Origins As a Paradigm in the Sciences and in the Humanities

The idea of origins has its place in nearly every domain of knowledge, suggesting that it can be understood as a hermeneutic paradigm in both the humanities and the sciences. If it is such a hermeneutic paradigm, than perhaps it would be valuable to examine the way origins have been conceptualized across a broad range of disciplinary boundaries in order to seek commonalities and to reveal insights about the history and cultural ideologies of different disciplines. In the context of this goal, Spinozzi (English literature, U. of Ferrara, Italy) and Zironi (Germanic philology, U. of Bologna, Italy) present 13 papers exploring origins in relation to specific theoretical frameworks and research methodologies. Papers discuss origins of ageing mechanisms, mitochondrial DNA and human origins, humanistic-scientific theories of the origin of art, memory as the origin of biological and cultural identity in the work of Samuel Butler, the evolutionary origin of altruism in human behavior, the early origins of smiling, the genesis of the cosmos in classical Greek culture; origins of Indo-European words and Nordic representations; cultural memory and the origins of England; and the semantics of originality as an indicator of the cultural paradigm shift from Medieval to Modern. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)