Does a global economy render the traditional nation-state obsolete? Does globalization threaten democratic life, or offer it new forms of expression? The German philosopher and social theorist Jurgen Habermas addresses these and other questions in this work.

Der Horizont der Moderne verschiebt sich -- Metaphysik nach Kant -- Motive nachmetaphysischen Denkens -- Handlungen, Sprechakte, sprachlich vermittelte Interaktionen und Lebenswelt -- Zur Kritik der Bedeutungstheorie -- Bemerkungen zu J. Searles "Meaning, communication, and representation" -- Die Einheit der Vernunft in der Vielfalt ihrer Stimmen -- Individuierung durch Vergesellschaftung : zu G.H. Meads Theorie der Subjektivität -- Philosophie und Wissenschaft als Literatur? -- Rückkehr zur Metaphysik? : eine Sammelrezension.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to, and selection from, Jrgen Habermas's writings from the early 1960s to the present. The book is divided into seven sections, covering the principal areas of Habermas's work. Each section includes an introduction and a selection of substantial extracts from relevant books.In the general introduction, Outhwaite outlines the central themes of Habermas's work and analyses the development of his views over the years. Subsequent sections are organized thematically and chronologically, so that the book will (...) be easy to use by students.There are extracts from all of Habermas's major works, including his early work on the public sphere and on science and technology; his writings on the methodology and epistemology of the social sciences; his work on evolution and legitimation; his theory of communication and discourse ethics; his analysis of modernity and his critique of postmodernism; and his most recent work on law and the state.By bringing these wide-ranging contributions together in a single volume, The Habermas Reader is an ideal teaching text. It will also be of interest to anyone who wishes to gain an overview of the work of one of the most important social thinkers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The placozoan Trichoplax adhaerens is a tiny hairy plate and more simply organized than any other living metazoan. After its original description by F.E. Schulze in 1883, it attracted attention as a potential model for the ancestral state of metazoan organization, the “Urmetazoon”. Trichoplax lacks any kind of symmetry, organs, nerve cells, muscle cells, basal lamina, and extracellular matrix. Furthermore, the placozoan genome is the smallest (not secondarily reduced) genome of all metazoan genomes. It harbors a remarkably rich diversity of (...) genes and has been considered the best living surrogate for a metazoan ancestor genome. The phylum Placozoa presently harbors three formally described species, while several dozen “cryptic” species are yet awaiting their description. The phylogenetic position of placozoans has recently become a contested arena for modern phylogenetic analyses and view‐driven claims. Trichoplax offers unique prospects for understanding the minimal requirements of metazoan animal organization and their corresponding malfunctions. (shrink)

J.L. Austin has demonstrated that people can “do things”—bring about social facts — with words. Here we describe how some people do things with things. This is a study of the symbolic use and situated history of material objects during a business negotiation between two German entrepreneurs: of the practical transformation of things-at-hand from objects of use into exemplars, or into forms-at-hand that can be used for the construction of transitory symbolic artifacts. Arranging boxes in a particular fashion can be (...) the equivalent of an illocutionary act, but unlike words things remain on the scene as indexical monuments to prior interactional arrangements. (shrink)

This article investigates whether investors consider the reliability of companies’ sustainability information when determining the companies’ market value. Specifically, we examine market reactions (in terms of abnormal returns) to events that increase the reliability of companies’ sustainability information but do not provide markets with additional sustainability information. Controlling for competing effects, we regard companies’ additions to an internationally important sustainability index as such events and consider possible determinants for market reactions. Our results suggest that first, investors take into account the (...) reliability of sustainability information when determining the market value of a company and second, the benefits of increased reliability of sustainability information vary cross-sectionally. More specifically, companies that carry higher risks for investors (e.g., higher systematic investment risk, higher financial leverage, and higher levels of opportunistic management behavior) react more strongly to an increase in the reliability of sustainability information. Finally, we show that the benefits of an increase in the reliability of sustainability information are higher in times of economic uncertainty (e.g., during economic downturns and generally high stock price volatilities). (shrink)

The commercialization of ‘big science’ is in full swing, leading to situations in which the ethical principles of academia are beginning to be compromised. This is exemplified by the profitable business of genetic ancestry testing. The goals of this sort of ‘big science’ are not necessarily in any way novel, however. In particular, large genotyping projects have a certain start‐up time when their design is frozen in, so that the projects often lag behind the development of genetic knowledge. On the (...) other hand, extremely provisional knowledge about potential disease markers is being rapidly turned into questionable ‘tests’, purporting to determine risk factors for complex disorders, by private companies that are eager to get their share of a profitable market of the future. The flow of money generated by such concerns looks likely to erode traditional research operations and small‐scale projects, which risk becoming pebbles on the ‘big science’ landscape. BioEssays 30:1246–1251, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

GEORG SIMMEL ON PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE: Postscript to a Collection of Essays by JÜRGEN HABERMAS Translated by Mathieu Deflem NOTE ON THE WEB VERSION: This translation is not identical to the published version in Critical Inquiry. Please consult the hard-copy version for the publication.

Dieser Text beinhaltet nichts Neues. Nur hinlänglich Bekanntes, Erinnerungen an Gelesenes und Reflektiertes, vor allem zur Philosophie der Kunst mit ihrer zentrale Frage, was Kunst ist. Und eng damit verknüpft die Frage, was ein Kunstwerk ist und was einen Künstler und eine Künstlerin auszeichnet. In diesem Essay wird es aber nicht um die Kunst im Allgemeinen gehen, sondern um die abstrakte Kunst und die abstrakte Malerei im Besonderen. Was zeichnet sie aus und was ist ihr Wesen? Ist es die Freiheit?

Systematic cross-national analyses of political debates on the admission of refugees and asylum seekers require a theoretically coherent and empirically comprehensive typology of frames and arguments used. The paper proposes such a typology of frames and arguments used by governments, opposition parties and social movements in public debates on the admission of refugees. We argue that the collective identity and characteristics of the receiving country on the one hand and refugees’ characteristics on the other constitute the key dimensions to which (...) frames in political discourse about the admission of refugees refer. We distinguish between six different frames – economic, cultural, moral, legal, security-related and international – of how the “we” and the “others” can be interpreted. Furthermore, we specify typical arguments associated with the respective frames for or against the admission of refugees. Given that the typology was developed based on a discourse analysis of a very diverse set of countries, including some of the so-called “Global South”, we claim that it can be used to analyze political debates on the admission of refugees in other countries as well and can thus contribute to an accumulation of knowledge. (shrink)

The present volume contains 14 contributions presented at a colloquium on "Structure and Approximation in Physical Theories" held at Osnabruck in June 1980. The articles are presented in the revised form written after the colloquium and hence also take account of the results of the discussion at the colloquium. It is a striking feature that the problem of approximation in physical theories has only recently found some attention in the philosophy of science, although the working physicist is con stantly confronted (...) with those questions. No interesting theory of exact science exactly fits its experimental data; almost every relation between different theories is an approximate one. There fore an adequate reconstruction of physical theories must take into account and conceptualize the moment of approximation. The majority of the articles in this book is centered around this subject. There are at least two elaborate, 'structuralistic' approaches to the formalization of physical theories in which the aspect of approximation has been incorporated: the approach due to P. Suppes, J. Sneed, W. Stegmuller ("S-approach") and the approach of G. Lud wig and his co-workers ("L-approach"). The articles in this book correspondingly fall into three classes: presentation, elaboration and critique of the L-approach [Hartkamper/Schmidt, Ludwig, Neumann, Werner, Schmidt, Mayr, Kamiah, Majer, Grafe] or of the S-approach [Moulines, Balzer, Cooke], and articles referring to both approaches or concerned with related matters [Scheibe, Pfarr, Castrigiano]. Of course, this is only a rough classification and each article must be appraised in its own right. (shrink)

Human interaction and communication involve space in multiple ways. This paper examines the spatial and interactional order of a covertly video-taped police interrogation. When the participants enter the interrogation room and become engaged in the interrogation process, the room itself is a constraint and a resource for interaction. While interacting within a built environment, the participants appropriate their material surroundings in ways that constitute a spatial order and make possible certain arguments. This paper examines how the physical structure of the (...) interrogation room is differentially appropriated, used, and filled in by the participants''; territorial and postural manoeuvers over the course of their interaction; and how the spatial structures thus created by the bodily appropriation of the physical locale are subsequently formulated by talk and thereby used as a metaphorical resource to frame the participants'' situated experience. Through this embedded process, the interrogators move the suspect toward confession. (shrink)

Feature logics are the logical basis for so-called unification grammars studied in computational linguistics. We investigate the expressivity of feature terms with negation and the functional uncertainty construct needed for the description of long-distance dependencies and obtain the following results: satisfiability of feature terms is undecidable, sort equations can be internalized, consistency of sort equations is decidable if there is at least one atom, and consistency of sort equations is undecidable if there is no atom.

On the example of the activities of the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (Fachhochschule des Mittelstands Bielefeld – FHM Bielefeld, Germany) as a key par­ticipant in the UNICOM project, the modern university’s implementation of its Third Mission – its fulfillment of its public purpose and observance of public responsibility – is considered. A comparative analysis of the four missions of a modern university was carried out, thanks to which the necessary relationship between them was re­vealed as an integral prerequisite for (...) the successful functioning and development of a modern university. A modern university implements its Third Mission primar­ily in close interaction with communities and industrial communities – both local (primarily) and quite distant (additionally). At the same time, the university must find a balance between meeting the needs of different social groups, guided both by the principles of social responsibility and the interests of the university and these groups. FHM’s training concept is to be close to practice and compact in the transfer of knowledge. This concept is based on four essential characteristics: application-oriented, profiling, interdisciplinarity and internationalization. Four main organi­zations in the structure of FHM Bielefeld enforce the active networking of people, with the motivation and expertise to enable groundbreaking projects and solutions aimed to strengthen the innovation ecosystem of the city. Applied research and third mission are conceptualized in the steps of preconditions, activities, results and con­sequences. The third mission includes the implementation of a cooperation project with a civil society actor or the implementation of a continuing education program designed together with a company. The close interaction of universities with local communities is primarily aimed at ensuring the interests of university stakeholders from local civil society and should be based on academic virtues and values. (shrink)

This editorial explains the scope of the special issue and provides a thematic introduction to the contributed papers.

HJ EIKMEYER AND H. RIESER Word Semantics from Different Points of View. An Introduction to the Present Volume /. Possible Worlds Possible worlds have turned ...

The favourable social conditions Fechner met at Leipzig with its university and its book industry as well as the close ties to the citizenship of that town were of outstanding importance for G.Th. Fechner (1801–1887), his scientific achievements as natural scientist and philosopher, as the founder of psychophysics and of experimental aesthetics. Since 1825 Fechner had been integrated into its social, scientific and art life in many different ways. His political and theoretical social ideas were obviously influenced by ist bourgeois (...) liberal circles. (shrink)

Die Frage: sind empirische Theorien falsifizierbar? ist natürlich trivialerweise zu verneinen, falls man Theorien nicht als Mengen von Aussagen, sonden z. B., wie Sneed/Stegmüller, als mengentheoretische Strukturen plus intendierte Anwendungsbereiche auffaßt. Daß die Antwort, zumindest dann, wenn man die Fragestellung auf bestimmte physikalische Theorien einschränkt, auch bei Zugrundelegung der sogenannten Aussagen-Konzeption (statement view) nicht anders lautet, ist hingegen schon weniger trivial — obgleich seit langem bekannt, spätestens nämlich seit Duhems berühmter Argumentation gegen die Möglichkeit eines experimentum crucis. Andererseits beruht eine (...) der derzeit einflußreichsten methodologischen Theorien, die von Popper, gerade auf der gegenteiligen Behauptung. Erst jüngst noch hat Popper seine Falsifizierbarkeits-Annahme, vor allem gegen Kritiken von Lakatos und Putnam, zu verteidigen versucht; die gleiche Intention verfolgen auch zwei Aufsätze von Musgrave. Es erscheint mir daher angebracht, kurz auf das Problem der Falsifizierbarkeit von empirischen Theorien zurückzukommen.Vorweg noch zwei Bemerkungen zur Terminologie: 1) Ich verwende, ohne mich auf den Versuch einer genaueren Explikation einzulassen, den Begriff (physikalische) Theorie in dem für den statement view geläufigen Sinne, wonach eine (deterministische) Theorie aus einer Menge von allgemeinen (deterministischen Natur-)Gesetzen besteht. Es sei ausdrücklich darauf hingewiesen, daß dies wenigstens partiell dem sonst üblichen Sprachgebrauch zuwider läuft: die Theorie des Planetensystems und die Mondtheorie, beispielsweise, sind keine Theorien im genannten Sinne, weil sie außer auf allgemeinen Naturgesetzen noch auf spezifischen nicht-gesetzesartigen Annahmen beruhen. Andrerseits dürfte diese Deutung des Begriffs Theorie zumindest mit derjenigen von Popper übereinstimmen. — 2) Daß eine Aussage bzw. Aussagenmenge T falsifizierbar ist, soll, wie bei Popper, bedeuten, daß Basissätze (wahre oder falsche) existieren, die zusammen mit T eine inkonsistente Satzmenge bilden; m.a.W.: falsifizierbar ist T in the simple logical sense of being logically incompatible with some basic statements. It has potential falsifiers. Basissätze sind dabei, grob gesagt, als Darstellungen von Beobachtungs-Befunden aufzufassen; Genaueres interessiert hier nur insoweit, als es sich umraum-zeitlich singuläre (Existenz-) Sätze handeln muß. Entsprechend soll schließlich T als falsifiziert gelten, wenn es wahre bzw. anerkannte oder akzeptierte Basissätze gibt, die T widersprechen. (Poppers Forderung, daß diese Basissätze ein reproduzierbares Phänomen beschreiben, also eine — allgemeine — falsifizierende Hypothese bewähren müssen, kann im vorliegenden Zusammenhang außer Betracht bleiben). (shrink)

In the children's book ``The Phantom Tollbooth'' by Norton Juster one can find the following passage:``Yes, please,'' said Milo. ``Can you show me the biggest number there is?''.

The article deals with the interpretation of the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biornedicine, article 17. The author develops the idea of dignity in regard to therapeutic and non-therapeutic research. He points out the tension and unity between the aim of healing and the aspect of wellbeing of the patient in research. The article discusses especially the criteria for non-therapeutic research and stresses the fact that this research aims to attain benefits for »other persons in the same (...) age category or afflicted with the same disease or disorder or having the same condition« as the patient. (shrink)