ACADEMIC ENGLISH (12) / MANAGING A PROJECT

One of Harvard Library’s defining strengths is our collections. They are vast – we are the world’s largest academic research library – but more importantly they reflect the global reach and depth of the university’s remarkable academic programs and history. They are the result of centuries of international collecting, they include valuable ephemeral materials, and they span a very broad range of specializations. We are fortunate to have a network of expertise across the system focused on stewarding vulnerable and critical resources, from a diverse set of perspectives. Many areas of the collections have played a role in the creation and development of academic disciplines and continue to reflect the history of those fields. In other words, our collections differentiate us from other academic research libraries and contribute significantly to world knowledge

https://library.harvard.edu/advancing-open-knowledge

When we think about the past, we think about history. When we think about the future, we think about science. Science builds upon its past, but also, simultaneously, denies it. As the Romantic essayist Thomas de Quincey claimed, for working scientists Isaac Newton’s Principia of 1687 has no more value than an outdated cookbook. What then does a history of science look like?

Science has been made over thousands of years by people from a diversity of cultural traditions. Activities such as experiment originated in Renaissance pharmacies, kitchens and artisan workshops; evolutionary theory drew on sources ranging from sheep breeding to the economics of human populations; astronomy emerged from attempts to read the heavenly language of the stars.

The history of science itself developed as a discipline in Europe and North America during the late 19th century, as a way of charting the rise of a distinctively modern world under European domination. Science seemed uniquely a product of the white men in the west. In recent years, however, historians of science have turned this view on its head, so that science is understood as the outcome of global interaction, conflict and exchange. The rise of the universities as a key site for learning in medieval Europe, the reorganisation of scientific disciplines in the decades around 1800 and the rise of genomics and computing in the late 20th century: these and other pivotal episodes are part of changes in cross-cultural commerce and trade.

Science, which has often aimed to establish universal standards, has close connections with the history of empires, from Assyria, Egypt and the Americas to China and India. It has been at the service of princely courts, the military and other centres of power. At the same time, however, the ‘scientist’ (a modern word, dating from the 19th century) is often recognised as having a special kind of moral authority, associated with ideals of detached expertise and neutral objectivity.

Nothing in our culture seems more objective than ‘nature’: but how did that come to be the case? The history of science helps us to understand how things we now take for granted, from the circulation of the blood to the existence of black holes, have been accepted. This requires looking at knowledge in the making, with false starts and wrong directions taken just as seriously as what now appear as brilliant insights. It also means looking at how consensus is established, the diverse range of activities that go into the making of science, and how science becomes part of everyday life.

Historians of science do not simply chronicle progress towards the present, nor do they search for the origins of a one-size-fits-all scientific method. Instead, they ask how discovery became identified as a key feature of science, and how different methods have arisen in different subjects. They look to the material traces of the past, preserved as instruments, maps, clay tablets, palm leaf manuscripts, archaeological remains, and books. The range of skills and methods needed to interrogate these materials means that historians of science are found in a remarkable variety of places, from dedicated academic departments and science studies units to libraries and museums.

Perhaps more than just about any other subject, the history of science challenges profound divisions in our disciplinary map of knowledge (…)

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/what-is-the-history-of-science/

Science Made the Modern World, and it’s science that shapes modern culture. That’s a sentiment that gained currency in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century—a sentiment that seemed almost too obvious to articulate then and whose obviousness has, if anything, become even more pronounced over time. Science continues to Make the Modern World.

Whatever names we want to give to the leading edges of change—globalization, the networked society, the knowledge economy—it’s science that’s understood to be their motive force. It’s science that drives the economy and, more pervasively, it’s science that shapes our culture. We think in scientific terms. To think any other way is to think inadequately, illegitimately, nonsensically.

In 1959, C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution complained about the low standing of science in official culture, but he was presiding not at a funeral but at a christening. In just that very broad sense, the “science wars” have long been over and science is the winner. In the 1870s, Andrew Dickson White, then president of Cornell, wrote about the great warfare between science and what he called “dogmatic theology” that was being inexorably won by science.1 In 1918, Max Weber announced the “disenchantment of the world,” conceding only that “certain big children” still harbored reservations about the triumph of amoral science (Weber, [1919]1991: 142).

Some years earlier, writing from the University of Chicago, Thorstein Veblen described the essential mark of modern civilization as its “matter of fact” character, its “hard headed apprehension of facts.” “This characteristic of western civilization comes to a head in modern science,” and it’s the possession of science that guarantees the triumph of the West over “barbarism.” The scientist rules: “On any large question which is to be disposed of for good and all the final appeal is by common consent taken to the scientist.

The solution offered by the scientist is decisive,” unless it is superseded by new science. “Modern common sense holds that the scientist’s answer is the only ultimately true one.” It is matter-of-fact science that “gives tone” to modern culture (Veblen, 1906: 585–88). This is not an injunction about how modern people ought to think and speak but Veblen’s description of how we do think and speak. In 1925, Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World introduced the historical episode that “made modernity,” which had not yet been baptized as “ Scientific Revolution”: it was “the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered . . .

Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir.” What started as the possession of an embattled few had reconstituted our collective view of the world and the way to know it; the “growth of science has practically recoloured our mentality so that modes of thought which in former times were exceptional, are now broadly spread through the educated world.”

Science “has altered the metaphysical presuppositions and the imaginative contents of our minds . . .” Born in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its home is now “the whole world.” Science, that is to say, travels with unique efficiency: it is “transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society” (Whitehead, [1925]1946: 2). The founder of the academic discipline called the history of science—Harvard’s George Sarton—announced in 1936 that science was humankind’s only “truly cumulative and progressive” activity, so if you wanted to understand progress towards modernity, the history of science was the only place to look (Sarton, 1936: 5).

The great thing about scientific progress was—as was later said and often repeated—that “the average college freshman knows more physics than Galileo knew . . . and more too than Newton” (Gillispie, 1960: 9). Science, Sarton (1948: 55) wrote, “is the most precious patrimony of mankind. It is immortal. It is inalienable.” When, toward the middle of the just-past century, the Scientific Revolution was given its proper name, it was, at the same time, pointed to as the moment modernity came to be. Listen to Herbert Butterfield in 1949, an English political historian, making his one foray into the history of science: [the scientific revolution] outshines everything [in history] since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.

Since it changes the character of men’s habitual mental operations even in the conduct of the non-material sciences, while transforming the whole diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself, it looms . . . large as the real origin of the modern world and of the modern mentality… (Butterfield, 1949: —viii) Butterfield’s formulation was soon echoed and endorsed, as in this example from the Oxford historian of science A. C. Crombie: The effects of the new science on life and thought have . . . been so great and special that the Scientific Revolution has been compared in the history of civilisation to the rise of ancient Greek philosophy in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. and to the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire . . . (Crombie, [1952]1959: vol. 1, p. 7)

And by 1960 it had become a commonplace—Princeton historian Charles Gillispie (1960: 8) concurring that modern science, originating in the seventeenth century, was “the most . . . influential creation of the western mind.” As late as 1986, Richard Westfall—then the dean of America’s historians of science—put science right at the heart of the modern order: “For good and for ill, science stands at the center of every dimension of modern life. It has shaped most of the categories in terms of which we think . . .” (Westfall, 1986).

Evidence of that contemporary influence and authority is all around us and is undeniable. In the academy, and most especially in the modern research university, it is the natural sciences that have pride of place and the humanities and social sciences that look on in envy and, sometimes, resentment. In academic culture generally, the authority of the natural sciences is made manifest in the long-established desire of many forms of inquiry to take their place among the “sciences”: social science, management science, domestic science, nutrition science, sexual science.

Just because the designation “science” is such a prize, more practices now represent themselves as scientific than ever before. The homage is paid from the weak to the strong: students in sociology, anthropology, and psychology commonly experience total immersion in “methods” courses, and while chemists learn how to use mass spectrometers and Bunsen burners, they are rarely exposed to courses in “scientific method.” The strongest present-day redoubts of belief in the existence, coherence, and power of the scientific method are found in the departments of human, not of natural, science.

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3425896/shapin_science_modern.pdf?sequence=1

Its historic role

Judaism has played a significant role in the development of Western culture because of its unique relationship with Christianity, the dominant religious force in the West. Although the Christian church drew from other sources as well, its retention of the sacred Scriptures of the synagogue (the Old Testament) as an integral part of its Bible—a decision sharply debated in the 2nd century CE—was crucial. Not only was the development of its ideas and doctrines deeply influenced, but it also received an ethical dynamism that constantly overcame an inclination to withdraw into world-denying isolation.

It was, however, not only Judaism’s heritage but its persistence that touched Western civilization. The continuing existence of the Jews, even as a pariah people, was both a challenge and a warning. Their liberation from the shackles of discrimination, segregation, and rejection at the beginning of the modern era was understood by many to be the touchstone of all human liberty. Until the final ghettoization of the Jew—it is well to remember that the term ghetto belongs in the first instance to Jewish history—at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, intellectual contact between Judaism and Christianity, and thus between Judaism and Western culture, continued. St. Jerome translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin with the aid of Jewish scholars; the exegetical work of the scholars of the monastery of St. Victor in the 12th century borrowed heavily from Jewish scholars; and the biblical commentary of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes) was an important source for Martin Luther (1483–1546). Jewish thinkers helped to bring the remarkable intellectual achievements of the Islamic world to Christian Europe and added their own contributions as well. Even heresies within the church, on occasion, were said to have been inspired by or modeled after Judaism.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Judaism/The-role-of-Judaism-in-Western-culture-and-civilization

Chapter 1: Interpretation and Definition of Classical Mythology

THE PROBLEM OF DEFINING MYTH

The establishment of a single, comprehensive definition of myth has proved impossible to attain. No one definition can satisfactorily embrace all the various kinds of stories that can legitimately be classed as myths on the basis of one criterion or another. The attempt to define myth in itself, however intractable a proposition, serves to highlight the very qualities of the stories that make them so different from one another.

THE MEANING OF THE WORD MYTH

“Myth” is derived from the Greek word mythos, which can mean tale, or story, and that is essentially what a myth is: a story. For many, such a general definition proves to be of no real service, and some would add the qualification that a myth must be a “traditional” tale or story, one that has proved of so lasting a value that it is continually retold, through whatever medium the artist/storyteller chooses to employ. For further clarification, distinctions are often made between “myth,” i.e., “true myth” or “myth proper,” and “saga” or “legend,” and “folktale.”

MYTH, SAGA OR LEGEND, AND FOLKTALE

Myth: not a comprehensive term for all stories but only for those primarily concerned with the gods and their relations with mortals.

Saga or legend: a story containing a kernel of historical truth, despite later fictional accretions.

Folktale: a story, usually of oral origin, that contains elements of the fantastic, often in the pattern of the adventure of a hero or a heroine. Its main function is entertainment, but it can also educate with all sorts of insights. Under this rubric may be classed fairytales, which are full of supernatural beings and magic and provide a more pointed moral content.

Rarely, if ever, do we find in Greek and Roman mythology, a pristine, uncontaminated example of any one of these types of story.

MYTH AND TRUTH

The most common association of the words “myth” and “mythical” is with what is incredible and fantastic. How often do we hear the expression, “It’s a myth,” uttered in derogatory contrast with such laudable concepts as reality and the facts? As opposed to the discoveries of science, whose truths continually change, myth, like art is eternal. Myth in a sense is the highest reality, and the thoughtless dismissal of myth as fiction or a lie is the most barren and misleading definition of all. Myth serves to interpret the whole of human experience and that interpretation can be true or fictitious, valuable or insubstantial, quite apart from its historical veracity.

MYTH AND RELIGION

The study of myth must not and cannot be separated from the study of religion, religious beliefs, or religious rituals. No mythologist has been more eloquent than Mircea Eliade in his appreciation of the sacredness of myth and the holy and timeless world that it embodies.

MYTH AND ETIOLOGY

An etiological interpretation of myth demands that a true myth must give the aitia, or cause or reason, for a fact, a ritual practice, or an institution. Thus narrowly defined, etiology imposes too limiting and rigid a criterion for definition. On the other hand, if one broadens the concept of the aitia of a myth to encompass any story that explains or reveals something or anything, an etiological approach offers one of the most fertile ways of interpreting myth, although it cannot really define it. What story can avoid offering some kind of explanation or revelation? Is the best general definition of myth, after all, a traditional story?

RATIONALISM, METAPHOR, AND ALLEGORY

Euhemerism: an attempt to rationalize classical mythology, attributed to Euhemerus (ca. 300 B. C.). He claimed that the gods were great men of old who had become deified.

Allegory: a sustained metaphor. The allegorical approach to mythology is favored by the anti-rationalists, who interpret the details of myth as symbols of universal truth.

Allegorical nature myths: for Max Müller in the nineteenth century, myths are to be defined as explanations of meteorological and cosmological phenomena. Müller’s theory is too limited. Some Greek and Roman myths, but by no means all, are concerned with nature.

MYTH AND PSYCHOLOGY

The theories of Freud and Jung are fundamental and far-reaching in their influence, and although continually challenged, provide the most searching tools for a profound, introspective interpretation of mythology. (…)

COMPARATIVE STUDY AND CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY

Oral and Literary Myth. Many insist that a true myth must be oral and anonymous. The tales told in primitive societies are the only true myths, pristine, timeless, and profound. The written word brings contamination and specific authorship. We disagree with such a narrow definition of mythology. Myth need not be just a story told orally. It can be danced, painted, and enacted, and this is, in fact, what primitive people do.

Myth is no less a literary than an oral form. Despite the successive layers that have been grafted onto Greek and Roman stories and their crystallization in literary works of the highest sophistication, comparative mythologists have been able to isolate the fundamental characteristics that classical myths share with other mythologies, both oral and literate.

Joseph Campbell. A comparative mythologist, perhaps best known for his series of PBS interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell did much to popularize the comparative approach to mythology. Though his attention was largely devoted to myths from other traditions, many of his observations, as he himself was well aware, can be profitably applied to classical mythology. (…)

SOME CONCLUSIONS AND A DEFINITION OF CLASSICAL MYTH

We have provided a representative (and by no means exhaustive) sampling of influential definitions and interpretations that can be brought to bear on classical mythology. It should be remembered that no one theory suffices for a deep appreciation of the power and impact of all myths. Certainly the panorama of classical mythology requires an arsenal of critical approaches.

Let us end with a definition of classical mythology that emphasizes its eternal qualities, which have assured a miraculous afterlife. It may be that a sensitive study of the subsequent art, literature, drama, music, dance, and film, inspired by Greek and Roman themes and created by genius, offers the most worthwhile interpretative insights of all.

A classical myth is a story that, through its classical form, has attained a kind of immortality because its inherent archetypal beauty, profundity, and power have inspired rewarding renewal and transformation by successive generations.

https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195397703/student/materials/chapter1/summary/

When we think about “resilience,” we typically imagine bouncing back from major hardship. Management theorists have increasingly put forward a more nuanced definition, however: resilience as the ability to adapt to complex change. But in today’s world, that means the demand for resilience is almost constant. With the ongoing onslaught of problems leaders face, and change being the only constant in organizational life, leaders must cultivate resilience as an ongoing skill, not just for the “big moments” of painful setbacks or major change. A significant study of 167 leaders revealed that the most resilient leaders have a deeper self-knowledge. They take honest stock of their skills, curb misplaced irritability by confronting its real sources, push back on unrealistic expectations instead of passing them on, and recognize when they’ve fallen into ambivalence and go back to first principles. (…)

Leaders mindful of their own flagging tenacity dig deeper and redouble their efforts to push ahead, inspiring those around them to do the same.

Adversity in organizational life, sometimes the result of major change, sometimes the provocateur of it, is a way of life today. Leaders need higher levels of resilience in constant reserve to weather this new normal. Those leaders with strong self-knowledge — who have a clear understanding of their skills and shortcomings, their frustrations, and their core principles — are more likely to sustain those needed reserves of resilience to thrive through adversity and change.

https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-better-you-know-yourself-the-more-resilient-youll-be

A half-century-old divining method, the Delphi technique, is getting new attention from leading corporations, thanks to recent refinements and today’s heightened connectivity. When properly framed and communicated, its broad predictions can be translated into highly useful strategic guidelines.

Named for the ancient oracle, the technique is a way of tapping the wisdom of experts. It involves recruiting 20 or so knowledgeable panelists and asking them to evaluate possible outcomes. Here’s how the Delphi technique works: A company research team recruits a panel of experts in appropriate fields (the wider the range of relevant expertise, the better); asks them—by phone or e-mail or in person—about the future of, for example, an emerging innovation or a volatile market; and then requests that each panelist rate the likelihood of several predictions that have emerged from the panel’s discussions or from company hypotheses. To ensure a free flow of ideas, the research team doesn’t ask the experts to justify their predictions. The results are then tabulated for the panel, and the experts rate the predictions’ likelihood again. Typically, at this point the team discusses the results with the experts. This process continues until consensus grows or ebbs. Some companies create and run the process themselves, but most use outside firms and remain anonymous, so that the panelists aren’t biased by knowledge of a sponsor’s identity. Companies that have tried the technique use it to guide decisions about major investments in, say, new technologies and about forays into immature or undefined markets.

Delphi panels were devised by the RAND Corporation to help the U.S. government imagine what might unfold in post–World War II Europe. They found early use in health care, education, and other nonprofit enterprises. Internet tools now enable panels to meet virtually, which makes it easier and less expensive for companies to recruit and schedule the experts, set up multiple panels to include a broad range of expertise, gather and distribute information, and conduct consensus building (though it is often helpful to bring the panelists together in person to mull over the findings). In addition, implementers have discovered that running multiple panels simultaneously can add great insight. In the case of an emerging technology, an additional panel of early adopters can be very helpful.

In the 1990s the Delphi technique helped a major television network predict that the advent of HDTV would be slower than widely expected. The network thus avoided making an unnecessary early investment to convert all of its equipment to digital. A global pharmaceutical company is using the technique to learn what trends or occurrences in the field of heart disease might induce consumers to take preventive actions such as changing their diets and starting medication when problems are first identified. A major financial services provider is beginning to use the technique, augmented by research among “lead users” (businesspeople and consumers deemed likely to be financially successful over time), to help determine which services to develop, which markets to target, and how best to earn customers’ long-term trust and loyalty.

But Delphi results alone don’t necessarily lead to great decisions any more than good market research does. The predictions are most useful if they are shaped into several possible scenarios that allow decision makers to understand the implications more fully. For instance, a panel’s prediction that the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease will increase would have much less value to a health care company than would a well-constructed scenario showing who might be affected—patients, families, health care facilities—and what the long-term consequences would be. Armed with detailed scenarios, a company can closely monitor the environment and act quickly in response to even faint indicators of which one is unfolding.

https://hbr.org/2007/09/the-wisdom-of-expert-crowds

The purpose of this projest is to make clear how rich the European heritage of knowledge is.

The project does not aspire to handle the topic of the scientific or cultural evolution.

It includes some selected information and intends to be a source of inspiration for the consideration of the questions: What is the core of the European identity? What can be the consequences of its loss? Or are such questions of any relevance at all and if so, why?

It should help to figure out how important it is to differentiate between various worldviews in the global, complex and interconnected world nowadays and to build a worldview based on (self)knowledge and (self)understanding as well as on the principle of compatibility between the self and the culture it has been nourished by.

It finally aims to foster curiosity, the desire and courage to learn more.