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Article: New post-cold war paradigm emerging in wake of attacks: multinational effort to end terrorism could herald better world order of non-imperialistic Pax Americana. (Essay).
- Article from:
- National Catholic Reporter
- Article date:
- October 19, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 National Catholic Reporter. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Earthshaking events appear in many forms. Some are as natural as earthquakes; some are as manmade as terrorist attacks and some are paradigm shifts. Paradigm shifts? In 1962 Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced the idea of the paradigm as an accepted set of principles by which the world is viewed.
A paradigm shift occurs when one paradigm replaces another paradigm. For example, such a revolution occurred when Copernicus asserted that the earth existed in a heliocentric universe, not the geocentric one of Ptolemaic theory. This produced a paradigm shift of cosmic proportions. Humankind was no longer the center of the universe, at least ...