Sociology, conflicts, and sensitivity, the triad that supports, that constitutes, the bed on which and in which this discipline moves its steps. Since sociology is a meta-science, it can make use of methodological-cognitive tools of other disciplines related to itself: in this specific case, we are referring to psychoanalysis, and its way of conceiving intra-subjective conflict, especially in the field of human relations. Simmel's far-sighted sociology and his way of conceiving conflict as an instrument of balance between (...) closeness and distance, between harmony and disarmament. Therefore, the present article has as its purpose to carry forward the hypothesis according to which at the root of human existence, of which conflicts are the analytical category of the same, as Collins argues; in this way the conflicts can find their origin in this coexistence between opposites, which invests every social event, and not only natural. (shrink)

The article, based on a retrospective excursion into the history of Ukrainian religious studies, reveals the peculiarities of the formation of the sociology of religion in Ukraine. The author shows its theoretical and empirical sociological and religious basis. In particular, in this context, the importance of scientific achievements of Western European scholars (O. Comte, E. Durkheim, G. Spencer, M. Weber, etc.) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is emphasized. It is established that the key role in the formation of (...) the sociology of religion in Ukraine, precisely as an interdisciplinary (religious and sociological) branch of scientific knowledge, was played by Ukrainian scientists (academic religious scholars) and the Department of Religious Studies of the H.S. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The example of cooperation between religious scholars, teachers and students (who gained experience as a practicing sociologist-religious scholar) shows the understanding of religion as a social phenomenon in the triad “Student – Teacher – Scholar”. It is determined that a significant place in the process of formation of the sociology of religion in Ukraine was occupied by the Specialized Academic Council D 26.161.03 for the defense of dissertations for the degree of Doctor (Candidate) of Sciences in the speciality 09.00.11 – Religious Studies (in the field of philosophical, historical and sociological sciences). It is proved that thanks to the contribution of Ukrainian academic religious scholars, the sociology of religion has established itself in the scientific academic space of Ukraine. (shrink)

In order to delimit the realm of social phenomena, sociologists refer implicitly or explicitly to a distinction between living human beings and other entities, that is, sociologists equate the social world with the world of living humans. This consensus has been questioned by only a few authors, such as Luckmann, and some scholars of science studies. According to these approaches, it would be ethnocentric to treat as self-evident the premise that only living human beings can be social actors. The methodological (...) consequence of such critique is a radical deanthropologization of sociological research. It must be considered an open question whether or not only living human can be social actors. The paper starts with a discussion of the methodological problems posed by such an analysis of the borders of the social world, and presents the results of an empirical analysis of these borders in the fields of intensive care and neurological rehabilitation. Within these fields it must be determined whether a body is a living human body or a symbol using human body. The analysis of these elementary border phenomena challenges basic sociological concepts. The relevant contemporary sociological theories refer to a dyadic constellation as the systematic starting point of their concept of sociality. The complex relationship between at least two entities is understood as the basis of the development of a novel order that functions as a mediating structure between the involved parties. Based upon empirical data, I argue that it is necessary to change this foundational assumption. Not the dyad but the triad must be understood as the foundational constellation. This implies a new understanding of the third actor, which is distinct from the concepts developed by Simmel and Berger and Luckmann. (shrink)

Part I. Social theory -- Part II. Philosophy -- Part III. History of science -- Notes on contributors -- Index.

Even though sign-systems are a crucial part of society, critical realism, as developed by Roy Bhaskar, does not yet have an adequate theory of signs and semiosis. The few suggestions that Bhaskar offers can be advanced through the semiotics of C.S. Peirce. In doing so, however, it becomes necessary to reconsider Bhaskar's ontological domains of the real, the actual, and the subjective, and expand the last domain into one of semiosis. This new understanding of ontological domains, incorporating Peirceian semiotics, provides (...) the basis for rethinking the ontology of society: the customary dyad structures/agents becomes the triad structures/agents/discourses, each of which possesses material, sociological, and meaningful aspects. (shrink)

The succession of shocks—sudden social and environmental crises, whether they be episodic or erratic, such as extreme weather events, pandemics, and economic recessions—has dire consequences on the ability of people, especially the vulnerable and precarious, to secure safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate foods. While the scholarship on multiple shocks and stressors is increasingly recognized in the academic literature, there remains a dearth in scholarship that critically interrogates the impacts of successive and overlapping shocks on the various dimensions and temporalities of (...) food security. In this paper, we adapt the double exposure framework to examine how a triad of shocks—a catastrophic typhoon, the COVID-19 pandemic, and high economic inflation—has led to varying magnitudes of transitory and chronic food insecurity among the fisherfolk in coastal communities in Capiz, the Philippines. Drawing from field research, we illustrate that the succession of shocks induced a decline in household incomes, an escalation of dependence on credit, and the consequential accumulation of debt among the fisherfolk. Credit and debt have allowed the fisherfolk to sustain meal frequency to some extent during periods of high vulnerability, but the succession of shocks continued to aggravate their lack of access to nutritious food. Looming in the background is the gradual crisis of declining fish stocks, which may exacerbate the impacts of successive shocks in the future. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFormal representations of lawyer–client relations are often characterised by their regulative aspects, including codes of ethics and practice. In this article I look inside the relationship by returning to the sociology of Georg Simmel, who closely examined the basic units of sociality, especially dyads and triads. Using examples drawn from empirical research on corporate lawyers and clients and banks, I open up the lawyer/client dyad and show that in most cases the practices of lawyers and banks add noise (...) and interference to the relationship. The reason is that in many situations the basic unit of analysis for lawyer–client relationships should be the triad rather than the dyad. Whereas dyads are fundamentally stable, triads are the reverse, as they allow for alliances and defections creating permanent uncertainty. I take a number of examples where clients suffered in the alliances formed between their lawyers and the banks, leaving them on the periphery. It is time to recast the lawyer–client re... (shrink)

The concepts of resilience and vulnerability have experienced an enormous upswing over the past years in different fields of inquiry. While vulnerability has played an eminent role in sociology, feminist studies, theology, and philosophy for some time, resilience has recently become increasingly important. Several high-ranking international academic alliances have been formed, which conduct interdisciplinary research into resilience. In the following, I will explore the conceptual triad of vulnerability, crisis, and resilience to point at some historical-semantic roots of this contemporary (...) discourse and to introduce two philosophical paths to elucidating the normative and experiential dimensions of it. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Constructivism as a Key Towards Further Understanding of Communication, Culture and Society” by Raivo Palmaru. Upshot: I discuss the solution proposed in the target article to the classic sociological problem of “intersubjectivity,” which is based on the conceptual triad of culture, socialisation and communication. From a constructivist perspective, I argue that Palmaru’s proposal does not advance on this matter.

The boom in new theories of resonance is most certainly due to an intellectual atmosphere closely linked to the so-called “affective turn” in the humanities. The paper compares some theories of resonance or responsivity such as Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenological-psychopathological analysis of resonance and Bernhard Waldenfels’ phenomenology of responsivity with a sociological research on resonance by which Hartmut Rosa aims at contrasting the capitalist dictatorship of the growth-acceleration-innovation triad and the resulting loss of bodily resonance in the modern age, and above (...) all with Hermann Schmitz’s phenomenology idea of felt-bodily communication. My aim is to show that by providing a neophenomenological approach to atmospheric perception – viewed as an affective and pre-reflexive bodily communication triggered by a spatial feeling whose sounding board is our Leib – a pathic aesthetics can assign both a diagnostic and a therapeutic value to the concept of resonance. This furthermore means that a sociology also attentive to the bodily and pre-linguistic dimension and a phenomenology also attentive to situative and historical-collective dimensions, both being able to focus on the pathicity of everyday life, may find an unexpected but promising point of contact. (shrink)

Resumen: En el presente artículo se propone una forma particular de problematizar lo que podemos comprender como conocimiento en ciencias sociales, que marginado de una perspectiva naturalista y más próximo a una fenomenológico-hermenéutica, vislumbra posibles intersecciones entre lo simbólico, lo social y lo cognitivo, con la finalidad de establecer desde una dimensión compleja y dialéctica un enfoque analítico de la ciencia social del conocimiento. Para ello, comenzaremos por figurar una problematización sobre el conocimiento en ciencias sociales, abordando algunas premisas sociológicas (...) y las funciones sociocognitivas para conceptualizar una perspectiva compleja del conocimiento. Posteriormente, un segundo apartado se sustenta sobre tres ejes principales: la objetividad, la subjetividad y la imaginación, como una tríada trascendental en esta perspectiva epistemológica. Para finalizar con la búsqueda de la relación entre el conocimiento y un pensamiento simbólico de acuerdo con los argumentos expuestos en los apartados anteriores, donde se entiende que las estructuras imaginario-arquetípicas circundantes en la realidad social, el proceso de comprensión e intersubjetividad constituyen, entre otros, los cimientos de los que vamos a entender por conocimiento en ciencias sociales.: This paper proposes a particular form of problematize what we can understand as knowledge in social sciences, that marginalized from a naturalistic perspective and closer to a phenomenological-hermeneutics glimpses possible intersections between the symbolic, the social and the cognitive, with the purpose of establishing from a complex and dialectical dimension an analytical approach of the social science of knowledge. To do this, we will begin by figuring out a problematization about knowledge in social sciences, addressing some sociological premises and socio-cognitive functions to conceptualize a complex perspective of knowledge. Subsequently, a second section is based on three main axes: objectivity, subjectivity and imagination, as a transcendental triad in this epistemological perspective. To end with the search for the relationship between knowledge and the symbolic thought according to the arguments outlined in the preceding paragraphs, where we understood that the imaginary-archetypal structures surrounding the social reality, the process of understanding and intersubjectivity constitute, among others, the foundations of which we will understand by knowledge in social sciences. (shrink)

The succession of shocks—sudden social and environmental crises, whether they be episodic or erratic, such as extreme weather events, pandemics, and economic recessions—has dire consequences on the ability of people, especially the vulnerable and precarious, to secure safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate foods. While the scholarship on multiple shocks and stressors is increasingly recognized in the academic literature, there remains a dearth in scholarship that critically interrogates the impacts of successive and overlapping shocks on the various dimensions and temporalities of (...) food security. In this paper, we adapt the double exposure framework to examine how a triad of shocks—a catastrophic typhoon, the COVID-19 pandemic, and high economic inflation—has led to varying magnitudes of transitory and chronic food insecurity among the fisherfolk in coastal communities in Capiz, the Philippines. Drawing from field research, we illustrate that the succession of shocks induced a decline in household incomes, an escalation of dependence on credit, and the consequential accumulation of debt among the fisherfolk. Credit and debt have allowed the fisherfolk to sustain meal frequency to some extent during periods of high vulnerability, but the succession of shocks continued to aggravate their lack of access to nutritious food. Looming in the background is the gradual crisis of declining fish stocks, which may exacerbate the impacts of successive shocks in the future. (shrink)

Social movements carry out extensive character work, trying to define not only their own reputations but those of other major players in their strategic arenas. Victims, villains, and heroes form the essential triad of character work, suggesting not only likely plots but also the emotions that audiences are supposed to feel for various players. Characters have been overlooked in cultural analysis, possibly because they often take visual, non-narrative forms. By focusing on characters within movements, we illuminate some cultural dilemmas that (...) both organizers and their opponents face as they try to influence players’ reputations. (shrink)

Le present ouvrage propose une etude systematique de la conception de la condition humaine contenue dans Condition de l'homme moderne de H. Arendt. Il en eclaire l'orientation, a la fois par rapport a la tradition ancienne et classique de la philosophie et par rapport au contexte immediat de la phenomenologie et de l'existentialisme contemporains. Il met en evidence une structure de la condition humaine, un agencement des differentes conditions qui la composent et l'accent mis par Arendt sur un pluriel de (...) conditions de base plus que sur les traits generaux habituellement mis en avant (la finitude, la mortalite). Outre la triade bien connue des trois activites fondamentales, le travail, l'oeuvre, l'action, il explicite une triade d'activites mentales, l'intelligence, la connaissance et la pensee. Il examine le statut de la pensee dans la condition humaine et le paradoxe de sa capacite de retrait par rapport a elle. La conception arendtienne de la condition humaine, non depassee a ce jour, est une reference capitale pour l'humanite, aujourd'hui inquiete de l'avenir de son monde. La version allemande du livre de Arendt, remaniee par rapport a l'edition anglaise originale, est prise en compte. (shrink)