I love language. How we choose to communicate shapes our world view, from our tone of voice, to the words we speak and the sentence structure we use. Moran talks about this a lot in his section on feminism. “At the same time, she suggests that there is an intimate connection between physiology, psychology and language which cannot be understood within traditional disciplinary divisions” (107). One aspect of language use and how it informs (others of) our opinions that we saw during the semester was in Zulus. Continue reading “Language in Zulus”
Contemplating the ‘Both And’
These past couple weeks have been weighing heavy on me. I’m not extremely sure where to begin, so I’ll start somewhere in the middle.*This is a slight continuation of my last blog post, so feel free to check it out. I reference it a bit here.* I was thinking about the positive results of western medicine, while taking into account the intense violence that Moran documents this institution committing by casting the patient as the lowest rung in its hierarchy. This is visible through events we saw in Meridian, like Meridian’s forced sterilization, and in my last blog post, the erasure of agency and the patient as a contributor to their health. Pondering the good and the not-so good made me think of a phrase we hear a lot in class-both and. When she says this, I believe Dr. McCoy challenges us to look at the (two) different sides of stories, people, and institutions. Continue reading “Contemplating the ‘Both And’”
Western Medicine Forgets Patients
In his chapter, “Theory and Discipline,” Moran includes some interesting assertions about Western medicine. He attributes the advancement of medicine as a discipline to a strict hierarchy of knowledge (like debunking certain practices like bloodletting) and people. As for the personal hierarchy, Porter comments , “… physicians at the top and surgeons and apothecaries at the bottom, and other healers dismissed as quacks.” The hierarchy of Western medicine seems to have forgotten the patient, strewn at the feet of the pyramid. Porter finds a place for the patient and observes, “Western medical tradition has been distinguished by its explanation of sickness not in terms of the relation between the individual and the world but in terms of the body itself.” Porter asserts that sickness is viewed in a one-dimensional way – through the body.
A Commonality Between Science and English
I wouldn’t have likened the literary analysis to science until I read this phrase from Interdisciplinarity: “if theories are disprovable, they can be tentatively accepted until they are falsified.” While we can’t necessarily prove a point concerning literature wrong, right is subjective and unattainable because of each interpretation’s inherent worth. According to Moran, Popper doesn’t claim that science is in line with relativism. On the other hand, literary interpretation is relativistic in its nature. My reading of Cane may contradict a classmate’s, but neither claim completely invalidates the other. Continue reading “A Commonality Between Science and English”
Philosopher Royalty: the Modern Liberal Arts Student
In Interdisciplinarity, Moran draws the development of the disciplines largely back to Ancient Greece. Aristotle created a hierarchy of disciplines, in which productive subjects, such as engineering, and to my disappointment, poetry and fine arts found themselves on the bottom tier. What Aristotle calls the practical subjects, ethics and politics, are in the middle tier. Physics, math, and theology, the theoretical subjects, were what Aristotle held in the highest regard. Aristotle’s stark classification of these disciplines is softened by his belief that “parents should have their sons trained not because it is necessary, or because it is useful, but simply because it is liberal and something good in itself.” Moran mentions that Aristotle had reservations about dividing knowledge, so he named the philosopher as one who bound all of that together in the highest form. Even at this stage, it’s clear that Aristotle is in favor of an interdisciplinary education. This hearkens to the work of his teacher, Plato. Continue reading “Philosopher Royalty: the Modern Liberal Arts Student”