These five letters from Christian von Ehrenfels to Alexius Meinong contain a written record of how Ehrenfels' dissertation plans came about, based on his reading and commenting on Meinong's work.

The first part of the studies contains a fundamental work on "Helmuth Plessner. Philosoph und Soziologe-Wissenschaft als Beruf in der Endzeit des bürgerlichen Humanismus", on which Christian von Ferber wrote until old age and whose discussion is still pending. In the second part of the studies, von Ferber describes his career in the post-war period under the influence and in the circles of Helmuth Plessner and other teachers, up to becoming a professor of sociology. He followed three orientations: Science (...) is more than the acquisition of methodological and theoretical competence. Scepticism is appropriate towards statements that cannot relate to primary reality, and science is related to the values of human life. Funda-mental reflections on the freedom-securing character of sociology and on central questions of health policy and social medicine illuminate Christian von Ferber's life's work and the topicality of his questions. (shrink)

The present contribution provides a constructive criticism of Brian Parkinson’s “Heart to Heart: A Relation-Alignment Approach to Emotion’s Social Effects.” I outline a number of points in Parkinso...

We test the role of like-minded and cross-cutting political discussion as a facilitator of online and offline political participation and examine the role of strong versus weak network ties. Most prior research on the topic has employed cross-sectional designs that may lead to spurious relationships due to the lack of controlled variables. The findings of a two-wave panel survey controlling the autoregressive effects suggest that cross-cutting talk with weak ties significantly dampens online but not offline political participation. However, no such (...) effects were detectable for cross-cutting talk with strong ties. In addition, we found no effect of discussions involving like-minded individuals in either weak or strong network connections on online and offline forms of political engagement. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

Every student of the twentieth century has heard both of the great Viennese economist Friedrich von Hayek and of the equally great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But what isn't well known is that the two were distant cousins and that, shortly after Wittgenstein's death in 1951, Hayek set out to write a biography of his cousin. The project was derailed by Wittgenstein family members, who felt it was to soon to publish such a work - especially one like Hayek's, so candid (...) about his cousin's difficulties and depressions. But Hayek's draft acquired an underground readership, and Wittgensteins biographers have used it extensively. Here finally, is the text of that work itself - a true goldmine in being one great thinker's view of another, whom he knew personally, even if not well. Hayek's account has the great merit of being close to its subject; the draft, moreover sheds light, not only on Wittgenstein but on Hayek as well. (shrink)

Sociologists usually conceive of emotions as individual, episodic, and categorical phenomena while emphasizing their social and cultural construction. At the same time, the term emotion refers to a wide range of conceptually and ontologically distinct components and is therefore best thought of as a relatively unspecific umbrella term. This article argues that the routes leading to the social and cultural construction of emotion, for example, norms, rules, values, and discourse, are unlikely to be applicable to each of these components in (...) the same way. This is particularly true for an element of emotion that is often portrayed as being most essential and basic and therefore to some extent avoiding the formative forces of culture and society, namely, affect. Although affect is an established notion in sociology, it has remained conceptually underdeveloped. The article therefore discusses different perspectives on affect from cultural studies that emphasize its relational and bodily character. In a second step, it contrasts and reconciles these views with existing theories of affect in sociology and social psychology and considers a number of essential characteristics that can be used to circumscribe affect and its social and cultural correlates. Finally, concepts from relational sociology are introduced and concrete examples to specify the relational character of affect and to develop an understanding of affect, that is both theoretically fruitful and conducive to empirical research, are discussed. (shrink)

Collective emotions are at the heart of any society and become evident in gatherings, crowds, or responses to widely salient events. However, they remain poorly understood and conceptualized in scientific terms. Here, we provide first steps towards a theory of collective emotions. We first review accounts of the social and cultural embeddedness of emotion that contribute to understanding collective emotions from three broad perspectives: face-to-face encounters, culture and shared knowledge, and identification with a social collective. In discussing their strengths and (...) shortcomings and highlighting areas of conceptual overlap, we translate these views into a number of bottom–up mechanisms that explain collective emotion elicitation on the levels of social cognition, expressive behavior, and social practices. (shrink)

Sind wir zu natürlicher oder politischer Feindschaft unvermeidlich verurteilt? Der vorliegende Band zeigt, dass Feindschaft immer wieder neu in Prozessen der Verfeindung entsteht, deren fragwürdiger "Sinn" hier zur Diskussion gestellt wird. Zu einer "realistischen", nüchternen Betrachtung dieser Prozesse, gehört es auch, das Verhältnis zwischen Feindschaft und Fremdheit zu befragen, Beispiele der näheren und ferneren Vergangenheit heranzuziehen, das scheinbar natürliche Verhältnis von Feindschaft und Krieg zu hinterfragen, Radikalisierungen der Feindschaft zu untersuchen, Feindschaft in ihrer Funktion als Identitäts- oder Gemeinschaftsbegründung in den (...) Blick zu nehmen, den moralischen Umgang mit Feindschaft zu überprüfen, die Formen und Strukturen der Imagination von Feinden zu interpretieren - und selbstverständlich die klassischen Bestimmungen von Feindschaft in der modernen politischen Philosophie zu reflektieren. Der interdisziplinär angelegte Band verbindet exemplarische mit systematisch ansetzenden Studien, die sich gleichsam als Probebohrungen im Nährboden von Gewalt und Krieg verstehen lassen. Sie versprechen, einem neuen, nicht einfach auf zweifelhafte Anthropologien zurückgreifenden Nachdenken über Feindschaft den Weg zu bahnen. (shrink)

How did Elijah Muhammad's establishment of the Nation of Islam affect the civil rights movement in the United States? Philosophers and Religious Leaders answers that question and others as it presents 200 leaders whose lives and work have greatly influenced the world we live in today. Profiles include: Muhammad Abduh—architect of Islamic modernism. Mary Daly— influential feminist theologian and philosopher. Mary Baker Eddy—founder of Christian Science. Mencius (Meng K'o)—Confucian moral philosopher and interpreter. Shang Yang—Chinese philosopher of legalist school.

This is the first publication and critical edition of Christian von Ehrenfels' dissertation on "Relations of Magnitude and Numbers. A Psychological Study", based on a new transcription by Reinhard Fabian.

Was heisst Lesen? Es sind zunachst die Textwissenschaften, die hier Auskunft geben, von der Literatur- uber die Kultur- bis zur Rechtswissenschaft. Mit der Literatur teilen sie die Auffassung, dass dem Lesen nur in flagranti auf die Spur zu kommen ist, im Versuch also, das Lesen zu lesen. Die Materialitat gedruckter Texte und ihre Lesbarkeit ist Sache der Typografie. Eine semiotisch informierte Wissenschaftsphilosophie vermag aufzuzeigen, inwiefern auch die Naturwissenschaften lesend auf ihre Gegenstande stossen. Und schliesslich setzen auch neuro- und kognitionswissenschaftliche Forschungsansatze (...) historisch konkrete Formen des Lesens voraus. Der Band leistet eine Bestandsaufnahme vor dem Hintergrund technologischer und epistemologischer Umbruche, die das Lesen tiefgreifend verandern. (shrink)

We investigate the rural resistance of one of the world’s largest social movements, La Via Campesina, as a powerful enactment of radical democracy in practice. More than this, the paper describes how the movement challenges the framework of radical democracy by pointing towards the ethical importance of recognizing the relationship of human dignity with nature and considering ethico-political values inherent in the peasants’ way of living. Their resistance is a rejection of depoliticizing silencing, and their everyday life is a commitment (...) to a “more than human” radical democracy in its most radical sense, as they are always already “in parliament with land”. We conclude by outlining a perspective which is both more than radical and more democratic, considering those who have not yet been heard but also that which, in the light of radical democracy, has never been counted as part of the political body at all: nature. (shrink)

We are witnessing a return of cosmology in 20th and 21st century thinking. It is cosmology in the ancient greek sense of the word which addressed the entirety of what surrounds and carries us. Another term for this ongoing transformation is the ›planetary‹ which isn’t simply a synonym for the ›global‹. The planetary means a kind of boundless pervasion based on science and technology and transposing planet earth and human life from a culture-historical to a cosmic scale.

Using a Web search engine is one of today’s most frequent activities. Exploratory search activities which are carried out in order to gain knowledge are conceptualized and denoted as Search as Learning. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework model which incorporates the perspective of both psychology and computer science to describe the search as learning process by reviewing recent literature. The main entities of the model are the learner who is surrounded by a specific learning context, the interface (...) that mediates between the learner and the information environment, the information retrieval backend which manages the processes between the interface and the set of Web resources, that is, the collective Web knowledge represented in resources of different modalities. At first, we provide an overview of the current state of the art with regard to the five main entities of our model, before we outline areas of future research to improve our understanding of search as learning processes. (shrink)

This article analyzes the role of emotions in social interaction and their effects on social structuration and the emergence of micro-social order. It argues that facial expressions of emotion are key in generating robust patterns of social interaction. First, the article shows that actors' encoding of facial expressions combines hardwired physiological principles on the one hand and socially learned aspects on the other hand, leading to fine-grained and socially differentiated dialects of expression. Second, it is argued that decoding facial expression (...) is contingent upon this combination so that reciprocal attributions of emotional states, situational interpretations, and action tendencies are more effective within rather than across social units. Third, this conjunction affects the conditions for emotional contagion, which is argued to be more effective within social units exhibiting similar encoding and decoding characteristics, and thus aligns emotions and action tendencies in a coherent, yet socially differentiated way. (shrink)

This contribution provides a brief commentary to Bakker’s and Lelkes’s plea to emotion researchers to engage more thoroughly with research on affective polarisation. I begin by summarising some of the main arguments and suggestions developed by Bakker and Lelkes and then make a number of suggestions that focus on how accounting for discrete emotions can make a particularly valuable contribution to affective polarisation research. The first suggestion pertains to the intentionality of emotions, and specifically of political emotions in intergroup contexts. (...) The second suggestion emphasises that emotions convey meaning about social relations that is considerably richer than the information contained in affect alone. The third proposition highlights that relations characterised by discrete emotions also reveal information about the cultural value and appropriateness of these relations. Finally, I discuss how discrete emotions specifically contribute to processes of community building and social exclusion. (shrink)

Antisemitism is on the rise. Recently, discussions have considered so-called “no-go zones for Jews” (city areas Jews should avoid to reduce the likelihood of being attacked). In this context and drawing from attribution theory, we examined if news consumers perceive a Jewish hate crime victim as partly responsible for being attacked when news coverage explicitly emphasizes that the victim displayed religious symbols (kippah) in a certain inner-city location. We conducted a quota-based survey experiment (N = 392) in Germany (4 groups, (...) between-subjects design) and randomly exposed participants to news coverage about an anti-Semitic attack. The article either emphasized that the Jewish victim displayed religious symbols (kippah) or not, and highlighted the specific location of the attack (Berlin synagogue vs. deprived inner-city district of Berlin). Moderated mediation analysis suggested that participants perceived the victim’s behavior to be more provocative when the news article highlighted that the victim displayed religious symbols and when the attack occurred in a deprived Berlin district. Yet, effects were only detected for individuals with low (vs. high) levels of education. Perceived provocativeness in turn increased victim blaming indicating that some individuals indirectly regarded the Jewish victim to be partly responsible for being attacked. (shrink)