2 results
14 - The transcendental alarm
- Edited by Carl F. Graumann, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany, Kenneth J. Gergen, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
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- Book:
- Historical Dimensions of Psychological Discourse
- Published online:
- 20 October 2009
- Print publication:
- 13 July 1996, pp 263-274
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Summary
About 1,500 years ago, Augustine of Hippo thanked God for his mother's milk:
For neither my mother nor my nurses stored their own breasts for me; but Thou didst bestow the food of my infancy through them, according to Thine ordinance, whereby Thou distributest Thy riches through the hidden springs of all things.
(Augustine, 400/1949, I, p. 7)God was the active agent in the ordinary events of life; nothing moved or intended or played except under His prescription and with His knowledge. Of course, as the Western desire to know broadened, the Augustinian “hidden springs” subtly became a significant source of error and of evil. The task of the talented believer became not merely to accept what was but to change the present – and to change it for the better. Over centuries, the core notion of salvation escaped its eschatalogical boundaries and became – almost drunkenly, in the rational explosion of the seventeenth century – the guiding spirit of human action. The shift from salvation as a gift of God, delivered in eternity, over to an immediate and secular consequence of social service was a process that took centuries, that was confined largely to European cultures, and that has never been complete in any culture. The shift had several discernible components – the deification of Nature, the belief in human progress, and the opportunities of scientific analysis, chief among them.
10 - A paradigm in question: Commentary
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- By William Kessen, Yale University, New Haven, CT, Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
- Edited by Glen H. Elder, Jr, John Modell, Ross D. Parke
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- Book:
- Children in Time and Place
- Published online:
- 03 May 2011
- Print publication:
- 29 January 1993, pp 224-240
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Summary
Here were the developmentalists, dealing with the universals of human development and human nature. What was their place in a discussion of trends and historical changes and shifting norms?
Sheldon White (1984)The closing moments of the Belmont Conference provided a chance to reflect on our cross-disciplinary efforts and to question the practicality of inquiry informed by the knowledge base of only a single discipline on child development. What is the historical challenge to the study of child development?
Consider the following “what if” speculation. What if the terms in which children are described at particular chronological ages have changed over time as well as the processes that govern their movement into adulthood? What does this say about how child development should be pursued in the present? The probing commentaries on the Belmont workshop by the developmentalist William Kessen and the social historian Michael Zuckerman have much in common with these considerations.
Each analyst praises the participants for having explored at least a promontory of fresh intellectual ground, and each calls for efforts that move one level deeper. Kessen suggests that a more solid interpenetration of the two disciplines may be achieved through the pursuit of evidential issues and, perhaps, by form of argument, a step taken in part by Emily Cahan and her collaborators in chapter 9. Zuckerman seeks a more thoroughgoing collaboration across disciplines, requiring different research questions.
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