Way Of Understanding Nature Research Articles

In Search of a Pathographical Ecopoetics: A Study of Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

What connects a pathography (an illness narrative) with the school of ecopoetics is poiesis: the Greek for “the act of creation”. Pathographical ecopoetics is “creation-with” the natural surroundings during illness. As opposed to Thoreau’s Walden where we find an autobiographical account of one’s relationship with nature, in pathographical ecopoetics the same relationship is unfolded through pathos (the Greek for “pain”) and disease. Illness as a method helps in bracketing out our pre-reflective involvement with the natural surroundings and paves the way for newer ways of understanding nature. As opposed to various other intersections between medicine and ecology, like ecopsychology, ecotherapy or green cure, there is a sense of Keatsian spontaneity and aesthetic wonder in pathographical ecopoetics. Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (2010) is one such account. Her debilitating illness, with “severe neurological symptoms”, brings her close to an unremarkable wild snail. Her world starts to get entwined with the world of the snail. The work is a curious admixture of illness memoir, biology, art, environmentalism, and more importantly a deep sense of compassion and empathy for the natural surroundings. The paper will explore the concept of ecopoetics with the help of Bailey’s pathographical account. The Sound of the Wild Snail Eating as a pathographical ecopoetics is away from the techno-scientific gaze of not only modern medicine but modernity in general. Bailey’s world of illness finds effortless connections with the world of the wild snail: her spatial and temporal confinement is attuned to that of the spatio-temporality of the snail. Both the worlds posit a challenge to the speed and “homogeneous, empty time” of modernity. Both the worlds keep the enchantment and mysteriousness of the natural world alive. In general, the work provides an alternative space in the metanarrative of 21st century modernity and techno-capitalism.

A Perspectival Reading of Spinoza's Essence-Existence Distinction

AbstractThis article examines the essence-existence distinction in Spinoza's theory of modes. This distinction is commonly made in two ways. First, essence and existence are separated by cause. Essences are understood to follow vertically from the essence of God, while existence follows horizontally from other modes. I present textual and systematic arguments against such a causal bifurcation. Second, essence and existence are distinguished by their temporal nature. Essence is eternal. Existence is durational. However, in several passages, Spinoza writes that eternity and duration constitute two ways of understanding nature rather than two really distinct aspects of nature.

Discursos científicos sobre la restauración ecológica en México

La restauración ecológica se considera actualmente una actividad prioritaria ante la crisis ambiental global. A pesar de la importancia otorgada a las narrativas científicas en el desarrollo de este campo ambiental, hasta ahora se ha dejado de lado el análisis de las construcciones de restauración ecológica que se pueden encontrar dentro de éstas. En este texto se analiza la construcción de nociones de restauración ecológica que circulan dentro de la comunidad científica mexicana desde la perspectiva de los estudios sociales de la ciencia a partir del análisis de discursos científicos. Los hallazgos del estudio muestran que las nociones de restauración ecológica identificadas son el resultado de articular diferentes formas de entender la naturaleza, las sociedades humanas y las relaciones entre ellas, con el fin de adjudicar un papel a la ecología en el seno de la sociedad en tanto actor que orienta la construcción de dichas relaciones; particularmente, a partir de las formas como se valora y concibe a la naturaleza. Fortalecer la legitimidad y autoridad epistémica de la ecología a la luz de la crisis ambiental es parte de este proceso.

A NANOTECNOLOGIA E SEUS RISCOS DESCONHECIDOS: REFLEXÕES ACERCA DA NECESSIDADE DE UM NOVO PENSAR SOBRE O DIREITO

Os caminhos abertos pela tecnologia trouxeram a possibilidade de explorar novas escalas e inauguraram uma nova forma de entender a Natureza a partir da Nanotecnologia. Desenvolvida através de um aparato tecnocientífico ultrasofisticado, faz com que a reflexão acerca de seus infinitos alcances e riscos seja conduzida pela certeza da incerteza dos modelos científicos criadores desta nova realidade. Nesta seara, o Direito é obrigado a enfrentar questões de cunho complexo e interdisciplinar, muitas vezes pautado em um cientificismo que confere genuidade e credibilidade somente aquilo que produz e que, pela velocidade com que as novidades transmutam, seguem em franco descompasso com o ritmo da dogmática jurídica. Este estudo, portanto, utiliza o método indutivo de investigação, com emprego de pesquisa essencialmente bibliográfica e têm como objetivo efetuar uma reflexão acerca dos desafios impostos à Ciência Jurídica, no sentido de indicar a necessidade de fortalecimento dos parâmetros próprios de decisão que conduzam, da melhor maneira possível, ao enfrentamento das nuances e desafios impostos pela Nanotecnologia.

Anti-Intellectualism and Natural Food: The Shared Language of Industry and Activists in America since 1830

This article uses the concept of “anti-intellectualism” to explain surprising overlaps in rhetoric between American food activists and the manufacturers they criticize. It shows anti-intellectual elements in the language of, in turn: Sylvester Graham, an influential lecturer during the 1830s; the Natural Food Company, maker of Shredded Wheat and an advocate for “natural food” in the early 1900s; and Michael Pollan, a leading figure in contemporary American food politics. These activists and manufacturers have spoken in an anti-intellectual style about nature and food, arguing that certain forms of knowledge and evidence are more natural than others. Each has favored similar ways of understanding nature, rejecting professionalized expertise for tradition, intuition, and the wisdom of more “natural” peoples. While disagreeing on the proper structure of food production and distribution, activists and manufacturers have both sought authority to tell people how to live by evoking similar visions of the American past. This shared ideal romanticizes a time in which women did more work at home, immigrants and indigenous people were even more marginalized, and custom and tradition more fully guided people’s food choices. With different politics and intentions, manufacturers and activists belong to the same lineage of food discourse and have both furthered an American tradition of anti-intellectualism.

Conocimiento escolar y saberes campesinos. Encuentros y desencuentros en la escuela rural

El presente artículo propone realizar una reflexión teórica acerca de la relación existente entre conocimiento y saber, desde una perspectiva epistemológica que explica el origen de cada uno, planteando una articulación entre ambos en la escuela rural. Partiendo de algunas preguntas, analizamos los fundamentos que nos guían hacia la discusión sobre si la escuela es portadora de un universo ajeno al campesino, una especie de “urbanización” de lo rural a través de ella, teniendo en cuenta que ésta es un fenómeno urbano. Desde una postura descolonialista nos preguntamos por la posibilidad de refutar los supuestos epistemológicos, que localizan la producción de conocimiento solo dentro de la academia y dentro de los cánones y paradigmas establecidos por el cientificismo occidental. En este sentido, se propone que la práctica educativa sea repensada desde el contexto rural, que tenga en cuenta y dialogue con las formas de producción de conocimiento que se generan en ámbitos extra-académicos y extra-científicos, refiriéndonos a los saberes campesinos. Hablamos de un universo que contiene ideas sobre el mundo, una cosmovisión, maneras de entender la naturaleza y su relación con el hombre, el conocimiento, la educación y el aprendizaje en el contexto campesino, que ha sido objeto del olvido por parte de la sociedad colombiana durante décadas.

The Inevitability of Change

As I sit to write my first editorial as Senior Editor of Studies in Art Education, first of Maine's summer storms approaches. The sky Is darkening, trees move in disturbing ways, and rain falls in sheets. But I know storm won't last; world is in a state of constant motion, always in process of becoming. Maine's variable weather is one of forces that challenge and invigorate those who live here. Whether it is lush green beauty of summer or stark cold of winter, changing weather contextualizes much of what it means to live in Maine.While it may be tempting at times to shun change and variability, they are, as Kristin Congdon has said, inevitable and necessary (2009, p. 3). When she took over as Senior Editor two years ago, she challenged art educators to see change as a constituent part of our field, especially in these times of social, political, and economic uncertainty and possibility. I too approach field of art education with change and variability in mind. How will art education continue to change to incorporate growing concerns with environment, issues of justice and diversity, and nature of our students' experiences? How will art education change to better serve needs of all students, especially those who continue to be underserved by current systems? How will declining economic resources affect art teachers in schools? How can art education diversify its institutional base by developing greater opportunities in other venues such as museums, prisons, and retirement and community centers? What new strategies and techniques will we develop to work with emerging technologies and students who use them as primary forms of communication and engagement? Change and variability are at heart of art education research; promoting and articulating that research is at heart of mission of Studies in Art Education.The articles included in this issue of Studies in Art Education reflect authors' attempts to embrace possibilities of change, to consider existing knowledge, raise new questions, and pose new ways of understanding nature of ourfield. Shin discusses role that informal orunplanned. unsystematic, and unofficial learning plays in our students' ability to come to terms with and find reassurance in their own identities, as well as cultural, ethnic, and racial identities of others. Wexler recounts experiences of preservice teachers as they make art with children with developmental disabilities and learn how embodied narratives of their students challenged their assumptions not only about disability, but also purpose and meaning of teaching art... Through discussion of experiences of student teachers, Powell and LaJevic analyze importance of emergent and responsive curricula in teachers' efforts to integrate art, materiality, and place in meaningful and organic ways. Schulte explores and expands upon nature of drawing as a constructive force in social and cognitive processes of children, highlighting role of verbalization in a child's capacity to consume, interpret, accentuate, and produce visual/cultural forms and meanings. And finally, describing artwork of two of his students, Richardson and Walker use Deleuze and Guattari to understand artmaking as a process-event where concept of becoming guides us to focus on the things that [art]making affects, from what was learned to what is being learned.In many ways, issues addressed by these authors reflect melange of concerns that constitute ongoing and emerging spheres of art education today. They deal with issues of diversity and justice, with nature of our lived experiences, with questions of how we learn and expand our understanding of world, and changing notions of art and, more specifically, art education. …

Hegel e a crítica ao estado de natureza do Jusnaturalismo moderno

Este trabalho pretende desenvolver as seguintes proposições: 1) Nos escritos juvenis, a questão da exterioridade da natureza foi já pensada, por Hegel, como um atributo daquilo que é natural, e que será desenvolvido de forma mais consistente nas obras posteriores, sobretudo, na Enciclopédia com a formulação do conceito de natureza como a "ideia na forma do seroutro (Andersseins)". 2) Este modo de entender a natureza - segundo o ponto de vista de uma "outridade" - servirá de referência às relações de dominação no campo político, nas quais os traços de naturalidade permanecem segundo o paradigma da dialética do senhor e do escravo, e que caracteriza as concepções de estado de natureza da doutrina do Direito Natural - como a de Hobbes. 3) A coação como violência ou subjugação legítima praticada contra aquilo que contém o elemento da exterioridade da natureza é compatível com a determinação essencial da natureza, e designa a condição inicial do homem como ser natural (Naturwesen), o qual pode ser coagido.

Indigenous knowledge and science revisited

This article provides a guided tour through three diverse cultural ways of understanding nature: an Indigenous way (with a focus on Indigenous nations in North America), a neo-indigenous way (a concept proposed to recognize many Asian nations’ unique ways of knowing nature; in this case, Japan), and a Euro-American scientific way. An exploration of these three ways of knowing unfolds in a developmental way such that some key terms change to become more authentic terms that better represent each culture’s collective, yet heterogeneous, worldview, metaphysics, epistemology, and values. For example, the three ways of understanding nature are eventually described as Indigenous ways of living in nature, a Japanese way of knowing seigyo-shizen, and Eurocentric sciences (plural). Characteristics of a postcolonial or anti-hegemonic discourse are suggested for science education, but some inherent difficulties with this discourse are also noted.

SCIENZA, POLITICA ED ESCATOLOGIA NELLA FORMAZIONE DELLO 'SCIENZIATO' NELL'EUROPA DEL XVII SECOLO: IL CASO DI MANUEL BOCARRO FRANCÊS - JACOB ROSALES

SUMMARY This paper aims to study the philosophical thought of the Portuguese astronomer and millenarian Manuel Bocarro Frances (alias Jacob Rosales), taking him as an exemplary case of the 'scienziato', which was taking shape in seventeenth-century Europe. Of Portuguese crypto-Jewish origin, Bocarro-Rosales travelled around Europe, cultivating scientific relationships with celebrated philosophers, physicians, and mathematicians, writing on cosmology, but he was to become better known as a prophetic author. The paper argues that, far from being independent and self-sufficient outlooks, these are complementary aspects, which one has to take into account in order to have a global understanding of Bocarro-Rosales's thought. Just as other men of science of his time, Bocarro-Rosales turned his prophetic aspirations to a way of understanding nature, history, and divine intervention, intimately related to the late-Renaissance philosophical debate. Closely attached to Renaissance philosophical eclecticism, his scientific and messianic thought was influenced by the late-Renaissance revival of philosophical doctrines as Neo-Platonism and Stoicism.

Pluralism and Panselectionism

It is certainly not unreasonable to try to account for patterns of variation in nature in terms of evolution by natural selection. But there are more or less “avid” proponents of this way of understanding nature who are, according to critics, more or less reasonable in inverse proportion. Attempts to understand nature in terms of evolution by natural selection can, according to these critics, be pushed too far. Just how far such pursuits can reasonably be pushed is the central problem of this paper.I will discuss this issue in the context of an episode in the history of evolutionary biology that has been labelled by Stephen Gould, “the hardening of the evolutionary synthesis” (Gould 1980, 1982, 1983). In the course of the hardening of the synthesis, evolutionists attributed a greater and greater role to natural selection, and correspondingly less and less a role to alternative evolutionary agents—minimizing in particular the role of so-called “random drift”.

A Descriptive, Research-Justified Data Base for Clinical Psychiatry: Would It Change Things?

A DESCRIPTIVE, RESEARCH-JUSTIFIED DATA BASE FOR CUNlCAL PSYCHIATRY: WOULD IT CHANGE THINGS? MICHAEL T. MC CUIRE* Of thatfalse power by which In weakness we create distinctions, then Believe our puny boundaries are things Which we perceive, and not which we have made. [William Wordsworth, The. Two-Part Prelude, 1799] These lines were written during a period in which Wordsworth was experimenting with ways of understanding Nature. Toward the end of the eighteenth century he set out to test the "excursive" powers of mind, its capacity to reach out and comprehend the world in a way relatively free of dogma and preconceived ideas. He soon discovered, however, that his test was fraught with difficulties: As he came to understand it, mind was as devoted to perpetuating its own self-created views about the world as it was to experiencing in novel and relatively unpreconceived ways. To this insight, he soon added another: The ways in which the processes of mind—perceiving, thinking, and remembering—were then described were often inaccurate and imprecise. Moreover, one's earlier experiences, personality, and cultural background inevitably played out their influences on one's perceptions and thoughts. Mind was not a refined instrument perceiving and ordering the stimuli impinging upon it; it consisted of several faculties, none of which was ever fully free from the influence of the others. The solution, he felt, was not to seek order in a priori thought or reason but in the phenomena themselves, in which the patterns and truths of nature could then be discovered. Wordsworth's insights into mind's properties, particularly its tendency to hold on to what it imagines independent ofexternal reality, might well be taken as an indication that he anticipated important psychological»Department of Psychiatry/Biobehavioral Sciences, Neuropsychiatrie Institute, University of California, 760 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, California 90024. I thank L. Fairbanks and D. McGuire for their contributions to this article.© 1978 by The University of Chicago. 003 1-5982/78/2 102-0007S01 .00 240 I Michael T. McGuire ¦ Data Basefor Psychiatry issues a full century in advance of their becoming formal psychiatric problems (e.g., cognitive inflexibility). It would be stretching this point to suggest further that he foresaw the current state of clinical research in psychiatry. Yet his words apply: We have created distinctions, boundaries , and syndromes; we have claimed knowledge of causes of psychopathological disorders; and we have advocated cures as if we had in hand the formula to explain man's psychological nature. Because his words do apply, his development from a young writer, well inculcated with the ideas of his culture, to the stature of a mature poet, committed to seeking an understanding of the world relatively free of prior cultural , experimental, and theoretical influences, could well serve as a career model for investigators interested in clinical research. But few psychiatrists have chosen his way. Rather, early in our careers we usually embrace one or another theoretical school and spend as much effort perpetuating school distinctions as we do striving to understand behavior in as objective a manner as possible. Our commitment to this or that school is all the more surprising when we realize that anyone who is familiar with clinical psychiatric research—the study of observable and verbal behavior—is exceedingly cautious in accepting explanations concerning the causes ofman's behavior . After nearly three-quarters of a century of research and perhaps a quarter of a million "research" studies, investigators still find few definitions , explanations, or principles of behavior which they can share in common, which they consider other than tentative, or which they believe will last beyond the next turn of this or that theory. Ironically, perhaps the two areas of general agreement are that we lack facts and that much behavior is influenced by yet-to-be-recognized variables. Such agreement not only underscores how little we really believe we know, but it also points to the predicament of clinical research. Background to the Predicament There have been many attempts to explain the predicament ofclinical research. One explanation emphasizes psychiatry's origins. It has been correctly argued that modern psychiatry largely developed in response to clinical demands rather than to findings in the...