It should be understood that a full understanding of the history of physics would include consideration of its institutional, social, and cultural contexts. Physics became a scientific discipline during the nineteenth century, gaining a clear professional and cognitive identity as well as patronage from a number of institutions (especially those pertaining to education and the state). Before the n…
Like the Enlightenment, Pietism has produced an extremely diverse body of historical scholarship, with opinions ranging from a denial of its existence to precise nationally, geographically, or chronologically defined variants, as well as views that see Pietism essentially as identical with the history of modern Protestantism. Such divergent opinion has led to the introduction of categories such as…
A principle feature of Platonism, which refers to the doctrines or philosophies influenced by Plato, is the belief in the existence of a distinction between the world that appears to the senses and a real realm that can be grasped only by the intellect. This latter realm contains the transcendental Ideas or Forms which, although existing independently of both the empirical world and human consciou…
Pluralism derives from the Latin plures, meaning "several" or "many," and it has formed the central concern of various intellectual traditions throughout the history of the West. Applied in philosophy, political theory, religion, and ethnic and racial relations, pluralism challenges the notion that a single authority or group must dominate all others. Rather than accept…
As a science of interpretation, poetics has consistently been concerned with delineating its proper field of study ("What is a poetic text?") and then subdividing it into genres ("What kind of poetic text is under consideration and what interpretive approaches does it select?"). Although classical writers on the subject of literary types failed to formulate a comprehens…
The word political derives from a Latin cognate (politicus) of the original Greek adjective politikos, which is also sometimes employed as a masculine noun to signify a public official or statesman. …
Protests disrupt the peace, stop business as usual, and cause disquiet. Protesters in effect withdraw their consent to the way things are. Even if people are poor, unemployed, or seemingly without power, when organized together they can become a force that troubles the powerful. When the powerful are inconvenienced (or worse) by sit-ins, strikes, marches, and occupations, they will often negotiate…
Political science, as currently conceived, is a relatively new concept that dates to the nineteenth-century United States. Prior to this time, the study of politics in the West remained a part of natural philosophy, and it tended to focus on philosophical, historical, and institutional approaches. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle is often named as the first "political scientist,�…
The concept of polytheism was a creation of the Enlightenment. Before then, Europeans had characterized the religious universe in terms of Christianity, Judaism, paganism, and (eventually) Islam. As late as the sixteenth century, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun, in his remarkably detailed and sensitive account of pre-Columbian Mexican religion and culture, equated various Aztec diviniti…
Perceptions of the meaning, implications, and control of reproduction and sexuality, at both the individual and community levels, are among the most important, but also the most challenging, in the history of ideas. Changes in human population helped shape the twentieth century and are creating new tensions in the twenty-first, but, despite the profound significance of childbearing to individuals …
If the term populism was initially borrowed from radical farmers' movements in the United States in the late nineteenth century to describe early-twentieth-century political developments in Latin America, since then it has certainly acquired a special relevance for understanding this region's politics. The golden era for Latin American populism is usually cited as the 1930s to the 19…
Populism (from the Latin term populus, usually translated as "the people") is the name of a group of ideologies that stresses the need for a more equitable distribution of economic, political, and cultural power. Populists argue that an elite of some form or another holds an unfair concentration of political and economic power and typically that government intervention is required to…
The history of positivism falls into two nearly independent stages: nineteenth-century French and twentieth-century Germanic, which became the logical positivism or logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle that, in turn, enjoyed an American phase. In the postmodern world, "positivist" is often a term of abuse, but historical research now contests the received characterization. In a br…
Postcolonial studies designates a broad, multidisciplinary field of study that includes practitioners from literary, cultural, and media studies, history, geography, art history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political economy. Postcolonial studies is the analysis of the phenomenon of imperialism and its aftermath: slavery, colonialism, nationalism, independence, and migration. Its ecle…
Postcolonial theory, often said to begin with the work of Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha, looks at literature and society from two broad angles: how the writer, artist, cultural worker, and his or her context reflects a colonial past, and how they survive and carve out a new way of creating and understanding the world. One of the earliest critical works to present t…
Few terms in the contemporary critical lexicon have been as vociferously debated and as persistently unstable in meaning and use as postmodernism and its various avatars, such as postmodernity. In spite of this instability, postmodernity may be defined as a broad category designating the culture that historically extends from the late 1960s to the early twenty-first century, and that is economical…
As an idea, poverty has had an eventful history. From roughly the eighteenth century onward, a change in moral sensibility caused a shift in the understanding of poverty as being an ideal state (for both individuals and communities) to being an execrable condition that societies should seek to ameliorate. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with the growth of social welfare programs, int…
In its most general sense, power refers to the capacity to have an effect. A powerful hurricane comes ashore uprooting trees and destroying houses; the power of music stirs our emotions; the power of love makes gentle the surly man or woman. We speak of electric or wind power, of powerful machines or human bodies. Many different phenomena with a very wide range of effects are said to be or to hav…
Practices are actions or activities that are repeatable, regular, and recognizable in a given cultural context. In everyday language, practice is often contrasted with theory, ideas, or mental processes: what is done as opposed to what is thought, the pragmatic as opposed to the ideational. Practices may be discursive (practices that communicate meanings through language), visual (practices that c…
Pragmatism is the collective name for a family of theories emphasizing the practical consequences of holding a belief as a means to evaluating the truth of that belief. This focus on the practical was born of attempts to evade or escape many of the traditional metaphysical and epistemological puzzles and problems of traditional Western philosophy. Rather than continuing to deploy philosophical tal…
Knowledge about pre-Columbian civilizations comes from two main sources: archaeological remains and the accounts written by European men. The latter include a first group of explorers who described the alien worlds they encountered (and destroyed), and a second group of priests, scholars, and administrators who interviewed the survivors who remembered the past, and later their descendants, who ret…
A major arena for the pursuit of prehistory ante literam was the study of cultural history (Kulturgeschichte), especially in the work of authors like Herder, Gustav Klemm, Friedrich Hellwald, and Gustav Kolb. It was in the later nineteenth century, however, that such efforts produced the modern discipline of "prehistory," a neologism self-consciously coined by Daniel Wilson in 1851. …
The concept of prejudice emerged during the early twentieth century and soon became the most prominent social scientific and lay concept to describe antipathy for others based on their social group or category membership. Social scientists have typically defined prejudice as a negative intergroup attitude. Many, however, have added the rider that this negative intergroup attitude is bad or unjusti…
Presentism is a neologism coined to identify today's preoccupation with the present age as the essential temporal referent in historical interpretation. (One notes that the term does not appear in the earlier edition of this Dictionary.) As a perspective on the meaning of historical time, it accords the present a privileged status. Presentism therefore stands as a counterpoint to the histor…
The volume of studies on privacy has increased tremendously since the 1970s, especially in the United States, and their geographical spread has become wider. These studies address new topics, including celebrity privacy for political and other public figures and privacy rights in international human rights law. Developments in advanced technology, such as electronic storage and DNA testing, have a…
The American economist Steve Hanke defines privatization as "the transfer of assets and service functions from public to private hands. It includes, therefore, activities that range from selling state-owned enterprises to contracting out public services with private contractors" (p. 4). At one extreme, privatization might entail the wholesale transfer to the private sector of both ow…
"Probability is the very guide of life," Bishop Butler wrote in 1736. Probability judgments of the efficacy and side effects of a pharmaceutical drug determine whether it is approved for release to the public. The outcome of a civil trial hinges on the jurors' opinions about the probabilistic weight of evidence. Geologists calculate the probability that an earthquake of a cert…
The idea of progress—the idea that human society can be made ever better by conscious effort, or that society is becoming ever better by spontaneous laws of history—is relatively new. The idea was virtually unknown in classical antiquity. In each of the three greatest books of that period, what we think of as progress is explicitly denied. In Plato's Republic, even the best po…
Since the twentieth century, propaganda has largely had pejorative associations. The term continues to imply something sinister; synonyms for propaganda frequently include lies, falsehood, deceit, and brainwashing. In recent years unfavorable references have been made to "spin doctors" and the manner in which "propaganda" has devalued democratic politics. The psychologi…
"There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe" (p. 2). So wrote Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780), the great English…
The root of the English word prophecy is derived from the Greek prophēteia, Latin prophetia. The root of prophēteia is derived from prophēmi, which means to speak before or for someone or something. A cognate Greek word is prophētazō, which indicates the reception of the gift of interpreting the will of the gods—that is, the gift of prophecy. The gift of prophe…
Protest, in the context of this entry, is understood as more or less public visual dissent from an official governmental authority or from customs sanctioned socially by the dominant classes. The protesting voice may be that of a minority or a majority but is here defined, following historiographical and ethical norms, as being directed toward "good causes": democracy, civil rights, …
Pseudoscience is a term applied to a field of inquiry by critics claiming that it is a pretended or spurious science because it does not meet established standards. The term pseudoscience is reserved for fields that claim to be a science, that make claims about the world and give explanations of natural processes. Statements of personal values or beliefs are neither scientific nor pseudoscientific…
In a 1928 entry on the subject for the Handwörterbuch der Sexualwissenschaft (Concise dictionary of sexual research), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) defined psychoanalysis as "the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and …
Psychiatry in the United States has undergone a number of sweeping changes since the middle of the twentieth century. The settings in which psychiatrists practice, the range of diseases they seek to treat, their theoretical understandings of these diseases, and the treatments they apply are all radically different from those of their predecessors. These changes have had an impact not only on the p…
The term public sphere is the English translation of the German term Öffentlichkeit. This term's significance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century stems initially from its use in Jürgen Habermas's Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (The structural transformation of the public sphere) in 1962. In spite of its foreign origin, the term public sphere actuall…
Punishment is best defined as an authorized agent or institution intentionally inflicting pain on an offender or depriving the offender of something in response to an offense or crime the offender is said to have committed. But definitions, however broad, need to be approached with caution, since it is impossible to perfectly capture the myriad constellations of social practices labeled punishment…
Puritanism is the set of religious beliefs and practices retroactively ascribed to Puritans by modern scholars. Since Puritan was originally a term of abuse toward people considered excessively, narrow-mindedly, or hypocritically religious, not an embraced identity, the definitions of both Puritan and Puritanism have been and remain inescapably vague. Roughly, we may take the term Puritans to refe…
The most central teaching of the Pythagorean school—that there is an underlying mathematical structure to the universe—is a foundational idea of Western civilization, particularly in the sciences. Because of this, the entire history of Western scientific and cosmological thought has been intertwined with Pythagorean ideas. Certainly many of the greatest physicists and mathematicians …
The German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) introduced the quantum of action h (Planck's constant) into physics in his successful theory of blackbody radiation in 1900 and thus started quantum theory, one of several revolutionary discoveries that occurred in physics at the turn of the twentieth century. Others were Albert Einstein's (1879–1955) special theory of relativ…
Since the early 1990s, the term queer has been strategically taken up to signify a wide-ranging and unmethodical resistance to normative models of sex, gender, and sexuality. Although this use of queer marks a process of resignification as new meanings and values are associated with what was once a term of homophobic abuse, there is always an important sense in which queer maintains, even in chang…
The interrelated terms of race and racism should be examined separately before their connection is explored. This entry defines both terms and explores their meanings and new approaches to these concepts in the twenty-first century. …
To discuss race in Asia, race must first be defined. Changes in definitions of race over the centuries in the West make this difficult. The earliest uses of race in sixteenth-century Europe usually focused on differences arising from common ancestry, descent, or origin. These were perceived in kinship and lineage relationships, physiological differences, or even religious or mythical ancestors. Th…
Of the ideas that have appeared in Europe over the centuries, race remains one of the most politically charged and difficult to define. Almost all scholars agree that race is a social construction, signifying no actual or important human difference. Yet, no one would argue that racism, or the process of viewing human groups as defined by inherited differences and acting in such as way as to reinfo…
Asian America is a meaningful social construct in understanding and analyzing Western colonialism in Asia, and immigration policy and racial hierarchy in American society. As a group identity, Asian-American is an externally imposed label because it is based on race rather than culture. The most misleading reference to Asians is the term Oriental. Derogatory in nature, the term refers to people an…
Radix, the Latin word for root, is the origin of the word radical. In contemporary political philosophy, the term describes activists who challenge established views and who operate outside the parameters of social convention to achieve political aims, sometimes employing extreme or violent methods in that pursuit. The concept of political radicalism evolved out of the language and logic of the sc…
People constantly make choices or decisions in an uncertain world: should I buy life insurance, marry, change jobs? Rational decision making is an important topic in the social sciences, cognitive science, and philosophy, and for many years classical decision theory has dominated competing accounts of decision making. …
In the final section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant distinguishes empiricism and rationalism: The School of Athens (1510–1511) by Raphael. In Raphael's fresco, Plato is pointing towards the heavens, indicating what he saw as the unchanging truths of knowledge, while Aristotle points downwards, symbolizing his belief that learning came from human experience. SCALA /…
The question "Who read what—and how?" is fundamental to intellectual history. No idea can have a history until someone reads it somewhere, and its impact on society will depend on the readings of individual readers. It was inevitable, then, that the historiography of ideas would turn toward the historiography of reading. That trend picked up momentum in the 1980s, when postmod…
Realism was a movement in nineteenth century Western culture that claimed to represent ordinary people and their everyday reality based on accurate observation. It challenged centuries of tradition when the highest art aspired to idealized pictorial forms and heroic subjects. Supporters considered its visual veracity to be an indication of an artist's "sincerity." Realism acqu…
Realism in Africa is often expressed as a concern with the authentic and full representation of African cognitive, experiential, historical, and cultural reality, focusing on the fundamental nature of African identity as expressed in its thought, art and culture. …
Aristotle relates that Socrates brought philosophy down from the heavens and into the cities of humans. More prosaically, Socrates invented the problem of practical reason by asking whether reasoning could guide action, and, raising the stakes, whether a life devoted to reasoning could be the best way to live. Aristotle closes the Ethics by ridiculing a too-close connection between reasoning and v…
Reflexivity first entered into anthropological discourse in the late 1970s in response to several problematics that had emerged in the previous decade, but its use in the humanities and in sociology has a longer history. In the words of Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby, two of its advocates, reflexivity "describes the capacity of any system of signification to turn back on itself, to make itse…
Reform, from the Latin reformare, to recast or reshape, denotes the overhaul of an existing state or condition with a view to its improvement. Until the eighteenth century the terms reform and revolution were used interchangeably. In the wake of the French Revolution, however, they took on distinct meanings. Reform came to denote substantial change through an orderly and lawful process; revolution…
Contemporary Islamic reform movements often trace their roots to the founding era of Islam. Several verses of the Koran encourage reform (islah), and a statement of the prophet Muhammad predicts that a renewer (mujaddid) will arise in each century to reform the community of Muslims. Among the scholars cited by various reform movements as fulfilling this prediction are Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali…
The Reformation was a movement in Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that broke the monopoly over religion held by the Roman Catholic Church since the later years of the Roman Empire and that created a new set of alternative Protestant churches that have henceforth helped supply the needs of Christians in Western Europe and in countries influenced by Europe. Each of these churches d…
It would be difficult to find two people today—even two historians or political scientists—who would completely agree on the meaning of the phrase Eastern Europe. Unlike such phrases as Great Britain, the former Yugoslavia, or the Baltic states, Eastern Europe varies widely in what it denotes. The variation occurs in part because what the phrase denotes has changed frequently over ti…
Although relativism is most often associated with ethics, one can find defenses of relativism in virtually any area of philosophy. The following article first discusses the general structure of relativist positions and arguments. It then examines several influential ideas concerning relativism in the late twentieth century. Finally, it ends by considering the rise of relativism in one area outside…
The first thing to note about the theory of relativity is that there are two different theories of relativity, the special theory put forward in Albert Einstein's (1879–1955) famous 1905 paper, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," and the general theory, completed in November 1915 and first presented systematically in a review article published in March 1916. Spec…
Like all items of culture, words have a history; meanings and usages change over time. So too, "religion," and the assumption that the world is neatly separated between religious and nonreligious spheres (i.e., Church/State), is a product of historical development and not a brute fact of social life. In the early twenty-first century, long after the modern usage of the word was first…
The modern academic study of indigenous African religions began with the publication of ethnographic, missionary, and travel monographs by Leo Frobenius, R. S. Rattray, H. A. Junod, W. C. Willoughby, Edwin Smith, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, John Middleton, Godfrey Liendhardt, Geoffrey Parrinder, and Marcel Griaule, among others. The African scholars Bolajii Idowu, John Mbiti, and Gabriel Setiloane also…
The term African-derived religions (ADR) is used to identify various religions transplanted to the Americas with the enslavement of Africans. For simplicity, ADR will be used in this entry to denote Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian religions, whose traditions survived cultural and ideological assault and continued to provide spiritual resources for a civilization rooted in African cosmologies. Wi…
When speaking of religion in East and Southeast Asia, a series of unique problems arises. What the West views as religion in Asia might well pass as philosophy and vice versa. The Harper Collins Dictionary of Philosophy views religion as oscillating between two extremes: Hence, the philosophy of religion studies a variety of topics from existence of "god" and moral thought to the rel…
Unlike Western systems of worship, religious thought and action from South American indigenous perspectives pervade every aspect of existence. As cultural systems, indigenous South American religions encompass quotidian life and become especially salient at times of life crises and during festival and protest activity. With more than three hundred languages grouped into a dozen or more macro famil…
Religion is a system of beliefs that explains what happens in the world, justifies order, and (usually) prescribes certain behaviors. In Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese imported and spread Catholicism, the predominant religion, starting with the voyages of Columbus in 1492. The belief in and practice of Christianity gradually replaced the native belief systems; at the beginning of the tw…
The Arabian peninsula was one of the last places to accept monotheism, and it did so in a distinctive form that was to dominate the Middle East thereafter. From about 610 until 632 Muhammad, a caravan merchant in Mecca, received verbal messages that he and his followers understood to come from God and that were collected together to form the Koran, the Muslim scripture. The Koran is considered to …
Almost every culture in human history has had a religious framework. Almost every religion offers some form of cosmology, some account of the origin of the world and of humanity, and some sort of scientia, some wisdom about how to relate to the world. The reason why the interaction of religion and science has been of such interest since the mid–nineteenth century is that modern Western scie…
The modern African state system is a new political concept that came about from the struggle for independence. These states are organized in the matrix of the two great religious traditions: Islam and Christianity. The secular hegemonic nature of the founding of these states brings into play the political meaning of these religious traditions. Religion in Africa is projected as a part of a continu…
The historical division between religion and politics that leads to the problem of their proper ordering and relation emerges only in coincidence with the phenomenon of divine revelation, and hence only with the so-called Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Religions that rest on a direct relationship between individual human beings and a deity effectively circumvent the monop…
Church-state relations in Latin America since the arrival of the Spanish in 1492 and then the Portuguese can be discussed in four periods: (1) evangelicization and orthodoxy, 1492–c.1750, (2) the secular state, c.1750–1892, (3) Rerum Novarum, 1892 to 1962, and (4) Vatican II, 1962 on. The Roman Catholic Church has been the dominant religious institution and Catholics remain a majorit…
The relationship between religious and political domains in Islam is extraordinarily complex and is rooted in a rich conceptual and a long (although conflicting) institutional tradition. Koranic verses clearly endorse the prophet Muhammad's spiritual and temporal authority. Muslims agree that he was the sole transmitter of the divine message, the most qualified person to decide the meaning …
Citizens of the United States quite properly regard the ideas and practices relating religion to the state in their nation as being sharply distinguished from those that prevailed in Europe at the time of the national founding. The sources of these ideas were European as opposed to African, Asian, or Native American. They arrived in America through literary imports and in the minds of colonists ch…
The term Renaissance (English, French, German; rinascità in Italian) refers to (1) "a rebirth of arts and letters" noticed by authors and artists living between the 1300s and the 1600s; (2) Italian cultural history from about 1300 to 1520 ("La Rinascimento"), as in the period concept of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860); …
Humans are surrounded by representations. Some of these occur naturally—for example, tree rings and footprints—while others are artificial—for example, words and photographs. Whatever their origins, all share a fundamental feature: they stand for something. Tree rings stand for the age of the tree; footprints stand for the entity that made them; a photograph stands for that wh…
Although in the early twenty-first century representative government is synonymous with democracy, the concept of political representation arose separately from the idea of the rule of the people. Broadly political representation refers to an arrangement whereby one is enabled to speak and act with authority in the behalf of some other. There are two issues that must be addressed in any theory of …
Republicanism advocates a government headed by commoners rather than a hereditary monarchy. It is similar to democracy in that it favors a representative form of government that receives its legitimacy from the people it rules, but democracy in theory also champions political, social, and economic equality. All of the Latin American countries (as well as the United States) are established as repub…
The term republic derives from the Latin phrase res publica ("matter" or "thing of the people"). Most generally, the word refers to any political regime in which no king or hereditary dynasty rules over subjects in a state of submission or servility. A republic is thus populated by "citizens" who enjoy some manner of political and legal rights to govern th…
The path of resistance has been neither straight nor narrow. First adopted by the political right, and then crossing the aisle to the left, resistance is sometimes considered a means and other times an end. Its modern history traces the evolution of an idea and a transformation in politics. The English word resistance is a derivation of "resist," stemming from the Latin—via th…
Until recently, definitions of accommodation and resistance, particularly in relation to slavery and colonialism, have reproduced the stark decisions that faced the Melians more than two thousand years ago. To accommodate was to agree, however tacitly, with the existing order of things—to compromise, to oblige, to be pliable. Accommodation entailed the avoidance of further conflict, as in a…
The term responsibility has several related meanings. First, there is causal responsibility. To say that the short circuit is responsible for the fire is simply to say that the short circuit caused the fire. Second, there is personal responsibility. This comes in two forms, prospective and retrospective. To say that the lifeguard is responsible for the swimmers' safety is to say that the li…
It is tempting to give a definition of revolution at the outset of an account such as this. This is a temptation to be resisted. The great sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) was right to say that "definition can be attempted, if at all, only at the conclusion of the study." Another great thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), declared that "only that which has …
Rhetoric governs the effective use of verbal and nonverbal communication designed to influence an audience. Understood in its broadest sense, it is practiced more or less deliberately in all societies. Even the animal world seems to apply some of its principles. But in its original and historical form, rhetoric is associated with the use of human discourse to persuade and can be defined as the art…
Invention (inventio) is the devising of matter, true or plausible, that would make the (legal) case convincing. Arrangement (dispositio) is the ordering and distribution of the matter, making clear the place to which everything is to be assigned. Style (elocutio) is the adaptation of suitable words and sentences to the matter devised. Memory (memoria) is the firm retention in the mind of the matte…
The study of ritual performed in communal life encompasses the wealth of world history and cosmology. Yet, few linguistic or conceptual categories of analysis address fully the diversity of ritual as an enactment of belief in the divine, inclusive of the mythologies of magic, associated with the liminal moments of human experience. For modern societies, the historical celebration of ritual as a dr…
The comparative study of religion has generally focused on doctrine, on canonical texts and their interpretations. But what of religions without writing, much less canonical texts? …
Romanticism is perhaps the richest and certainly the most vexed of the "isms." At the most general level, the term denotes a set of common tendencies in European art and thought from about 1797 to 1848. Ultimately those tendencies influenced the arts, especially literature, in virtually every country from Spain to Russia, but their acknowledged origins and centers were Britain, Franc…
In order to define and explain the paired concepts of sacred and profane, it is important to look at these concepts as developed in the influential work of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). …
Every civilization has its share of sacred places, that is, geographical locations, buildings, monuments, or environmental features, such as mountains, lakes, rocks, waterfalls, and so on, that are believed to be endowed with intense spiritual qualities. Indeed, such places are frequently thought to possess a variety of supernatural powers that can heal, rejuvenate, or otherwise affect the human b…
A more restrictive approach to questions of textual authority was presented in the Great Instruction Discourse (Mahapadesa-sutta, attributed to the Buddha but probably written after his death), in which he advises his followers to compare contested teachings with the corpus of discourses known to have been spoken by the Buddha. If a teaching or text accords with the oral instructions (Pali, sutta;…
The traditional biography of Muhammad portrays the first encounter of this forty-year-old merchant with God's messenger Gabriel in a mountain cave as a terrifying experience. He is commanded to recite, yet does not know how or what to recite. Indeed, for Muslims the illiteracy, or at least lack of education, on the part of the Prophet is a guarantee that the revelations were not composed by…
Sage philosophy is a body of knowledge attributed to wise men and women in communities and is regarded to be philosophically significant for both its content and its critical approach to the sustenance and growth of knowledge at the communal level. Although the term came into use rather recently in the course of African philosophers' appraisal of the nature and relation of philosophy to the…
Abundance and scarcity are crucial to Latin America because of the sharp disparities between the wealth produced in this region and the impoverishment of people and environment. Though ideas about causes differ sharply, Latin American social thought has revolved in substantial part around this axis. This entry begins with ideas from before the Spanish conquest, proceeds to key debates among the co…
Scholasticism is best understood not as a set of doctrines, but as a method, or body of intellectual practices. In particular, Scholasticism developed as the method through which Christian thinkers of the patristic and medieval periods gradually transformed the narratives of Scripture into a theological system. Scholastic method, then, has its roots in the earliest Christian times. It reached its …
Science is a product, a particular kind of knowledge, as well as a process to obtain such knowledge. It is a social activity primarily aimed at obtaining objective and consensual knowledge about nature and to use this knowledge for socially desirable purposes. Scientists and philosophers disagree about whether scientific knowledge mirrors nature as it really is, or if it merely constitutes an inst…
The most familiar characteristics of modern science—rigorously demonstrated relationships based on a combination of experimentation and exact measurement—did not exist anywhere in the world before the seventeenth century. Any definition of science that holds for earlier times or for places other than Europe must be more inclusive. More useful criteria are the attempt to find rational…
The history of science as an academic discipline grew in the post-1945 era along with the development of higher education and the expansion of science and technology. In the United States, Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 article, "Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President," called for a government-supported national research foundation. Bush's influence led …
Like a rapacious and relentlessly predatory science fictional entity assimilating all it encounters (the Star Trek Borg come to mind), science fiction in the early twenty-first century is an unstoppable expansive force that is certainly not limited to one particular genre. Science fiction literature, once ghettoized and marginalized, is pervasive and ever more rapidly garnering respect. PMLA, Amer…
As distinct from the centuries-old conception of scientific revolutions (plural), the concept of the one and only Scientific Revolution dates from the 1930s. What meaning, if any, to give the concept over and above its signifying the birth of modern science has been in lively, productive dispute ever since. This entry first outlines the historiographical vagaries of the term, then (from the headin…
The terms secularization and secularism have had a variety of meanings since they were coined; "secularization" in the mid-seventeenth century and "secularism" in the mid-nineteenth, both incorporating the word secular. "Secular," from the Latin "saeculum," a generation or age, originally referred to secular clergy who were not in a monastic …
The concept of segregation is usually based on race, gender, class, religion, or ethnicity, depending on the circumstances under which it is practiced. This entry will mainly address racial and ethnic segregation and when appropriate address how it spawned gender and class segregation in the Americas and Africa. …
Unwanted sexual attention was imposed on people in no position to refuse it long before sexual harassment was a recognized idea. Sexual harassment seems to be practiced wherever the sexes are materially unequal, which generally they are; its reality in paid work can be traced from the beginnings of industrialization and in unpaid work throughout slavery. Until the mid-1970s, it had no name. The wo…
When we think of sexuality, we think of many different things. We think of reproduction and the different bodies and reproductive capacities of men and women. We think of pleasure, the pleasures of the body, but also the pains, mental and physical, that can wrack the body. We think of love, and the joys of human involvement, but we might also remember the fear and hate that sexuality can evoke…
Islam considers sexual pleasure to be a gift from God to humanity that should be enjoyed with gratitude. The religion has also always frowned on celibacy. The Prophet, who is an exemplar for all aspects of Islamic behavior, enjoyed his many wives, including his famous child-bride, 'A'isha. Hence, sexual regulation is concerned not so much with the potential for sexuality to distract …
The phrase sexual orientation is used to describe different forms of erotic attraction: toward people of the same gender (homosexual), the opposite gender (heterosexual), or both (bi-sexual). Like any simplistic categorization, such definitions quickly become mired in contradictions and complications. For instance, is the label "heterosexual" to be reserved for people who only have s…
Shinto, composed of two ideographs, literally means the "way of the kami." Although kami can be translated as gods or deities, it also refers more generally to spirit-beings, the supernatural, or to a sacred quality in which an individual can even participate. Shinto refers to what has become a religious tradition indigenous to Japan that recognizes the existence of the kami governi…
Skepticism is both a generalized sense of doubt and disbelief as expressed in everyday language and an identifiable school of thought in the history of ideas. In its most general sense it refers to uncertainty, doubt, disbelief, suspension of judgment, and rejection of knowledge. It is characterized by its opposition to dogmatism, which claims to know reality and the truth. …
Slavery is possibly the most ubiquitous of all human institutions. It has existed in most times and most places, and few peoples have not, at various times, been either the enslaved or the enslavers. While slavery has generally been coerced, the result of war capture or kidnapping, in periods of Slaves cutting sugar cane in Antigua, 1823 painting by William Clark. The majority of slave labor w…
Sociability is a descriptive term that refers to the relational or interactive disposition and condition from which persons, as individuals, are said to derive their identity and status. According to this view, humans are regarded as beings whose defining characteristics, like reason, and its manifestation in cognitive, moral, and language capacities, are said to arise from the social conditioning…
The term social capital first began to be defined in the 1970s and remained largely restricted to the academic world of the social sciences until the 1990s, when it suddenly emerged as a central element in public discussions and policy debates about the quality of civic culture in Western nations, especially the United States of America. At the same time it also gained a place of prominence in dis…
Modern theorists of the social contract school argued that political authority was artificial and conventional rather than divinely or naturally ordained. To sustain their argument, some—including Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)—appealed to a social contract as a way of explaining the rational basis for and…
Social Darwinism arose in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was an intellectual movement associated with the theory of evolution in general but was principally derived from the works of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), especially his Origin of Species (1859). Five major questions are raised by the extension of Darwin's theories to the human sphere. 1. To what extent was Darwi…
The "new" social history that emerged in the United States in the 1960s and came to dominate the profession by the 1980s, conjoined two scholarly agendas. The first was a program for reshaping history along the lines of the behavioral sciences—in particular economics, political science, and sociology—and employing quantitative methods and models in historical research. …
The difficulty of defining socialism is apparent to anyone who attempts to study this protean doctrine, not least because what socialism is or is not is usually a matter of contentious debate. However, there is a general consensus that the various schools of socialism share some common features that can be summarized as follows. Socialism is above all concerned with the relationship between the in…
Socialist ideas have been in Africa before the advent of colonialism at the turn of the nineteenth century. African socialisms represent various combinations of African thinkers, politicians, and activists' absorption with and reconfiguring of nineteenth-and twentieth-century European socialist ideas and practice. The sources are multiple, from trades unions and contact with European worker…
The concept of society is in transition due to globalization and the knowledge associated with it. Today's views of society are not altogether new, however. Rather, they are engaged with the rediscovery of the worlds of antiquity. Since the 1970s, scholars have reached to the past to explain mainstay concepts such as society. In this manner, ancient Eastern ideas flood into the current West…
Sophistic speeches were famous in antiquity for their rhetorical style and their moral and philosophical content. Prodicus' "Hercules at the Crossroads," (see Xenophon, Memorabilia, II.i.21–34) depicts a young Hercules at the brink of manhood choosing between a life of virtue and one of vice. Though the life of vice appears easy at first and the life of virtue difficult…
Sovereignty refers to the supreme and ultimate source of authority that exists within any political unit or association. A sovereign power is deemed independent of all other authorities and it possesses no rivals within its jurisdiction. Thus, sovereignty has internal and external dimensions. Internally, it connotes the superior and final power to determine who shall rule and how rule shall occur.…
"What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" queried the historian and political reformer C. L. R. James in the preface of Beyond a Boundary (1963), his lyrical exploration of political, social, and racial relations in the twentieth-century West Indies and British Empire. He answered throughout the book that those who only know sport really know nothing of value. Sport, he i…
The concept of the state was central to the social sciences until temporarily displaced in the 1950s by a concept of the "political system" that is mainly associated with Talcott Parsons's (1902–1979) systems analysis. Parsons's sociology identified the political system with behaviors and institutions that provide a center of integration for all aspects of the so…
The scope of coverage of the term postcolonial varies across disciplinary fields and authors, being broader in literary studies, for example, than in political science. Some authors include former settler colonies as referents alongside non-settler colonies. Other analysts, such as Amina Mama, distinguish the term postcolonial, used to refer specifically to former colonies, from the term post-impe…
The state of nature is a situation without government, employed in social contract theory in order to justify political authority. The device is most important in the works of the great contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). But it has a long history and wa…
Stoicism, from its foundation, has been most famous for its ethical ideas. Even now, stoical suggests a particular ethical stance, endurance of pain or misfortune without complaint. But in antiquity Stoicism was notable also for its unified view of the scope of philosophy and of the nature of reality. …
Structuralism was both an intellectual movement with wide ramifications in the twentieth century and an attempt to provide scientific status to the knowledge of language, culture, and society. Structuralism originated in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), a Swiss linguist whose lectures, when published by his students in 1916 (Course in General Linguistics), launched the new sch…
Structuralism in anthropology is inextricably linked with its founder, Claude Lévi-Strauss. His principal contributions have been in the field of kinship and in the analysis of symbolism, particularly of myths. The characteristic approach of structuralist analysis is to categorize systems, not in terms of the composition or content of their component elements, but in terms of the structure of…
Subjectivism's natural antonym is objectivism, and various species of subjectivism have been developed as alternatives to objectivism of various sorts. One can be a subjectivist about a variety of things—ethics, aesthetics, even science. Many of these topics are covered in related entries, however, and the emphasis here will be on subjectivism with respect to ethics in modern and con…
Sufism is the English rendering of the Arabic word tasawwuf, which derives from suf, meaning "wool." Tasawwuf in early Islamic history refers to the attitude of people who used to wear a white woolen garment as a sign of renunciation of worldly possessions. To be properly understood, the emergence of Sufism must be situated in the context of Islamic expansion. During the first and se…
The word suicide is a seventeenth-century English invention put together from Latin elements and meaning literally "self-slaughter," and from English the word spread to other European languages. An isolated scholar around 1130 had in fact coined a Latin word suicida, but it had not gained currency, and that fact highlights the question why so ancient an act should have had to wait so…
Superstition has had different meanings in different cultures and epochs. One thing binding these meanings together is that they are usually negative—superstition is a concept defined principally by its self-declared opponents. A second is that superstition is defined as the opposite of something praiseworthy—usually true religion or true science. The word superstition itself origina…
In view of its global impact, as Anna Balakian has persuasively argued, Surrealism constituted the major poetic and artistic current of the twentieth century. Of the dozens of movements that vied for this honor, Surrealism proved to be the most influential and the most persistent. Although abstraction enjoyed a huge success, it was limited almost entirely to art. Surrealism's most serious r…
The symbolist movement began in France in the 1880s as a literary phenomenon. The term symbolism, however, quickly came to encompass a range of arts, from painting and sculpture to theater and music. While the movement is often said to have spanned the years 1885–1895, the ideas and aesthetic interests of symbolism are often traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century, and many earl…
Syncretism—the process whereby two or more independent cultural systems, or elements thereof, conjoin to form a new and distinct system—is among the most important factors in the evolution of culture in general, but especially in the history of religion. Indeed, all of the so-called world religions, that is, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, are to a…