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Epistemological Foundations (epistemological + foundation)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

MOTIVATIONAL, ETHICAL, AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS IN THE TREATMENT OF UNWANTED HOMOEROTIC ATTRACTION

JOURNAL OF MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPY, Issue 1 2003
Christopher H. Rosik
A recent special section of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy(October, 2000) focusing on the mental health needs of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals neglected to address the clinical needs of homosexual persons who desire to increase their heterosexual potential. This article attempts to correct this omission by outlining common motivations for pursuing change, updating the current state of knowledge regarding the effectiveness of change efforts, and providing some ethical guidelines when therapists encounter clients who present with unwanted homoerotic attraction. Finally, to assist marriage and family therapists (MFTs) in more deply understanding divergent perspectives about reorientation treatments, an examination of the role of moral epistemology is presented and some examples of its potential influence are described. MFTs are encouraged to recognize and accept, rather than ignore or deny the valid needs of clients who seek to modify their same-sex attraction. [source]

European Integration, the Problem of Complexity and the Revision of Theory

JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 1 2003
Robert Geyer
Recently, European integration (EI) and international relations (IR) debates have been locked into two camps: rationalists, modelling themselves on the natural sciences, and reflectivists, opposing themselves to the natural sciences. The division is based on an out-of-date view of the orderly nature of the natural sciences. Since the middle of the twentieth century a new complexity framework in the natural sciences has developed. This framework provides a new and intriguing ontological and epistemological foundation for addressing the problem of complexity and helps to explain and overcome the separation between the two poles of debate in European integration and international relations. [source]

The "Return of the Subject" As a Historico-Intellectual Problem

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 1 2004
Elías Palti
abstract Recently, a call for the "return of the subject" has gained increasing influence. The power of this call is intimately linked to the assumption that there is a necessary connection between "the subject" and politics (and ultimately, history). Without a subject, it is alleged, there can be no agency, and therefore no emancipatory projects,and, thus, no history. This paper discusses the precise epistemological foundations for this claim. It shows that the idea of a necessary link between "the subject" and agency, and therefore between the subject and politics (and history) is only one among many different ones that appeared in the course of the four centuries that modernity spans. It has precise historico-intellectual premises, ones that cannot be traced back in time before the end of the nineteenth century. Failing to observe the historicity of the notion of the subject, and projecting it as a kind of universal category, results, as we shall see, in serious incongruence and anachronisms. The essay outlines a definite view of intellectual history aimed at recovering the radically contingent nature of conceptual formations, which, it alleges, is the still-valid core of Foucault's archeological project. Regardless of the inconsistencies in his own archeological endeavors, his archeological approach intended to establish in intellectual history a principle of temporal irreversibility immanent in it. Following his lead, the essay attempts to discern the different meanings the category of the subject has historically acquired, referring them back to the broader epistemic reconfigurations that have occurred in Western thought. This reveals a richness of meanings in this category that are obliterated under the general label of the "modern subject"; at the same time, it illuminates some of the methodological problems that mar current debates on the topic. [source]

Bridging Scholarship in Management: Epistemological Reflections

BRITISH JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2003
John D. Aram
If the relevance gap in management research is to be narrowed, management scholars must identify and adopt processes of inquiry that simultaneously achieve high rigour and high relevance. Research approaches that strive for relevance emphasize the particular at the expense of the general and approaches that strive for rigour emphasize the general over the particular. Inquiry that attains both rigour and relevance can be found in approaches to knowledge that involve a reasoned relationship between the particular and the general. Prominent among these are the works of Ikujiro Nonaka and John Dewey. Their epistemological foundations indicate the potential for a philosophy of science and a process of inquiry that crosses epistemological lines by synthesizing the particular and the general and by utilizing experience and theory, the implicit and the explicit, and induction and deduction. These epistemologies point to characteristics of a bridging scholarship that is problem-initiated and rests on expanded standards of validity. The present epistemological reflections are in search of new communities of knowing toward the production of relevant and rigorous management knowledge. [source]