This article is the result of collaboration between a linguist and an anthropologist. In La Troisième planète. Structures familiales et systèmes idéologiques (The Third Planet: Family Structures and Ideologies) (Todd, 1983), anthropologist Emmanuel Todd provided a world map of family types, which he used to explain the distribution of major political philosophies around the world. However, this did not explain the distribution of the family types themselves. Indeed, a concluding chapter entitled &dquo;Le Hazard&dquo; (The Effects of Chance) stated that the distribution of family types did not seem to be the result of any particular economic or ecological factor and was therefore a prime example of the uncertainty principle at work. However, Laurent Sagart, a linguist specializing in Chinese dialects, noticed that this map of family types exhibited a structure well known to experts in historical linguistics and dialectology, contrasting a large, continuous zone in the center with a number of small, independent zones located around the periphery of the central zone or in isolated enclaves within it. When such maps appear in linguistic atlases, dialectologists usually conclude that the central zone was the innovative area while the peripheral and isolated zones conserved the original features. The same analysis, if applied to the map of family types, would lead to the conclusion that the communal family system in the center of the map represented a more recent innovation than the systems around the periphery.The map in La Z'roisienae ptanete was intended to explain the modern political philosophies that developed after the breakup of the great agricultural civilizations. In the entire Old World it distinguished only about 60 different human groups, excluding numerically small peoples and nomadic populations. Since this map was intended to reflect a hypothesis about the history of family systems in the Old World (that is, the entire world as we understand it
To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Diogenes is, above all, to honor Roger Caillois. From 1952 until his death in 1978, this periodical was the heart of his working life. In July 1948 Caillois had become an international public servant, working for a brand new institution, UNESCO, as a member of its “ideas office” responsible for program planning. UNESCO and the nongovernmental organizations clustered around it adopted a grand and magnificent objective: to promote peace through education and culture. One avenue to pursue this goal was the publication of books and periodicals. Diogenes was therefore the fruit of the interaction between the plans of UNESCO and the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies and the life experience of Roger Caillois.
The thesis of this paper is that the shared commitment of C.S. Lewis and Francis A. Schaeffer to metaphysical realism formed the basis of their development and practice of pre-evangelism. Pre-evangelism is defined as a work to be done prior to evangelism. It appears each developed his views independent of the other suggesting it was their mutual commitment to metaphysical realism that accounts for their similar views of pre-evangelism. These shared ontological commitments led Lewis and Schaeffer to ask defining questions of the naturalists (Lewis) and the existentialists (Schaeffer to lead the non-believer to consider held beliefs in light of the way things are. In this way, the non-believers’ beliefs were not first measured against Christian beliefs, but against the way creation presents itself to everybody. As Schaeffer would say, allow the non-believer to see the conclusions of his own beliefs. Put another way, Lewis would say that it was to show a person that he was wrong before showing him why he was wrong. Both believed mind independent reality as precisely the way to do this. The conclusion here is that metaphysical realism offers the same advantages for evangelism in the post Christian and atheistic atmosphere of the 21st Century.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.