... as differences are observed in ancient Chinese and ancient Greek responses to cultural difference; also the significantly different views of these matters among the Greek philosophers. In the same vein, discussing studies of cultural/linguistic variability or counterclaimed universality among humans in color...

... that assumption, several others likewise become untenable, including the assumption that precise meanings for words or concepts are available in principle. Objectivism and relativism are claimed to be equally chimerical. objectivity relativism cultural difference Copyright © 1994 1994 ...

... of the place of observation in science confirms) that arguments from the indeterminacy of translation can be extended properly to a supposed incommensurability of scientific theories. indeterminacy of translation cultural difference incommensurability commensurability meaning Copyright © 1993 1993 ...

... differences by psychologists Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, cited by Roepstorff, indicates extensive conceptual and methodological problems in that tradition of research. It also indicates that, contrary to Roepstorff's description of the new field of cultural neuroscience as a site of cultural-relativist...

... according to their degree 1.  Simon Harrison, “Cultural Difference as Denied Resemblance: Reconsidering Nationalism and Identity,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45.2 (2003): 343 –  61. Common Knowledge 17:1...

... cultural models, Amerindian perspectivism holds that human and nonhuman species possess a common values system and cultural framework. While this commonality is ordinarily obscured by biologically grounded, perceptual differences, the gap in perspective may be bridged by shamans, whose gift of adopting...

...Richard Rorty; Jeffrey M. Perl In this brief essay Rorty comments on how some fear that Thomas Kuhn’s widely persuasive view of science can and is being used to denigrate science or to reduce our sense of its difference from literature. Rorty goes on to argue that no part of culture should...

..., and then goes on to show how differently Japanese culture regards and manages major change. The author of this introduction, who is also the journal’s editor, begins by evaluating a triptych of 1895 by Toshikata as a response to the seemingly revolutionary changes brought by the Meiji Restoration a generation...

...Maya Jasanoff; Jeffrey M. Perl Written in an effort “to frame questions of culture and power in different terms” from those of Edward Said, this case study of Ottoman Alexandria before the French invasion in 1798 (identified by Said as the “launchpad of modern Orientalism”) reveals “lines between...

...Leighton Hazlehurst This essay explores ways in which cultures at different levels and in different historical circumstances employ different modes of discourse to deal with conflict and with ways to resolve it. The study is based on ethnographic observations of the Tsimshian myth of Asdiwal...

... of cultural difference. His essay on conservatism contrasted the dominant styles of thought in France and Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—French universalism versus German historicism—and raised the question of what thoughts are possible in a given period ( welcher Gedanke in einem...

...Nicolas Langlitz Based on anthropological fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research as well as on the epistemic culture of neurophilosophy, this Common Knowledge guest column examines two very different philosophical engagements with psychedelic drugs. In Thomas Metzinger's evidence-based...

... in the Babylonian Talmud. Examining the story of Rav Rehumi and his wife in Ketubot 62b, the author inquires whether differences of culture and the passage of time make it impossible for us to determine whether love is the affect involved. The case is especially difficult to resolve, given that, while there may...

... In this introduction to a Common Knowledge special issue on the Warburg Institute, the authors argue that the Institute remains today — as it has been, in different forms, for almost a century — one of Europe's central institutions for the study of cultural history. At once a rich and uniquely organized library...

...Barbara Herrnstein Smith Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science...

... argues against or supplements Perl's contention that Japanese attitudes toward change differ radically from those that are standard in the West. Andersen expands on arguments made by Roland Barthes—an explicator and partisan of Japanese thought—to show that at least one Greek myth (that of the unchanging...

..., and survivors as they were formulated during the last years of World War II and after the establishment of the State of Israel. Behind these images stood historical, concrete human beings who were classified according to concepts supplied by Zionist and historical Jewish culture, in which activism vs. quietism...

... hundred percent of GDP in individual debt in 2008, the real Faustian bargain was not a “enjoy now, pay later” scheme for “glitzy, short-term junk.” The truth is much scarier, and points toward a different set of cultural and theological references than the ones Atwood investigates. The dividing line...

...Dominic Green; Marsha Keith Schuchard This article comprises a dialogue between two historians who have attempted, individually, to narrate the life of Lord George Gordon (1751 – 93), the Scottish prophet, revolutionary, and convert to Judaism. For modern cultural historians, Gordon's...

... as members of the same genus as themselves. When reading or writing cultural, intellectual, or social history, I take it as a rule of thumb that, from “experiencers” less different than Nazis from Jews (or than bats from phenomenologists), we may expect a considerable measure of commensurability...