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ABSTRACT:
All systems of knowledge have their own history, i.e. their own historically specific configuration. While the Natural Sciences generally interpret their own history as the history of an unbroken progress, the Humanities highlight in their history rather the break, the alterative. The logic of progressively developing knowledge was called into question by Thomas S. Kuhn who considered the history of Science as accumulation of anomalies, as shift of paradigm. This radically new approach made relative the concept of the scientific innovation as well as that of the scientific truth. Under this aspect, innovations are not really discoveries of new theories, practices or methods but rather new-castings or re-castings of old ones. The undermining of Science was continued by Paul Feyerabend, who showed that any given principle or practice had been broken by some great scientists, ergo there was no such thing as a "scientific" method. Finally the famous hoax by Alan Sokal totally demystified Science. The Science Wars have not finished yet, but the in the meantime recovered Human Sciences define themselves no more as a system of discovered knowledge but as a system of socially and culturally constructed knowledge.
If the validity of former scientific results is not absolute but relative, if truth is not found but made, related concepts such as new and old, innovation and reproduction must also be re-estimated. This is an invitation for such papers which intend to carry out intertextual analyses on such (post)modern texts or any other kind of art (music, applied art etc.) in which old, as far as possible ancient and sacral, texts are in some way recycled, e.g. old myths or sacral texts such as the Bible, Talmud, Torah, Koran etc. |
