Separate Academic Discipline Research Articles

Ceramic Engineering Education

ABSTRACTCeramic Engineering or Ceramics has existed as a separate academic discipline in the United States for over ninety years having been founded to ensure the application of the principles of chemistry to the fabrication of ceramic products. With the maturation of the traditional ceramic industries, including refractories and glass, and the growth markets of high technology ceramics for electronic and structural applications, the requirements of a ceramic engineering education are undergoing rapid change. The current status of the ceramic industry and its impact on education and the ceramic education infrastructure are reviewed. Within this framework and the property and structure emphasis unique to ceramics, a model undergraduate degree curriculum is presented.

Economics and the Law: A Critical Review of the Foundations of the Economic Approach to Law

Over the last several decades economists and lawyers trained in or enamored of economics have sought to explore the extent to which virtually all areas of the law could be understood as the institutional embodiment of the principle of economic efficiency. This research program has come to be thought of as a separate academic discipline: namely, law and economics. The work in law and economics has had both analytic and normative dimensions. The analytic work has been devoted to demonstrating that large areas of law can be explained or made intelligible by seeing them as concerned not so much with matters ofjustice or morality as with the efficient allocation of resources. The normative work in the field is concerned to give legislators and judges a framework for legislating and adjudicating cases so as to promote further the goal of efficiency.1

Medical Care of the Surgical Patient: A Problem-Oriented Approach to Management

Medical Management of the Surgical Patient, by Michael F. Lubin, H. Kenneth Walker, and Robert B. Smith III, 923 pp, with illus, $69.95, Woburn, Mass, Butterworth Inc, 1982. As general internal medicine has developed as a separate academic discipline, general internists have naturally begun to publish textbooks dealing with their turf. Initially, these authors produced volumes with titles like Primary Care Medicine and Office Practice of Medicine. Now, they have expanded their horizons and have begun to publish texts on the perioperative practice of medicine. The text by Goldmann et al is one of the first examples of this new species. Textbooks of perioperative medicine are clearly long overdue, and Goldmann and colleagues are to be congratulated for putting together this ambitious multiauthored enterprise. Goldmann et al also deserve considerable credit for three particular strengths of their text. First, it is broad in scope. The book opens with a discussion

Christopher Wren: The Natural Causes of Beauty

During 1971 two new books were added to the immense amount of published work on Wren’s architecture, one written by Margaret Whinney and the other by Kerry Downes. This evidence of a continuing interest in the critical appraisal of Wren’s buildings seems to invite a contribution from the neglected study of his natural philosophy. A number of articles have been published on various aspects of Wren’s ‘scientific work’, but we are still without a general critical account and, as a result, this valuable source of knowledge about Wren has remained largely untapped. The present article can only be a beginning, but it will aim at an understanding between two separate academic disciplines, the histories of science and of architecture. As such it risks censure by either or by both. Wren’s natural philosophy is more properly the subject of a book than of an article and we must be extremely selective, drawing on examples from his work which illustrate general conclusions. On the other hand there is, of course, a great deal of published material on Wren the architect. Any attempt to summarize the ‘results’ of this work, by giving what purport to be representative conclusions, will seem naive to anyone who has studied the changing expression of Wren’s remarkable talent. In order to minimize these difficulties, we will concentrate on the solution of one problem, namely the interpretation of Wren’s theory of beauty, as it has been preserved in his first tract on architecture. This is a single problem, but I will try to show that it is also a central one, having implications which involve our whole approach to Wren’s work. It also seems to raise more general questions, concerning the historiography of the history of architecture.

The Sociologist's Quest for Respectability

ACADEMIC sociologists and those trained in sociology have a long university tradition, and even though we are sociologists and professors, we often fail fully to appreciate this tradition in our daily existence of teaching, research, and other roles. As professors we sometimes forget that we have a long and eminent tradition. We have positions of high status, a status reflected in an often-quoted Swedish statement that professor walks second only to the king, who walks next to God. Universities extend as far back as the ninth century, but they were largely specialized institutions dealing with medicine, law, and theology. As groups of schools, faculties, and colleges, universities date primarily from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, following the accumulation of knowledge largely derived through the rediscovery of Aristotle, Arabian commentaries, and the study of the broader liberal arts. Many universities from which we trace our traditions have existed for as long as nine hundred years: Bologna (1088), the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge from the twelfth century; Prague (1348); Vienna (1365); Uppsala (1477); Mexico and San Marcos de Lima (1551); and Harvard (1636). Universities today, as compared with the past, have developed well-established innovations, such as the preparation of theses in place of disputations, seminars, electives, laboratories, and separate graduate schools. In this long academic tradition, sociologists are fairly late arrivals on the university faculties; the first independent department of sociology in the world is generally considered to be at the University of Chicago in 1893. The first professional journal was established in 1895. It was not until the 1940's that the University of California and Princeton University recognized sociology as a separate academic discipline. Today nearly all universities in this country have departments of sociology, and they are rapidly being established abroad. Thus it is understandable that sociologists often

The Concept, the Idea, and The Morality of Law an Essay in Jurisprudence

IThe title of this essay refers to the titles of three recent works by Professors of Jurisprudence. It is proposed to use these works to illustrate the problem of Jurisprudence in discovering its own appropriate concepts and making sense of its literature.Jurisprudence, it may be assumed, is what Professors of Jurisprudence write. They write it presumably for the edification of students in the Faculties to which they are attached, to help them to see the coherence and the relevance of the more specialised studies in which they are engaged. These Faculties are Faculties of Law. But what is law? The diverse strange and even paradoxical ways in which this question has been answered by serious thinkers, says Professor Hart in his opening paragraph, constitute “a situation not paralleled in any other subject systematically studied as a separate academic discipline.” If we say, then, that Professors of Jurisprudence write about law, our statement may fail to convey any exact or agreed information. Even if it may correctly be assumed that Professors of Jurisprudence use the word ‘law’ to refer to their basic subject-matter, it cannot be assumed that the precise identity of this subject-matter is universally or even generally agreed. Consider some of the identifications of law quoted by Professor Hart—‘ What officials do about disputes is… the law itself’; ‘The prophecies of what the courts will do… are what I mean by the law’; Statutes are ‘sources of Law… not parts of the Law itself’; ‘Constitutional law is positive morality merely’; ‘One shall not steal; if somebody steals he shall be punished… If at all existent, the first norm is contained in the second norm which is the only genuine norm… Law is the primary norm which stipulates the sanction.’