A presente investigação versa sobre as controvérsias acerca da institucionalização da história da arte no Brasil, tendo como objeto central os debates sobre a criação de cursos de graduação na área, por meio do qual objetiva-se refletir sobre a formação e a presença do historiador da arte no Brasil e questionar a relevância da autonomia institucional e epistemológica da história da arte. Pretende-se, a partir de uma história das instituições, empreender uma reflexão epistemológica sobre a presença da história da arte e a formação do historiador da arte no Brasil. Procura-se demonstrar a tese de que a preocupação em constituir um espaço de formação específica em história da arte em nível de graduação e a problematização das histórias da arte produzidas nas universidades brasileiras (evidente, por exemplo, na forma como são propostos os currículos destes cursos) são fundamentais ao debate acerca do que se compreende por história da arte no Brasil hoje e estão diretamente relacionadas ao amadurecimento e à consolidação da autonomia da história da arte enquanto campo científico no país. Para isso, avaliou-se que as particularidades que envolvem a constituição e a configuração atual da história da arte no Brasil poderiam ser mais bem compreendidas retomando o que outrora se projetou, revendo os percursos e avaliando os percalços, de forma a revelar o lugar que a história da arte ocupa hoje no âmbito científico brasileiro. O período histórico que o projeto de pesquisa abrange tem como marco inicial a década de 1950, quando teve início uma série de manifestações favoráveis à criação de um curso superior de história da arte, com destaque para a atuação do historiador da arte Mario Barata. Em 1963, foi criado o primeiro curso específico na área, alocado na estrutura do extinto Instituto de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro (IBA-RJ), que originou o bacharelado hoje oferecido pelo Instituto de Artes da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (ART/UERJ). O recorte estende-se até as duas primeiras décadas do século XXI, quando ocorreram importantes reformulações naquele curso e foram criados quatro outros, vinculados à Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade Federal de São Paulo (EFLCH/UNIFESP); à Escola de Belas Artes da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (EBA/UFRJ); ao Instituto de Artes da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (IA/UFRGS); e ao Instituto de Artes da Universidade de Brasília (IdA/UnB). Por fim, propõe-se que o reconhecimento das especificidades e limitações da história da disciplina no Brasil possa ajudar a compreender o que significa hoje produzir história da arte entre nós, bem como criar condições fecundas para que se possa prosseguir a partir de tais questionamentos. / The present research deals with the controversies about the institutionalization of art history in Brazil. Its main object is the debates about the creation of undergraduate courses in the area, through which the objective is to reflect on the formation and the presence of the art historian in Brazil and to question the relevance of the institutional and epistemological autonomy of art history. The intention is to, through the study of the history of the institutions, undertake an epistemological reflection on the presence of art history and the formation of the art historian in Brazil. It is sought to demonstrate the thesis that the concern to constitute a space of specific formation in art history at graduation level and the problematization of the histories of art produced in the Brazilian universities (evident, for example, in the forms that the curriculum to those courses are proposed) are fundamental to the debate about what is understood by art history in Brazil today and are directly related to the maturation and consolidation of the autonomy of art history as a scientific field in the country. For this purpose, it was evaluated that the particularities that involve the constitution and the current configuration of art history in Brazil could be better understood by taking back what was once projected, reviewing the routes and evaluating the mishaps, in order to reveal the place that art history occupies today in the Brazilian scientific scope. The historical period that the research project covers has as its initial mark in the 1950s, when a series of demonstrations favoring the creation of an advanced course in art history began, highlighting here the performance of art historian Mario Barata. The creation of the first specific course in the area was in 1963, in the former Instituto de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro (IBA-RJ), which originated the bachelors degree, offered today by the Instituto de Artes da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (ART/UERJ). The time range extends to the first two decades of the twenty-first century, when major reformulations occurred in that course and four others were created, linked to the Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade Federal de São Paulo (EFLCH/UNIFESP); the Escola de Belas Artes da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (EBA/UFRJ); the Instituto de Artes da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (IA/UFRGS); and the Instituto de Artes da Universidade de Brasília (IdA/UnB). Lastly, it is proposed that the recognition of the specificities and limitations of the history of the discipline in Brazil can help to understand what today means to produce art history among us, as well as to create fertile conditions to continue through such questions.

No description available.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1979 H83 / Master of Science

Semantic Web and Linked Open Data provide a potential platform for interoperability of scientific data, offering a flexible model for providing machine-readable and queryable metadata. However, RDF and SPARQL gained limited adoption within the scientific community, mainly due to the lack of support for managing massive numeric data, along with certain other important features – such as extensibility with user-defined functions, query modularity, and integration with existing environments and workflows. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of Scientific SPARQL – a language for querying data and metadata combined, represented using the RDF graph model extended with numeric multidimensional arrays as node values – RDF with Arrays. The techniques used to store RDF with Arrays in a scalable way and process Scientific SPARQL queries and updates are implemented in our prototype software – Scientific SPARQL Database Manager, SSDM, and its integrations with data storage systems and computational frameworks. This includes scalable storage solutions for numeric multidimensional arrays and an efficient implementation of array operations. The arrays can be physically stored in a variety of external storage systems, including files, relational databases, and specialized array data stores, using our Array Storage Extensibility Interface. Whenever possible SSDM accumulates array operations and accesses array contents in a lazy fashion. In scientific applications numeric computations are often used for filtering or post-processing the retrieved data, which can be expressed in a functional way. Scientific SPARQL allows expressing common query sub-tasks with functions defined as parameterized queries. This becomes especially useful along with functional language abstractions such as lexical closures and second-order functions, e.g. array mappers. Existing computational libraries can be interfaced and invoked from Scientific SPARQL queries as foreign functions. Cost estimates and alternative evaluation directions may be specified, aiding the construction of better execution plans. Costly array processing, e.g. filtering and aggregation, is thus preformed on the server, saving the amount of communication. Furthermore, common supported operations are delegated to the array storage back-ends, according to their capabilities. Both expressivity and performance of Scientific SPARQL are evaluated on a real-world example, and further performance tests are run using our mini-benchmark for array queries.

The question this contribution sets out to address is whether law can be regarded as a science. This notion is readily accepted by many, yet it is submitted that a proper theoretical justification for such an assumption is usually missing. The traditional primary sources of law, South African case law and legislation, distinguish between legal practice and legal science, but the basis of the distinction is not clear. However, an entire body of literature in the philosophy of science has developed around the question of when a discipline will amount to science. Various demarcation criteria proposed in philosophy of science are considered. These include that science uses the scientific method, is susceptible to falsification, is puzzle-solving within a paradigm or renders beneficial results. None of these criteria offer a satisfactory solution to the problem. The proposition by a group of philosophers including Herman Dooyeweerd, Marinus Stafleu and DFM Strauss, that the answer to the demarcation question is to be found in modal abstraction, is then considered. Modal abstraction amounts to a consideration of reality (persons, things, theories and rules) from one or more defined point(s) of entry. It is an artificial and learnt manner of thinking as it approaches reality from the perspective of one of the modalities of being. For example, juridical abstraction would mean that a cow is considered as the object of someone‟s proprietary rights. An abstract idea of the cow‟s characteristics, from a juridical point of view, is formed and the rules of property law are applied. A number of South African legal philosophers, amongst others Van Zyl, Van der Vyver and LM du Plessis, have followed this approach. The South African legislature also attempted to define the terms “science” and “research”, mainly for funding purposes. These definitions are considered and the conclusion is that they do not provide the clear-cut answers one would expect. It will be argued that the nature of activities will determine whether an endeavour is scientific or not. The conclusion is that an alignment of the demarcation criterion developed by Strauss and others and the statutory definitions can provide a workable demarcation criterion. This “test” is then applied to activities of law students, academics, practitioners and judicial officers to determine when they will be practicing “science”. / MPhil, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

The question this contribution sets out to address is whether law can be regarded as a science. This notion is readily accepted by many, yet it is submitted that a proper theoretical justification for such an assumption is usually missing. The traditional primary sources of law, South African case law and legislation, distinguish between legal practice and legal science, but the basis of the distinction is not clear. However, an entire body of literature in the philosophy of science has developed around the question of when a discipline will amount to science. Various demarcation criteria proposed in philosophy of science are considered. These include that science uses the scientific method, is susceptible to falsification, is puzzle-solving within a paradigm or renders beneficial results. None of these criteria offer a satisfactory solution to the problem. The proposition by a group of philosophers including Herman Dooyeweerd, Marinus Stafleu and DFM Strauss, that the answer to the demarcation question is to be found in modal abstraction, is then considered. Modal abstraction amounts to a consideration of reality (persons, things, theories and rules) from one or more defined point(s) of entry. It is an artificial and learnt manner of thinking as it approaches reality from the perspective of one of the modalities of being. For example, juridical abstraction would mean that a cow is considered as the object of someone‟s proprietary rights. An abstract idea of the cow‟s characteristics, from a juridical point of view, is formed and the rules of property law are applied. A number of South African legal philosophers, amongst others Van Zyl, Van der Vyver and LM du Plessis, have followed this approach. The South African legislature also attempted to define the terms “science” and “research”, mainly for funding purposes. These definitions are considered and the conclusion is that they do not provide the clear-cut answers one would expect. It will be argued that the nature of activities will determine whether an endeavour is scientific or not. The conclusion is that an alignment of the demarcation criterion developed by Strauss and others and the statutory definitions can provide a workable demarcation criterion. This “test” is then applied to activities of law students, academics, practitioners and judicial officers to determine when they will be practicing “science”. / MPhil, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Openness about sperm and egg donation and the regulation of donor anonymity or non-anonymity are new phenomena. How do affected families, clinics, and regulators deal with information about gamete donors and the donation itself? And how does this knowledge management contribute to the creation and enactment of kinship? Addressing these questions in Germany and Britain, this ethnography makes a comparative contribution to the empirical and theoretical analysis of kin-formation and social change. Maren Klotz reveals a contemporary renegotiation of the values of privacy, information-sharing, and connectedness as they relate to the social, clinical, and regulatory management of kinship information. Transparency, not genetics, is the moral imperative, and instead of an unambiguously discernible “geneticization,” her findings on donor non-anonymity and parental openness display a pattern of “transparentization.” This pattern represents a shift in authority over kinship away from the sometimes highhanded reproductive medical profession towards concerned groups, parents-by-donation, and policymakers.

This thesis analyzes the struggle of the last decade to improve the quality of Swedish science and how the methods towards this goal can be understood from different scientific traditions. By studying the latest research proposals by the Swedish government it shows a development towards viewing all the sciences as natural sciences in certain aspects. It argues that the notion of scientific peers being the same for the natural sciences and the human sciences is a problematic assumption, when it comes to evaluating the human sciences through certain quantitative methods. It further argues that whether or not this assumption is true for a certain discipline is essential for the adequacy of these evaluation methods. It also tries to make a first assessment of whether or not the discipline of Swedish economic history is indeed suitable for this kind of evaluation.

This PhD thesis takes a ’micro’ perspective on the production of higher education and research. More precisely, I use tools of industrial organization to study two individual institutions involved in their production process. The second chapter studies universities, the main producers of higher education and research, and the third and fourth chapters analyze scientific journals, which are central in the production and the dissemination of science. Besides being crucial nodes in the production and transmission of knowledge, these institutions, interestingly, share other common characteristics: they both emerged before the Industrial Revolution, their importance increased over the centuries and they seem unavoidable today, and many actors are private not-for-profit.

This study investigates the challenges to the legitimacy and authority of scientific research in late modern philosophy of science. The author suggests that the different challenges to the legitimacy of science have led to relativism and amount to a crisis. Keeping in mind the positivist background, he illustrates the legitimacy crisis of science in the period from Popper to the present. In particular his analysis focuses on the "historical school" (Kuhn, Feyerabend etc.) in philosophy of science. The main question of this study is: what are the causes and the nature of the legitimacy crisis emerging in the contemporary philosophical assessment of science? To answer this question, a few specific challenges to the legitimacy of science emerging in particular areas are analysed: for example the difficulties of anchoring scientific certitude to its proper object of study, the loss of objectivity, growing scepticism about the possibility of communication and scientific progress. After substantiating the gradual emergence of relativist and sceptical approaches in the abovementioned areas, this study provides a "diagnosis" aiming at identifying the causes of the crisis. The humanist ground motive of nature and freedom and the choice of anchoring scientific certainty either in the subject or in the object of knowledge are considered the main sources of the crisis. They lead to arbitrary absolutisations of particular aspects of the scientific enterprise and (in the case of subjectivist approaches) to sceptical approaches to the possibility of scientific objectivity, communication and progress. This study also indicates a few possible resources, available in the reformational tradition, to counteract the legitimacy crisis of science. The main resource indicated in this study is the recognition of the structural order for reality, which is accessible to scientific analysis, "constrains" scientific research but also constitutes a common ground for researchers. Other important resources are the recognition of the link between scientific and pre-scientific knowledge and the acknowledgment that universality and individuality are traits of everything that exists. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Philosophy))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.