Impact Of Postmodernism Research Articles

Historicism, Truth Claims, and the Teaching of Ethics

AbstractThis article analyzes the impact of postmodernism on the meaning, truth, and justification of claims in contemporary theology and ethics. It argues that historicist premises do not lead inexorably from a naïve objectivism in ethics to ethical relativism, as Sheila Greeve Davaney and Richard Rorty suggest. Instead, as the work of Carol Christ and Jeffrey Stout has argued, theologians and ethicists are justified in making indirect, web-of-belief related claims to ontological truth. Christ's theological realism and Stout's modest pragmatism both appear able to support meaningful discussions of truth, while avoiding the related dangers of relativism, skepticism, and nihilism. Paying careful attention to these methodological issues in a course on Religious Ethics and Moral Issues has proved very effective in overcoming student acquiescence to a relativist perspective, and in enabling them to propose and defend their own moral views with greater confidence.

The impact of postmodernism on research methodology: implications for nursing

This article considers what have been referred to as the two major crises in research methodology: (i) the crisis of legitimation (to what extent are the notions of reliability and validity still meaningful in the light of a posture that is said to approach an 'anything goes' standpoint); and (ii) the crisis of representation (to what extent is it possible to represent the world view of 'the other' without it being merely a construction of the researcher). These are discussed in order to identify aspects of a continuing debate that is of relevance to nurses for they are integral to graduate research and the ongoing application of research in hospital or community contexts. Educating nurses in research requires that they learn a repertoire of research skills such as literature critiques, developing research questions, interviewing, analysing techniques and computer-assisted analysis. However, postmodern debates can also be beneficial by facilitating their understanding of contemporary research issues so that they can critically integrate such reflexive thinking into their own research practices and go on to explore new ways to undertake research.

MOVING BOUNDARIES: TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE INTERFACE BETWEEN ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR ENVIRONMENTS

The transformation of the interface between academic institutions and their environment can be depicted in terms of moving boundaries: the academic-commercial, managerial and university work. These movements represent fundamental transformations of universities, in structure, referent external objectives, meaning and work. It is of great importance to realise that whilst these changes may appear from close up to be unique to changes within the Australian scene, they are not. Instead, the movement of the three boundaries is set within shifts that are currently going on within global society. Representing as they do, deep penetration of commercial market parameters into the very premises of acadaemia, these changes represent the impact of postmodernism on contemporary academic work.

The consumerist manifesto: advertising in postmodern times

Advertising is no longer on the defensive. It has survived the snobbery of the 50s, the conspiracy theories of the 60s and the semiology of the 70s to be embraced and apotheosised by the 80s. The Consumerist Manifesto is the first book to examine the advertising process from within the agency itself, and from the wider perspective of advertising's dual relationship as both consumer and object, with contemporary cultural theory. Martin Davidson follows the creation of successful campaigns and explores how advertising has succeeded in setting the tone for even larger aspects of our material and personal lives. With the impact of postmodernism and popular culture, and the subsequent collapse of the old anti-advertising critique, the books reveals how advertising came to be embraced as the idiom of the enterprise culture, and how it became central to the decades assault on traditional notions of political and cultural value. Martin Davidson explores the wider implications of advertising's dominance for cultural theory, art, anthropology and language. Finally, Martin Davidson asks how this new critique will have to develop if the industry's new credibility is to be maintained.

Postmodernism and medical anthropology: Words of caution

Of late, discourse in anthropology increasingly has been set within the frame of postmodernism. While debate continues as to whether postmodernism represents a particular period or an historically conditioned perspective (or interrelated set of perspectives) within the social sciences and beyond, it is clear that assessment is needed of the impact of postmodernism on work within the field. This paper represents a critique of the potential effect of postmodernism within medical anthropology. It is the argument of this paper that despite the postmodern eschewal of so-called grand theory, postmodern writers in anthropology smuggle a theoretical perspective into their work. The problems of this perspective in terms of the critical turn within medical anthropology are examined.

Clinical Intervention in the Postmodern World

ABSTRACT Postmodernism is a philosophy that has begun to influence many areas of study. In this paper, the impact of postmodernism on clinical practice is examined. Basically, dualism is undermined by postmodernism. As a result, reality is understood to constitute a ‘language game’. In terms of clinical practice, the notion of intervention must be reconceptualized. Health and illness, in short, must be assessed in terms of the assumptions a client accepts regarding the nature of reality.

Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities (review)

Reviews1 1 1 And so, is the search for a core sense of raison entirely futile? After reading Haight, I am left with the impression that behind the protean raison lurks what today often goes by the name of "reflective equilibrium." If so, then our understanding of seventeenth-century French thought is due for a major revision. University of ColoradoSteven Fuller Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities, edited by Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan; viii & 365 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983, $27.50. The debate about the nature of modernism and postmodernism forms the focal point around which the majority of the papers in this important scholarly volume pivot. They are die result of two conferences on "Innovation/Renovation " held in Germany in 1980 and the United States in 1981. Of the sixteen papers, those of Ihab Hassan, Claus Uhlig, Dominick LaCapra, and Paul Noack address the theme of"Perspectives on Change"; while Geoffery H. Hartman , Ralph Cohen, Wayne C. Booth, Herbert Blau, Richard Schechner, Régis Durand, Leslie A. Fielder, Didier Coste, and Matei Calinescu offer differing "Perspectives on Innovation"; finally there are "Perspectives on Postmodernism" by Norman N. Holland, Malcolm Bradbury, and Jean-François Lyotard. The range of subjects discussed covers most of the important areas in the humanities. I shall restrict my comments to three papers, one from each section of the volume, which incorporate important features of certain others while themselves offering significant contributions to the vexed question of the implication and impact of postmodernism. LaCapra's "Intellectual History and Defining the Present as 'Postmodern'" attempts to redefine die orientation of intellectual history in the light of recent developments in French philosophy. Derrida's impact has caused historians to rethink their understanding of the "present in the past." In articulating a postmodernist historiography, La Capra is concerned to develop a conception of the "present" which is ensnared neither in a view of history as discontinuous nor in one that sees it as the unfolding of a simple continuity. Going beyond this opposition , and diereby displacing the "traditional options," is understood as a continual process which refuses a unique result or consequence. Such a process does not involve rejecting tout court the categories of traditional historiography but rather their reformulation. This is apparent in LaCapra's reworking of the terms "text" and "context," where the former becomes a site of differing tendencies while the latter loses its power to provide "a univocal 'key' to the meaning of a text." 1 12Philosophy and Literature Hartman, one of the (in)famous Yale critics, opens his "The New Wilderness: Critics as Connoisseurs of Chaos" with an eloquent restatement of the way in which criticism becomes creative and thus itself becomes a place where the nature of the literary is continually rethought. Hartman's major concern, however, is to argue that die opponents of the Yale school employ in their critiques the very concepts and strategies that have been brought into question by "poststructuralist theory." But there is a further, and for Hartman a more disturbing , dimension to these attacks on contemporary theory. In them he identifies a totalizing and universalizing tendency which aims to force a sameness on linguistic practice. Implicit in Hartman's position is the claim that the recognition by poststructuralist theory of the arbitrary, nonstandard, and fragmented nature of discourse entails (or perhaps should entail) a critical and political pluralism. It is the joining of the political and theoretical that distinguishes the importance of Hartman's paper. Lyotard's "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" is a direct though enormously sophisticated intervention in a debate which his earlier La Condition Postmoderne helped to start. Lyotard's response to this question stems from his recent work on theories of presentation. Kant on the Sublime is interpreted as providing a way into an understanding of modernism, for the Sublime concerns the unpresentable while the modern "presents the fact diat the unpresentable exists." This "fact" gives rise to two responses. One is nostalgic and regretful of the modern predicament while the other celebrates and affirms die inventive possibilities it affords; "Melancholia contra novatio." Lyotard identifies the former widi the modern while the latter is the postmodernist stance...