major religious insights and themes with modern scientific thinking. If, for example, we give up the anthropomorphism of the traditional idea of God as creator and think of God as simply creativity, it becomes possible to integrate theological insights with current scientific thinking and to formulate the issues posed by the rise of techno‐secularism in a more illuminating way. This in turn should facilitate effective address of those issues.     

Receptacle/Chōra: Figuring the Errant Feminine in Plato's Timaeus

This essay undertakes a reexamination of the notion of the receptacle/chōra in Plato's Timaeus, asking what its value may be to feminists seeking to understand the topology of the feminine in Western philosophy. As the source of cosmic motion as well as a restless figurality, labile and polyvocal, the receptacle/chōra offers a fecund zone of destabilization that allows for an immanent critique of ancient metaphysics. Engaging with Derridean, Irigarayan, and Kristevan analyses, Bianchi explores whether receptacle/chōra can exceed its reduction to the maternal‐feminine, and remain answerable to contemporary theoretical concerns.     

Motherloss: An Adult Daughter's Depth Perspective

Abstract

This writing brings consciousness to the experience of Motherloss from an adult daughter's perspective. Death is an issue of soul. It is not a problem to be understood and resolved but, rather, a mystery to be experienced. To face death and have a soulful relationship to the experience of Motherloss, one must have access to a feminine consciousness, a dimension of reality deeply forgotten and lost in modern Western culture.     

Alchemy and the erotic transference: A Jungian approach

Abstract

In The Psychology of the Transference Jung showed a series of pictures which he discovered in an ancient alchemical text, the Rosarium philosophorum. He connected these to the effects of the transference in psychotherapy. This may seem an unnecessarily obscure way of looking at the transference, yet it makes remarkable sense. Although alchemy is often considered the sole province of Jungian analysis, it can also be seen as illuminating a psychodynamic approach to counselling. Written from a post-feminist viewpoint, a critical approach is taken to certain key Jungian terms. The paper is illustrated with two clinical examples.     

In memoriam: Remembering Rollo May: An interview with Irvin Yalom

We note first of all that the full title of Mary Shelley's book is Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. If we take this title as a cryptic introduction to its subject matter, we come to understand the novel as exploring the consequences of an Enlightenment project that sought to replace the classical Greek Prometheus, who was the founder of Greek religion, with a modern surrogate representing modern industrial techno-science. The ancient Greek Prometheus had sought to liberate his people by separating mortals from immortals and thereafter reuniting them by means of a festive, religious ritual. By contrast, the modern pseudo-Prometheus promised to liberate humanity by effacing the division between heaven and earth and by seeking to make the natural scientific universe the ultimate object of all cultural activity. Modern human science, including academic and scientific psychology, should be counted among the offspring of this modern and progressive Prometheus. Mary Shelley's masterpiece describes the dangers inherent in blindly following this modern techno-scientific Prometheus, thereby indirectly evoking the possibility of building a different psychology and human science that remains in close alliance with the antique Prometheus.     

Prejudice against Australian Aborigines: old-fashioned and modern forms

Prejudice is a pervasive and destructive social problem. Theories of prejudice distinguish between old-fashioned and modern forms. The former is an open rejection of minority group members; the latter is subtle and covert, with a veneer of outgroup acceptance. The present study examines the distinction in the context of contemporary attitudes to Australian Aborigines. Separate measures of each, and of other variables, were included in a random survey of the Perth metropolitan area in 1994. The two forms of prejudice were correlated (r=0.55), but factor analysis revealed that the two constructs are separable. Further, they were distributed differently in the population, with modern prejudice being more prevalent than old-fashioned prejudice (57.9 per cent scoring above the midpoint on the modern scale, and only 21.2 per cent on the old-fashioned scale). Modern prejudice was predicted more strongly by social psychological variables (R²=0.51) than was old-fashioned prejudice (R²=0.30), and the pattern of results from regression analyses differed for the two types of prejudice. Overall, the results confirm the distinction between old-fashioned and modern forms of prejudice, but indicate that the two are conceptually and empirically related to one another. Comparisons with earlier research reveal the declining prevalence of old-fashioned prejudice, but indicate prejudice is still a major social problem. ©1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

RETHINKING THE SECULAR: SCIENCE,TECHNOLOGY, AND RELIGION TODAY

Abstract. Contemporary tensions between science and religion cannot simply be seen as a manifestation of an eternal tension between reason and revelation. Instead, the modern secular, including science and technology, needs to be seen as a distinctive historical phenomenon, produced and still radically conditioned by the religious history of the West. Clashes between religion and science thus ought to be seen fundamentally as part of a dialogue that is internal to Western religious history. While largely agreeing with Caiazza's account of the “magical” understanding of technology, I suggest that this needs to be seen as part of a more fundamental drift in religion and culture away from canonical meanings to more “indexical,” pragmatic ones—but also that technology is still inflected by soteriological meanings that were coded into modern technology at its very inception in the early modern period. I conclude by arguing that a recognition of science and technology's grounding in Western religious history can make possible a more fundamental encounter with religion.     

THE CHINESE PRACTICE-ORIENTED VIEWS OF SCIENCE AND THEIR POLITICAL GROUNDS

In China, practice-oriented views of science can be traced back to antiquity. In ancient times, the Chinese people independently created and developed application-oriented sciences, but they ignored basic science. In modern times, China learned and introduced Western science and technology as a practical instrument to protect the nation and make it prosperous and powerful. Through technology and production, science has been playing an immediate and major role in the development of socialism since 1949. Since 1978, the Chinese government has always emphasized that science and technology are the primary productive forces. From ancient times to the present, the practice-oriented views of science are grounded in politics. Science has been the handmaiden of politics since the Qin Dynasty. However, this state of affairs hinders the development of basic science, a science that is not oriented toward immediate application. It also hinders open-minded, critical reflection on the downsides or limits of science, which could draw on broader (moral, spiritual, or religious) values.     

Philosophy of science in Estonia

This paper presents a survey of the philosophy of science in Estonia. Topics covered include the historical background (science at the 17th century Academia Gustaviana, in the 19th century, during the Soviet period) and an overview of the current situation and main areas of research (the problem of demarcation, a critique of the traditional understandings of science, φ-science, classical and non-classical science, the philosophy of chemistry, the problem of induction, the sociology of scientific knowledge, semiotics as a methodology).     

The pretense of psychology as science: The myth of mental illness in Statu Nascendi

If I was profoundly shocked by the Varieties [of Religious Experience, by William James], that was not because some of the facts described in it were such as I would rather not hear about. They were, on the whole, amusing. Nor was it because I thought James was doing his work clumsily. I thought he did it very well. It was because the whole thing was a fraud.... Psychology... regarded as the science of the mind, is not a science. It is what “phrenology” was in the early nineteenth century, and astrology and alchemy in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century: the fashionable scientific fraud of the age.... There were, I held, no merely moral actions, no merely political actions, and no merely economic actions. Every action was moral, political, and economic.     

Metaphysics in China and in the West: Common Origin and Later Divergence

There are two tendencies in the arguments of the legitimacy of metaphysics in ancient China: the tendency to argue that there was no metaphysics in ancient China and the tendency to argue that ancient Chinese metaphysics is totally different from that of the West. In this article, the author counters these tendencies and argues that Chinese and western metaphysics both originated from a dynamic cosmology and shared objects of investigation and characteristics of thinking in terms of Becoming. However, in their later development, due to the difference in the problems of their focus, traditions of “moral metaphysics” and “(natural) metaphysics of Being” were formed in China and in the West, respectively. The author also explores the reasons for the rise of modern science in the West and its lack of progress in China. Translated from Shehui Kexue Zhanxian, 2005:3