S.A. Asghari
Abstract
The crisis of environment degradation is one of factors that have raised the problem of how to make development sustainable while considering limitations. Trying to solve this problem itself, however, raises another problem: out of the two fields of economics and ecology which one should determine the ...
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The crisis of environment degradation is one of factors that have raised the problem of how to make development sustainable while considering limitations. Trying to solve this problem itself, however, raises another problem: out of the two fields of economics and ecology which one should determine the policy-making for sustainable development. At last, thinking about this led me to the question whether sustainability constrains development, and if yes how. The aim of the research reflected in this paper was to find the answers to these problems and questions in the course of explaining the context of their emergence. The method was to analyze, explain, and infer implications of the theories and comparing them: firstly, the concepts or criteria of sustainability in some important expert fields of knowledge were analyzed and explained so that the status of the ecological concept of sustainability in the mainstream sustainable development becomes clear; secondly, I turned to drawing the implications of important theories in ecology –climax theory, ecosystem theory, permissive ecology theory– for sustainability criterion, and comparing them; finally the recent economic theories of sustainability were analyzed and explained and their consequences for sustainability were inferred. Through all these stages I sought to answer the question whether sustainability constrains development, if yes how, and different criteria were compared in this regard. This study made it clear that (1) in the context of sustainable development, two fields of knowledge have been the most decisive fields in determining the criterion of sustainability: ecology and economics; (2) the sustainability that resulted from ecosystem theory constrains development; (3) but permissive ecology theory cannot regard nature as a norm or criterion for development; (4) permissive ecology’s diluted concept of sustainability leaves development primarily unconstrained; (5) in sustainable development sustainability now has become mainly an economic concept; (6) while strong sustainability has considerable capacity for constraining development, weak sustainability is lacking in this regard.
Mahmood Motavaseli; Mahmood MashhadiAhmad; Ali Nikoonesbati
Abstract
The elimination of institutions from economic analysis can be thought of as the most important cause in making economics as a separate science. The direct result of this step, which shows the desire of mainstream economics to follow physics in order to get the merit of "science" by wearing mathematical ...
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The elimination of institutions from economic analysis can be thought of as the most important cause in making economics as a separate science. The direct result of this step, which shows the desire of mainstream economics to follow physics in order to get the merit of "science" by wearing mathematical crown, was the dereliction of interdisciplinary studies and disregarding of ethics and politics. So, it can be claimed that, the elimination of institutions is one of the most unpleasant events in the history of economic thought and led this branch of human knowledge in an arena free from reality and full of mathematical abstractions. Regarding this fact, it seems necessary to study the causes of this neglect. This necessity encouraged us to fill the existing gap in the related literature and bring some reasons to light. In order to reach to this goal, using content and textual analysis methods, some major causes of ignoring institutions is identified, among which the following can be pointed: intense desire of some economists to follow physics, their mistake in separating economics from human sciences, the impacts of political events, and a set of epistemological and methodological reasons.
MohammadHassan Khani
Abstract
Imam Sadiq University was established as a non-governmental academic institution in Iran in 1982 aiming at combining certain branches of Humanities with Islamic studies. In this article the author tries to evaluate the success and failure of declared aims of the ISU founders to make Islamic Studies not ...
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Imam Sadiq University was established as a non-governmental academic institution in Iran in 1982 aiming at combining certain branches of Humanities with Islamic studies. In this article the author tries to evaluate the success and failure of declared aims of the ISU founders to make Islamic Studies not only relevant to the needs of contemporary societies but rather an integrated part of academic discipline. This paper is an attempt to introduce this innovation in combining Islamic studies with other academic subjects, namely, Political Sciences, Management, Economics, Law and Communications at ISU and tries to explore the challenges facing this endeavor.
Adel Paighami; Heidar Toorani
Abstract
In the past, philosophy of education and curriculum designing focused on specialization and single disciplinarity approach .But since the turn of the 20th century, by a vast literature of realizing real and new educational needs and competencies beyond a single discipline, and criticizing the limits ...
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In the past, philosophy of education and curriculum designing focused on specialization and single disciplinarity approach .But since the turn of the 20th century, by a vast literature of realizing real and new educational needs and competencies beyond a single discipline, and criticizing the limits of that narrow approach to the reality, defining integrated curriculum or non-disciplinarity approaches has been a topic of discussion .Over the last decades, theorists offered six basic categories for non-disciplinary works :Parallel Disciplinary Approach, Interdisciplinary Approach, Multi-Disciplinary Approach, Cross-Disciplinary Approach, Plural-Disciplinary Approach and Supra/Trans-Disciplinary Approach. Through these approaches, integration seemed to be a matter of degree and method from fundamentally different starting points. Economics also is essentially an integrated discipline from different social sciences, mathematics, economic subjects, knowledge and ideas, and even methodology of natural sciences, and inevitably, its curriculum, educational programs and courses can not be designed unless benefited from these literatures and approaches in the curriculum designing subject area. The present article briefly defines the non-disciplinarity approaches and shows their implications, applications and theoretical capacity in designing different possible curriculums and graduate educational courses in Economics
