Comparative analysis of civilizations has recently revived and has led into a debate about varieties of modernity. This connection between an empirically defined area of study, `civilizations', and a theme that is predominantly seen as conceptual, `modernity', is a peculiar one and raises crucial questions for any social theory. Can `modernity' be located spatio-temporally among the civilizations? Is it itself a civilization (or the successor to all civilizations), or does it not rather refer to a human condition? This article takes (...) its starting point from the observation that civilizational comparison is always some form of cultural analysis and asks if and how a cultural theory of modernity is possible and fruitful under current theoretical and historical conditions. (shrink)

Contributors to this volume present methodological foundations for deductive modeling in policy analysis, applications to particular areas of public policy, and applications to the institutional framework within which particular policies are chosen.

In this essay an engineer and a philosopher, after many conversations, develop an argument for why the Aristotelian version of virtue ethics is the most promising way to develop what we call artificial moral, social agents, i.e. robots. This, evidently, applies to humans as well. There are several claims: first, that humans are not born moral, they are socialized into morality; second, that morality involves affect, emotion, feeling, before it engages reason; third, that how a moral being feels is related (...) to some narrative, whether moral or not; and finally, that narrativity is what builds a sense of a “moral” I, namely an authorial moral self. (shrink)

Projecting essence onto a social category means to think, talk, and act as if the category were a discrete natural kind and as if its members were all endowed with the same immutable attributes determined by the category's essence. Essentializing may happen implicitly or on purpose in representing ingroups and outgroups. We argue that essentializing is a versatile representational tool that is used to create identity in groups with chosen membership in order to make the group appear as a unitary (...) entity, that outsiders often draw on a group's essentialist self-construal in their judgements about the groups, that judgements about members of forced social categories are often informed by essentialist thinking that easily switches to discrimination and racism, and that under certain historical and political conditions members of social categories and groups may contest their essentialized identity, such as parts of the feminist movement, or that they may attempt to reconstruct an essentialized identity, such as parts of the homosexual movement or the largely defunct European nobility. Besides explicit political and power interests, we see communication processes and language use as a tacit force driving essentialization of social categories. (shrink)

Through to the early part of the twentieth century the concept of indoctrination was straight-forward and generally free of controversy. Ideological agitations likely fermented by several factors such as a misunderstanding of the progressive education movementProgressive Education Movement, reaction to the growth of FascismEnlightenment, theand Fascism and Communism in Europe especially and student revolts of the sixties and seventies brought with them a host of disturbing connotation surrounding the idea of indoctrination. This is unfortunate as shown in the essay that (...) follows since a simple and clear reading of standard dictionary definitions of indoctrination allow it to serve as an apt benchmark and cautionary guide to practicing science educators. (shrink)

The world we inhabit is surrounded by ‘coded objects’ from credit cards to airplanes to telephones. Sadly the governance mechanisms of many of these technologies are only poorly understood, leading to the common premise that such technologies are ‘neutral’, thereby obscuring normative and power-related consequences of their design. In order to unpack supposedly neutral technologies, the following paper will try and foreground two of key questions around the technologies used on the global Internet: 1) how are content regulatory regimes governed (...) and 2) how are the algorithms embedded in software governed? The following paper will explore these two aspects in turn, before drawing conclusions on understanding the normative frameworks embedded in technological systems.Article first published online: 22 MARCH 2016. (shrink)

In recent decades, the belief in progress that was widespread across the two centuries following the French Revolution has withered away. This article suggests, though, that the diagnosis of the end of progress can be used as an occasion to rethink what progress meant and what it might mean today. The proposal for rethinking proceeds in two big steps. First, the meaning of progress that was inherited from the Enlightenment is reconstructed and contrasted with the way progress actually occurred in (...) history. In this step, it is demonstrated that progress was expected through human autonomy, but that it was actually brought about by domination and resistance to domination. A look at the short revival of progress after the middle of the twentieth century will confirm this insight and direct the attention to the transformation of the world over the past half century, on which the second step focuses. This socio-political transformation is analyzed as spelling (almost) the end of formal domination. The current era has often been characterized by the tendencies towards globalization and individualization as well as, normatively, by the increasingly hegemonic commitment to human rights and democracy. A critical analysis of the current socio-political constellation, however, shows that the end of formal domination does not mean the end of history; it rather requires the elaboration of a new understanding of possible progress. Progress can no longer predominantly be achieved through resistance to domination, but rather through autonomous collective action and through the critical interpretation of the world one finds oneself in. (shrink)

The traditional German policy was to “push to the East”. After signing a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and the Red Army entered the Polish territory on September 17.The German occupation was marked by terror and executions. A resistance movement was developed, and along a secret government and underground army came into being. It was organized by officers who were not taken prisoners of war and by main political parties. The German retaliation—arrests, (...) tortures, concentration camps—did not deter the Poles from joining the patriotic conspiracy.For about five years, the nation waited for a proper moment to fight the occupants. For the city of Warsaw, it seemed that the good time was the middle of the summer of 1944. The Germans were retreating on all fronts, and the Red Army was on the suburbs of Warsaw, on the right bank of the Vistula. It was expected that it would help the insurgents.The Uprising was intended to last a few days. It ended after more than two months, when the Home Army had no more bullets, and the population—no more food. An honorable surrender was signed with the Germans, by virtue of which the insurgents were treated as allied soldiers rather than bandits to be executed, as was the case at the beginning of the Uprising. (shrink)

In these highly selective and condensed considerations, I could only offer a comparison of the main sociological themes in Gurwitsch's inaugural dissertation with the corresponding themes in Schutz's first book. Other sociological themes were not discussed, mainly because they were not developed far enough in one or the other or both sources. The crucial theme of explicit and implicit ontological presuppositions had to be ignored because it demands an extensive treatment of its own. The same goes for the proper consideration (...) of the particular conceptions of Husserl mobilized by each author for his purposes.Even so, I hope to have conveyed an idea of the convergences and differences in the early views of Gurwitsch and Schutz, as mirrored in the studies which were compared. This article should be seen as a small beginning of the huge task of studying comprehensively the unique personal and intellectual friendship of two seminal thinkers and the influences they exercised upon each other's work, even though they operated in substantively quite different areas. (shrink)

We show that a stable groupG satisfying certain commutator conditions is nilpotent. Furthermore, a soluble stable group with generically splitting automorphism of prime order is nilpotent-by-finite. In particular, a soluble stable group with a generic element of prime order is nilpotent-by-finite.

Es scheint mir fruchtbar, bestimmte theologisch-anthropologische Grundkonzeption des Alten Testaments im Rahmen des Imperfektibilitäts-Diskurses zu beschreiben. Ausgangspunkt für die besonders an Gen 6,5 (im Kontext von Gen 6-8) anknüpfende Position der „Unfähigkeit des Menschen zur Vervollkommnung“: Alle Reflexionen geschehen in Gen 6,5ff. nur von Gott her und auf das Verhältnis Mensch-Gott hin; es gibt keine individuell/kollektive Unterscheidung bei dieser Problematik, sowohl der einzelne Mensch wie auch die Menschheit sind imperfektibel. Das Konzept ist offen für einen Inklusionsansatz, der vom Differenzprinzip her (...) denkt, verfolgt selbst aber eine andere, theologische, Zielrichtung und führt den Lesenden die Angewiesenheit des Menschen auf Gottes Gnade sowie ihre Zusage vor Augen. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 94-114.

We present the notion of finite high-order Gowers games, and prove a statement parallel to Gowers's Combinatorial Lemma for these games. We derive ‘quantitative’ versions of the original Gowers Combinatorial Lemma and of Gowers's Dichotomy, which place them in the context of the recently introduced infinite dimensional asymptotic theory for Banach spaces.

Kostas Axelos and Cornelius Castoriadis are among the most inspiring thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. They each combine comprehensive philosophy with social and political theory, and a broad view on human history with a critical diagnosis of the present, with nuanced observations on our current condition—characteristics, rare during this period, that this article describes as polyscopic thought. Castoriadis is widely known as the philosopher of ‘autonomy’, of the human capacity to give oneself one’s own law; his (...) diagnosis of the present focused on the weakening of this capacity in contemporary capitalism and democracy. Axelos, in turn, is a thinker of the ‘planetary age’ in which the human pretence to master the world and one’s own fate withers away in the face of the predominance of ‘technique’. This essay connects and contrasts the work of the two thinkers trying to understand the differences and to uncover underlying commonalities. Significantly, it suggests that both scholars saw a need to rethink key concerns in philosophy and the social sciences with a view to better grasp what awaits human beings in the current world and what can be done about it. (shrink)