Eighteen years experience of teaching medical anthropology at a Hungarian medical school offers insight into the dynamics of interference between the rationalist epistemological tradition of biomedicine as one of the central paradigms of modernism and the cultural relativism of medical anthropology, as cultural anthropology is considered to be one of the generators of postmodern thinking. Traci...

Writing about democracy, Walt Whitman said, “It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted.” The word “diversity”— or the term “cultural diversity”—also has a history in Virginia that has yet to be enacted or actualized in some meaningful way. Clearly, a relationship between these two pieces of unfinished business exists, a relationsh...

Meanings of pluralism in different disciplines – Meaning in jurisprudence, esp. European Court of Human Rights – Feature of society and idea of society – Individual freedom v. group existence – Politics, religion, education – Pluralism as expression of rights and as guarantee of rights – Rejection of legal pluralism – Contradiction of elitist theory – State protection of pluralism and its limits

After distinguishing several ways in which the notion of the moral roots of citizenship and citizenship education can be understood, this paper focuses on the question ‘Is there some underlying attitude that citizens should have towards their fellow citizens?’. It argues for respect, rather than love or care, as being the appropriate attitude, in part on the grounds that the emphasis on respect...

Causal pluralism is increasingly gaining interest as a promising alternative for monistic approaches toward causation. However, although the debate is scarcely out of the egg, the term “causal pluralism” already covers diverse meanings. This creates confusion, and to remedy that confusion, it is necessary to discern different kinds of pluralistic approaches to causation and different possible p...