In the recent decade the perspectives of historical epistemology have turned economic practices into a novel object of study: the focus lies on how discourses, techniques of measurement and valuation produce economic facts.1 The research on the historical epistemologies of economic facts belongs to a broader scholarly endeavor that takes place in cultural anthropology, social theory, literary studies, political theory and history. This interdisciplinary work brings to light how deeply economic issues are constituted by intermingling a set of cultural, political, (...) technical and legal distinctions, which distinguish what counts as properly economic from what does not.2 In this perspective, the very definition of economy becomes a hybrid and contentious affair.The central theoretical question for the historical epistemology and cultural anthropology of economy is currently how to conceptualize the link between epistemic practices and acts of ‘doing the economy’. This special issue on the Historical Episte mology of the Economic pushes us to think about this crucial link. Monika Dommann, Daniel Speich Chassé and Mischa Suter explore different modes of approaching the interlacing of epistemology and economy. These modes can be discussed under the following headings: 1) Pragmatics and Poetologies of Knowledge, 2) Economic Discourses and Epistemic Techniques, 3) Boundaries of Economy. On the basis of the richness of the historical material and the finely grained arguments that these papers bring forth, I will elaborate on the conceptualization of these linkages between epistemology and economy. My discussion culminates in the attempt to clarify an analytical distinction that is freely used in this special issue but that deserves further discussion: the distinction between the economic and the economy as an object of historical epistemology. My question is, does it matter if we write a historical epistemology of the economic or of the economy? What distinction do we wish to make by juxtaposing these two? (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Doping taucht im öffentlichen Diskurs meist als Problem des Hochleistungssports auf. Diese Aufmerksamkeitsfokussierung wird - angesichts der Dopingpraktiken hunderttausender Breiten- und Freizeitsportler - der Komplexität und Diversität des realen Dopingausmaßes nicht gerecht. Im Schatten des im Mittelpunkt der Aufmerksamkeit stehenden Hochleistungssports und der dort vorfindbaren Dopingpraktiken hat sich insbesondere in Fitness-Studios seit Jahrzehnten ein Milieu etabliert, in dem Medikamente missbräuchlich und ohne Skrupel eingesetzt werden, um den als „defizitär“ wahrgenommenen Körper zu überarbeiten und in eine hypermuskulöse Gestalt zu transformieren. (...) Der vorliegende Artikel verfolgt die Zielsetzung, die nach außen weitgehend intransparente Lebenswelt gedopter Kraftsportler und Bodybuilder im Sinne einer verstehenden Soziologie zu durchleuchten und zu erhellen. Die hierbei dargestellten Kenntnisse über die Einstellungen und biographischen Verlaufsfiguren der Dopingnutzer sowie über bestehende Netzwerke, konspirative Praktiken und eskalatorische Suchtspiralen sind frappierend und erschreckend zugleich. Sie zeigen, wie sehr Techniken der medikamentösen Körpermodellierung unter Ignorierung von Gesundheitsschäden und Nebenwirkungen bereits im modernen Alltag angekommen sind. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 1 Seiten: 391-394.

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 107 Heft: 1 Seiten: 139-174.

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 9 Heft: 1 Seiten: 187-254.

Mit Blick auf Móu Zōngsāns erkenntnistheoretische Schriften untersucht Rafael Suters die Frage, ob es diesem gelungen ist, die kritische Philosophie Kants mit der konfuzianischen so zu vermitteln, dass sich von einer kritischen Transformation konfuzianischen Denkens sprechen läßt, oder ob er im Versuch, dies zu tun, nicht letztlich in einen kritikfernen Intuitionismus zurückgefallen ist, gegen den der Kritizismus Kants doch gerade gerichtet war. Aus der Konstellation, die diese Untersuchung mit den beiden vorhergehenden bildet, wird deutlich, dass dies eine Frage von beträchtlicher (...) moralphilosophischer und auch politischer Relevanz ist. (shrink)

Citizen participation today needs to be understood as both an empowerment practice to create urban futures as well as the perpetuation of entrepreneurial and neoliberal modes of planning. The exponential progress of technologies and the digitalisation of everyday life have led to a surge of innovation. Since hybridity has become a key factor, citizen participation now involves citizens and governments meeting online and offline in a multi-stakeholder setting to plan the city in parallel layers, often according to controversial or even (...) contradictory logic (Horelli et al., 2015). As digital citizen participation opens up new tools and means to mobilise people and shape urban futures, this chapter analyses these new aspects through the categories of top-down/bottom-up participation as well as formal/informal practices. Using four case studies comparatively, our aim with this chapter is to find a new theoretical basis and contextualisation for digital citizen participation. The case studies are situated across Europe and North America: we study participatory budgeting in Helsinki, digitalising citizen participation in Lubbock, Texas, the National Map of Security Threats in Poland, and digital placemaking by a grassroots movement in an urban planning participation process in Zürich, Switzerland. The findings of the article show that (1) digital citizen participation fosters novel multi-actor networks negotiating governance of the urban space, (2) studies of citizen participation need to acknowledge the multi-layered hybridity and (3) new modes of governance enable novel senses of informality in participation. (shrink)

Die überarbeitete Wiener Dissertation erhebt den Anspruch, einen grundsätzlichen Fortschritt in der Forschung darzustellen. Stathakopoulos (S.) geht es darum, die Bedeutung von Versorgungskrisen und epidemischen Krankheiten im spätantik-frühbyzantinischen Reich während eines Zeitraumes von 284 bis 750 herauszuarbeiten. Sein Buch soll dabei einen gesunden Mittelweg zwischen allzu großer Vernachlässigung dieser Faktoren und unkritischer Sensationshistorie beschreiten – der Verf. lehnt in diesem Fall insbesondere die übertriebenen und nur wenig fundierten Thesen von D. Keys mit Recht ab (2). Es handele sich, so S. (...) über seine Arbeit, um die erste Behandlung der Spätantike unter dem Blickwinkel von Hungerkrisen und Epidemien; seine Untersuchung basiere „on an exhaustive catalogue recording all such phenomena from 284 to 750. It is meant to offer a complementary view of this period beyond the turmoil of political and military history, and comments on themes such as continuity and change of social and economic structures and mentalities“ (2). Damit versucht S. zentrale Fragen anzugehen und in aktuellen Diskussionen Stellung zu beziehen. Der Autor hat neben den literarischen Quellen auch das epigraphische und papyrologische Material herangezogen (vgl. 10f.) und weist mehrfach darauf hin, wichtige Anregungen aus der Annales-Schule erhalten zu haben (etwa 4, 12). Ebenso selbstbewußt wird das Ziel der Untersuchung dargelegt: „We can, however, expect that certain patterns concerning the causes, effects and reaction within the phenomenon, or combinations of the above that are common in many cases will emerge – in short, that a typology of crises will be revealed“ (13f.). (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 96 Heft: 1 Seiten: 355-358.

The article tries to contribute to a more concrete embedding of early Islam into the context of late antique, in particular late Roman history. It takes its starting point in a description of the phenomenon of liturgification as an overarching process of religious permeation and internalization that swept across Eastern Roman society since the second half of the sixth century and saved society from collapse. During the early seventh century, when the Romans suffered from immense territorial losses to the Persians, (...) liturgification contributed to the survival of the Empire as well. Liturgification, however, radiated out into the territory of the immediate neighbors of the Romans, and thus also reached Arabia by various ways, not least via trade and military contacts, but probably above all through the mediation of the Ǧafnids, who energetically supported Christianization in their area of influence, which extended deep into the Arabian Peninsula. In this way, liturgification itself created the enabling space in which Islam could come into being. The restitutio crucis by Heraclius in Jerusalem, March 21, 630, then lent these developments concrete reference points and impetus. It should be viewed as the culmination of a process that was driven in turn by liturgification and characterized especially by the grave threats that the Eastern Roman-Byzantine Empire faced in its war against the Persians in the early decades of the seventh century. It led to a reconceptualization of the imperial monarchy, which now attributed a messianic quality to the emperor in a highly eschatologically charged context. The emperor, in turn, first effectively tapped the representational potential of this quality in the act of restoring the relics of the True Cross in Jerusalem in 630. This brought about a situation of messianic rivalry, since the rise of the Prophet Muhammad – which was made possible in turn by the penetration of liturgification into Arabian territory – was based on claims similar to those that Heraclius had claimed for himself. The first attacks on Byzantine outposts in the years 629/30 may have been a direct response to the emperor’s self-representation in Jerusalem. They were the beginning of the Muslim armies’ excursions beyond the Arabian Peninsula and thus the beginning of the great Muslim-Arabian Empire that would come into being in the ensuing century. Against this background, the restitutio crucis proves to be vitally important as a turning point in developments both within the Byzantine Empire and beyond its borders. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungAnhand unterschiedlicher Fallbeispiele aus dem 5. Jahrhundert wird gezeigt, dass die Mobilität barbarischer Verbände in der Regel ein temporäres Phänomen darstellte. Der Alterungsprozess der Kerngruppen kriegerischer mobiler Verbände erhöhte mit der Zeit den Druck auf den Anführer, nach Ansiedlungsmöglichkeiten zu suchen. Der Prozess der Ansiedlung selbst überführte den Anführer einer mobilen Kriegergemeinschaft in die neue Rolle eines Herrschers über ein stehendes Heer. Er war mit enormem ökonomischem Aufwand verbunden und führte offenbar dazu, dass die Herrscher sich verstärkt um dynastische Absicherung (...) bemühten, obwohl eine solche während der liminalen Phase des Übergangs in der Regel zum Scheitern tendierte. (shrink)

HINTIKKA ("COGITO, ERGO SUM: INFERENCE OR PERFORMANCE?") WISHES TO REJECT (1) IF B(A) THEN THERE EXISTS X SUCH THAT X=A, POINTING OUT THAT IT WOULD CEASE TO BE PROVABLE IN QUANTIFICATION THEORY IF LOGICIANS DROPPED THE DUBIOUS ASSUMPTION THAT (2) ALL THE SINGULAR TERMS WITH WHICH WE HAVE TO DEAL DESIGNATE SOME ACTUALLY EXISTING INDIVIDUAL. HE ALSO ARGUES FOR THE FALSITY OF (3) THINKING ENTAILS EXISTENCE. WILLIAMS ("THE CERTAINTY OF THE COGITO") CONTENDS THAT DESCARTES INFERRED 'I EXIST' FROM 'I THINK' (...) USING (4) 'B(A)' PRESUPPOSES THAT THERE EXISTS X SUCH THAT X=A AS HIS PRINCIPLE OF INFERENCE. IN THIS PAPER, THE AUTHOR SHOWS WHY (3) SHOULD BE AFFIRMED AND (1), (2), AND (4) REJECTED. WHILE HE THUS AGREES WITH HINTIKKA AND WILLIAMS THAT APPEAL TO OUR LOWER FUNCTIONAL CALCULI FAILS TO EXPLAIN THE NECESSITY OF THE CONNECTION BETWEEN 'COGITO' AND 'SUM', HE OFFERS AN ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT OF WHY 'SUM' IS NEVERTHELESS A LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE OF 'COGITO'. (EDITED). (shrink)

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Mou Zongsan, one of the main representatives of New Confucianism in twentieth-century China, has presented, under the designation of a moral metaphysics, an ambitious philosophical reconstruction of Confucianism drawing both on Kantian critique and Buddhist scholasticism. I have argued elsewhere that this "philosophized" Confucianism can be understood as a reformulation of the daotong, the traditional view that the correct transmission of the Confucian Way proceeds from a master to his disciples. Unlike what Mou's prominent academic standing, at least in his (...) later years, might suggest, the core of Confucianism in his view is thus transmitted not in public discourse but in an intimate communication... (shrink)

This collection of original essays by both artists and academics explores the significance of Wittgenstein's writings across a diverse field of performance practices, including poetics and choreography, theatre, and psychotherapy, as well as reflections on political thought and ChatGPT.

Protein turnover (PT) has been formally defined only in equilibrium conditions, which is ill‐suited to quantify PT during dynamic processes that occur during embryogenesis or (extra) cellular signaling. In this Hypothesis, we propose a definition of PT in an out‐of‐equilibrium regime that allows the quantification of PT in virtually any biological context. We propose a simple mathematical and conceptual framework applicable to a broad range of available data, such as RNA sequencing coupled with pulsed‐SILAC datasets. We apply our framework to (...) a published dataset and show that stimulation of mouse dendritic cells with LPS leads to a proteome‐wide change in PT. This is the first quantification of PT out‐of‐equilibrium, paving the way for the analysis of biological systems in other contexts. (shrink)