The wantok system in the Solomon Islands and the Melanesian countries more broadly, strongly links to the practices of group identity and belonging, reciprocity, and caring for one’s relatives. It is a term used to express patterns of relationships that link people in families, tribes, islands, provinces, nationality and even more superficially at greater Melanesian sub-regional aggregates. Various aspects of the wantok system are called different names by distinct language groups in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Nevertheless, the (...) word wantok originates from the English words ‘one talk’, which literally means in Melanesian pidgin, speakers of the same language. (shrink)

The present volume is the fifth in the series of yearbooks with the title Globalistics and Globalization Studies. The subtitle of the present volume is Global Transformations and Global Future. We become more and more accustomed to think globally and to see global processes. And our future can all means be global. However, is this statement justified? Indeed, in recent years, many have begun to claim that globalization has stalled, that we are rather dealing with the process of anti-globalization. Will (...) not we find ourselves at some point again in an edifice spanning across the globe, but divided into national apartments, separated by walls of high tariffs and mutual suspicion? Of course, some setbacks are always possible, because the process of globalization cannot develop smoothly. It is a process which is itself emerging from contradictions and is shaped by a new contradiction. They often go much further than underlying systemic changes allow. They break forward, as the vanguard of a victorious army, and then often meet resistance of various social and political forces and may suddenly start to roll back just at the moment when everyone expects their further offensive. We believe that this is what is happening with globalization at present. The yearbook will be interesting to a wide range of researchers, teachers, students and all those who are concerned about global issues. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

The article assumes that Lipman’s paradigm of ‘Philosophy for Children’ as a ‘Community of Inquiry’ is very useful in extending the range of philosophical practices and the benefits of philosophical community reflection to collective life as such. In particular, it examines the possible contribution of philosophy to the practical and ethical dynamics which, nowadays, seem to characterise many deliberative public contexts. Lipman’s idea of CI is an interesting interpretative key for such contexts. As a result, the article highlights the possibility (...) of understanding a CI essentially in terms of an ethics of responsibility. (shrink)

This article explores some current transformations of the social. It argues for a shift from a model of sociality based on community towards a network sociality. This shift is particularly visible in urban spaces and in the cultural industries. However, it seems to become paradigmatic more widely of the information society. The article is to be read as a cultural hypothesis. In the first part I introduce some examples that document the rise of a network sociality. Most of these examples (...) are drawn from a two-year ethnographic study of London's new media. The second part consists of a critique of some theoretical accounts of contemporary transformations of sociality. The third part is an attempt to outline the concept of network sociality. It is a form of sociality that is ephemeral but intense, it is informational and technological, it combines work and play, it is disembedded and generic, and it emerges in the context of individualization. (shrink)

In regard to the explanation of actions that are governed by institutional rules, John R. Searle introduces the notion of a mental “background” that is supposed to explain how persons can acquire the capacity of following such rules. I argue that Searle’s internalism about the mind and the resulting poverty of his conception of the background keep him from putting forward a convincing explanation of the normative features of institutional action. Drawing on competing conceptions of the background of Heidegger and (...) Wittgenstein, I propose to revise Searle’s conception. The background of institutional agency can only provide a convincing explanation if it includes the context of actions and intersubjective structures of a shared life-world. I suggest that a further development of this idea would lead to the identification of the background with a web of social recognition. (shrink)

The liberation of Africa and its peoples from centuries of racially discriminatory colonial rule and domination has far-reaching implications for educational thought and practice. The transformation of educational discourse in Africa requires a philosophical framework that respects diversity, acknowledges lived experience and challenges the hegemony of Western forms of universal knowledge. In this article I reflect critically on whether African philosophy, as a system of African knowledge(s), can provide a useful philosophical framework for the construction of empowering knowledge that will (...) enable communities in Africa to participate in their own educational development. (shrink)

The Article focuses on the concept of social solidarity, as it is used in the Report of the International Bioethics Committee On Social Responsibility and Health. It is argued that solidarity plays a major role in supporting the whole framework of social responsibility, as presented by the IBC. Moreover, solidarity is not limited to members of particular groups, but potentially extended to all human beings on the basis of their inherent dignity; this sense of human solidarity is a necessary presupposition (...) for a genuinely universalistic morality of justice and human rights. (shrink)

I introduce and compare Russian and Japanese notions of community and space. Some characteristic strains of thought that exist in both countries had similar points of departure, overcame similar problems and arrived at similar results. In general, in Japan and Russia, the nostalgia for the community has been strong because one felt that in society through modernization something of the particularity of one's culture had been lost. As a consequence, both in Japan and in Russia allusions to the German sociologist (...) Ferdinand Tönnies' book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft are frequent. In the end I associate the Japanese as well as the Russian ideas with neo-Darwinian versions of the theme of evolution as it has been developed by Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. (shrink)

Demokratien geraten zunehmend unter Druck. Dabei wird die Bedeutung von Demokratie selbst zum Gegenstand der Auseinandersetzung. Diese Auseinandersetzungen nimmt der vorliegende Band zum Anlass, die Bedeutung von Demokratie grundsätzlich zu untersuchen. Mit dem Begriff der Konstituenzien sind dabei jene wesentlichen Bedingungen gemeint, die Demokratie ausmachen. Die meisten dieser Bedingungen sind normativ. Was Demokratie ist, wird auch und gerade dadurch bestimmt, was Demokratie sein sollte. Damit geht es um jene Normen, deren Verwirklichung politische Praktiken zu demokratischen Praktiken macht. Sind diese Normen (...) nur eingeschränkt verwirklicht, mindert sich der demokratische Gehalt von Politik. Inwieweit ist dann nun aber eigentlich der Fall? Und was können wir dagegen tun? Antworten auf diese Fragen geben einschlägige Vertreterinnen und Vertreter aus Philosophie, Politik- und Rechtswissenschaft. (shrink)

This article presents a novel conception of groups and social processes within and among groups from a communication-ecological perspective that integrates approaches as different as Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, Heideggerian praxeology, and Luhmann’s systems theory into an innovative social-theoretical framework. A group is understood as a social entity capable of collective action that is an object to itself and insofar possesses an identity. The elementary operations of groups consist in social processes with communicative, pre-communicative, and non-communicative episodes. Groups operate in a number (...) of environments that are conceived of as both correlates of their own processes and providing groups with the raw materials for the fabrication of their constituents. These environments include but are not limited to spatial, discursive, emotional, institutional, semiotic-medial, psychic-personal, technical, and groupal environments. The article paves the way to combine studies on intergroup and intragroup communication in one comprehensive theoretical framework situated on such an abstract level that it can be concretized in view of utterly different cultural contexts and the emic perspectives of actors therein. Accordingly, the framework provides researchers with the conceptual devices to balance the comparability of different lifeworlds with the faithfulness to actors’ inside views. The methodological implications laid out in this article prioritize qualitative, especially ethnographic methods as a starting point for research on group communication. (shrink)

In this paper, a particular case of deceptive use of images – namely, misattributions – will be taken in consideration. An explicitly wrong attribution (“This is a picture of the event X”, this not being the case) is obviously a lie or a mistaken description. But there are less straightforward and more insidious cases in which a false attribution is held to be acceptable, in particular when pictures are also used in their exemplary, general meaning, opposed to their indexical function (...) in referring to a specific event. In fact, the boundary between referential use and symbolic-exemplificative use is not always clear-cut, and it often becomes the subject of ideological dispute. The main point that this paper would like to do is that in some circumstances there is a deep-seated belief that images that are clearly misattributed could still be legitimately used to refer to the fact, even if this is not the case. This twisted epistemological stance, that I will summarize under the oxymoronic concept of “emblematic evidence”, is both the product of political and tribal polarization in the ideological debate, and the result of a shift in our understanding of what photographic images should do. (shrink)

This article addresses the Danish concept ‘sammenhængskraft’ in its shifting articulations in the Danish public debate from 1994-2010. By combining a discursive analytical approach with Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of asymmetric counterconcepts it is demonstrated how the concept is embedded in various political discourses. Through this process, which is described as a semantic battle, it gradually changes its meaning from an open social political concept used in particular when discussing future socio political challenges in the well fare state to a national (...) conservative – and defensive – key concept. It is argued that when usedin a political conflict as a conceptual tool with which to fight the enemy the term ‘sammenhængskraft’ creates disintegration rather than cohesion. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to build a bridge between the fields of social cognition and social ontology. Drawing on both classical and more recent phenomenological studies, the article develops an account ofgroup-directed empathy. The first part of the article spells out the phenomenological notion of empathy and suggests certain conceptual distinctions vis-à-vis two different kinds of group. The second part of the paper applies these conceptual considerations to cases in which empathy is directed at groups and elucidates the sense (...) in which individuals can empathically target not only other individual’s emotions, but also shared emotions as such. Clarifying the structure of group-directed empathy, it will also be argued that the latter is, by default, more informative than individual-directed empathy. The third and last section of the paper is devoted to one central consequence of the proposed account: if it is possible to empathize with groups as such, and if empathy necessary builds on body-perception, then both ideas seem to be conducive to the claim that groups as such have a body. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a crucial question of social ontology addressed by Gerda Walther, namely, whether a social community has its own reality over and above that of its members and its cultural “products”, such as language, religion, infrastructure, and works of art. Walther has a nuanced answer which combines elements of phenomenology and Marxism. She praises Marxists for drawing our attention to the “community as such”, taken as an object distinct from its members and their relations. She maintains the (...) thesis, defended according to her by “certain socialists and Hegelians” (which presumably includes Marxists), that communities have their own reality. However, she develops it one step further, arguing that these social structures are “higher-order” unitary realities that exist over and above their members and cultural products. In addition, she enriches this realist position from a phenomenological point of view by identifying with precision the kinds of mental act on which communities are founded, namely, “unifications” and “we-experiences”. As such, Walther’s theory is an early encounter between phenomenology and Marxism, prior to Trần Đức Thảo and Jean-Paul Sartre, and thus deserves much more attention than it has received in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Traditional focuses of sociology include social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, sexuality, gender, and deviance. Recent studies have added socio-technical aspects of the digital divide as a new focus.

An introduction to Thomas Hobbes as a systematic and not merely political philosopher. Best known for his contributions to political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes set out to develop a coherent philosophical system extending from logic and natural philosophy to civil and religious philosophy. In this introduction to Hobbes’s thought, Otfried Höffe begins by providing an overview of the entire scope of his work, making clear its systematic character through analysis of his natural philosophy, his individual and social anthropology, and his political (...) thought. He then offers an innovative examination of religious and ecclesiastical questions, touching not only on the political implications of religion so important to Hobbes, but also on his attempt to reconstruct Christianity in terms of a materialistic philosophy. He also explores Hobbes’s continuous critique of Aristotle and Aristotelian Scholastics, in which Höffe argues that Hobbes and Aristotle have much more in common philosophically than is normally supposed—and certainly more than Hobbes himself acknowledged. Finally, Höffe sketches the influence Hobbes had and continues to have on the development of legal and political philosophy. “A thoroughly successful introduction to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes ” — Reinhard Brandt, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, in praise of the German edition. (shrink)

MOST MODERN PEOPLE think it is obvious why people become modern. For them, a more interesting and important puzzle is why some people fail to embrace modern ideas. Why do people in traditional societies often seem unable or unwilling to aspire to a better life for themselves and their children? Why do they fail to see the benefi ts of education, equal rights, democracy, and a rational approach to decisionmaking? What is the glue that makes them adhere to superstition, religion, (...) and obligations to family and tribe even if it means accepting a life of insecurity and poverty? The “kin infl uence hypothesis” (Newson et al. 2005) suggests an explanation both for why people become modern and for why modern ideas are often slow to be accepted by a population. The hypothesis is based on the understanding gained by social-psychological research of how cultural norms change. It takes a Darwinian approach to explaining human behavior and recognizes that much of the cultural change associated with modernization is a progressive abandonment of values and norms that encourage people to pursue what evolutionary theorists refer to as “reproductive success.”1 The kin infl uence hypothesis proposes that the cascade of cultural changes associated with modernization is the result of the momentous change in the human social environment that occurs early in economic development. For most of human evolutionary history, the norms of all cultures must have prescribed behavior that, on balance, enhanced the genetic fi tness of their members. If this were not the case, then, as Lumsden and Wilson (1981) and Alexander (1979) rightly pointed out, evolutionary biologists would be unable to explain how humans evolved the uniquely human capacity for learning and imitation that makes culture possible. Nor could we explain how an African ape came to be the world’s dominant organism. With economic development, however, people begin to abandon the beliefs and values that encourage fi tness-enhancing behavior.. (shrink)

Alfred Schütz is often credited with providing sociology with a firm ground derived from phenomenology of science and justifying it as a science operating within natural attitude. Although his project of social science draws extensively on Edmund Husserl’s theory of attitudes, it would be incorrect to assume that Schütz shares with the founder of phenomenology his conception of science. This paper compares Husserl’s and Schütz’s views on the structure and meaning of science and traces the roots of their radical divergence. (...) Whereas Husserl increasingly emphasises the importance of phenomenological reduction for the genuine human science, Schütz eventually rejects reduction and restricts the social science to a specific system of relevancies within the reality of the lifeworld. This paper presents the argument that Schütz’s conception eliminates the possibility of a phenomenological justification of social science, as it implies that there are no rationally justifiable grounds to pursue science. In this way, Schütz’s views substantially differ from the phenomenological theory of science and become open to the phenomenological critique of naivety. (shrink)

Lipman’s curriculum of “Philosophy for Children” was the outcome of a harmonious and fruitful partnership between philosophy and pedagogy, but over the time practice shows the risk of a double fall and reduction: on the one side into the ditch of pedagese and, on the other, into the ditch of philosofese. Using the expression “Philosophical Practice of Community” instead of “Philosophy for children” appears preferable to protect the latter from the risk of being considered, because of its evocative vagueness, both (...) a sort of toy-philosophy, and a kind of pedagogical device suitable for all purposes. Set out in terms of PPC, the project of doing philosophy with children becomes part of a broader field of research concerning each of the three components and their relationships. If ideas are not clear about what “philosophical” means, the risk is that philosophy can be assimilated to other approaches and used as general as empty label. Among the many questions that a PPC puts on the table, I’ll try to frame three of them: 1) Is it necessary to know the philosophical tradition to practice philosophy with children? 2) Who are the philosophers? 3) How to revitalize the Socratic orality? (shrink)

The impressive development of electronic communication techniques has given rise to virtual communities. The nature of these computer-mediated communities has been the subject of much recent debate. Are they ordinary social groups in electronic form, or are they fundamentally different from traditional communities? Understanding virtual communities seems a prerequisite for the design of better communication systems. To clarify this debate, we will resort to the classical sociological distinction between small traditional communities (based on personal relations) and modern social groups (bound (...) by looser, more impersonal links). We will argue that the discussion about virtual communities is often vitiated by a simplistic assimilation to traditional communities, whereas they may be in fact quite different and much more impersonal. Virtual communities are often bound by reference to common objects or goals, and not by personal relations. In this respect, virtual communities are just another example of a long-term evolution of modern society toward more abstract social relationships. (shrink)

The paper critically reconstructs the crowd psychological heritage in phenomenological and social science emotion research. It shows how the founding figures of phenomenology and sociology uncritically adopted Le Bon’s crowd psychological imagery as well as what I suggest calling the disease model of emotion transfer. Against this background, it can be examined how Le Bon’s understanding of emotional contagion as an automatic, involuntary, and uncontrollable mechanism has remained a dominant force in emotion research until today. However, a closer look at (...) phenomenological descriptions and empirical investigations of how emotion’s spread shows that there is little evidence supporting Le Bon’s crowd psychological framework. Thus, I suggest that the disease model should be dismissed in favor of more plausible approaches to interpersonal emotion dynamics. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza críticamente la caracterización del comunitarismo (Michael Walzer y Amitai Etzioni) respecto de los problemas de desintegración social de las sociedades post-industriales (diagnóstico social) y las categorías propuestas (tolerancia, solidaridad y resocialización moral) para solucionar dichos problemas y sus consecuencias (apatía ciudadana, desinterés por los asuntos públicos, falta de compromiso social, criminalidad, vandalismo, etc.) El análisis se centra en el carácter funcional que asume el modelo de integración social comunitarista y en los problemas que presentan los fundamentos de (...) ese modelo (solidaridad y tolerancia). (shrink)

Historiography of education is not only a question of construction but also of selection. In 19th century “history of education” was typically a genre of “great educators”, mostly male and only marginally female. This construct is influential up to now, at least in popular contexts of educational reasoning. The article discusses in the introductory section problems of selection of names and meanings within history of education, and then three types of historiographical writing that are not only concerned with “great educators” (...) but have larger Philosophical impact. The first type is Herman Nohl’s history of German progressive education, the second one is Emile Durkheim’s history of Higher Education in France, and the third one is George Herbert Mead’s Movements of Thought in 19th Century. The article compares them and discusses their implications for further development of historical writing in education. (shrink)

This paper examines an excerpt from a larger (televised) interview, wherein various married couples are asked to characterize their living situations in the aftermath of job loss and on the work of description and assessment by interview parties. It thus focuses on features of affiliation and disaffiliation and analyzes how both procedures work, particularly within an environment in which affiliated parties are engaged in attempting to figure out an "unpredictable" outcome of some (mutually experienced or experienceable) situation. In the excerpt, (...) there are instances of both affiliation and disaffiliation. Using such conversation analytic structures as topic organization, story organization, preference structures, and distinguishing between content and structural affiliations, the interview excerpt is shown to contain a series of story stages, each of which is an element of the overall work of collaborative assessment. Within this assessment, parties make use of "content affiliations," wherein they reference their lived affiliation with one another, while at the same time, structuring their talk so as to disagree and disaffiliate with one another's stance. In contrast to such classical theorists as Durkheim, Simmel, Toennies and Cooley, who viewed affiliation as resulting from internal, emotive sources, or as Durkheim put it, saw this as being a non-directly measurable condition of "primary group" relationships, this report argues for the possibility of seeing affiliation as a performed, or achieved, activity. In this latter conception, one made evident through ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, affiliation - along with its counterpart, disaffiliation, are indeed external and measurable actions. (shrink)

En este trabajo se discuten los aportes de la teoría sociológica contemporánea al debate filosófico y científico de la ontología, para ello son cotejados los componentes ontológicos de la Teoría General de Sistemas Sociales de Niklas Luhmann, lla Teoría de la Acción Comunicativa de Jürgen Habermas y la Actor-Network Theory de Bruno Latour.

Solidarity has for a long time been referred to as the core value underpinning European health and welfare systems. But there has been debate in recent years about whether solidarity, with its alleged communitarian content, can be reconciled with the emphasis on individual freedom and personal autonomy. One may wonder whether there is still a place for solidarity, and whether the concept of justice should be embraced to analyse the moral issues regarding access to health care. In this article, I (...) will answer this question by analysing the normative foundations of the concept of justice, followed by a deeper examination of the concept of solidarity in continental philosophy. More specifically, I will compare the philosophical traditions rooted in Kant to approaches rooted in Hegel. In addition, I will present the work of Avishai Margalit on the decent society to criticize a predominantly liberal approach to access to health care. The importance of solidarity lies particularly in its emphasis on relational aspects and the role of recognition in care practices, which are usually ignored in liberal approaches to justice. However, the article will argue that solidarity is not an alternative to a rights-based concept of justice, but must be considered as a necessary complement to it. (shrink)

The essay attempts to contextualize the German-Scandinavian tradition of Critical Psychology (GSCP) that bases on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory in today's critical psychologies. It is argued that adding to a psychology and ideology critique the positive dimension of ”foundational” theory is important to counteract the currently prevailing “negative” ideology of liberalism. It is also claimed that an ”instrumental” version of critical psychology, which takes up elements from psychology for tactical purposes will remain dependent on the given discipline of psychology and unable (...) to reflect on its own subject position. GSCP is then rendered as developing the Marxist ontology of social practice (rather than its utopianism) toward a concept of a subjectivity constituted in social practice but with the criteria of action potency and productive needs on the part of the individual. It is suggested that this approach solves important problems in contemporary critical psychology. Finally, it is described how GSCP, too, might grow from the encounter, by developing a theory of collective subjectivity to include – us. (shrink)

Solidarität wird in Krisenzeiten sowie bei Ungerechtigkeit und Marginalisierung gefordert. Sie tritt dabei in unterschiedlichen Reichweiten und Akteurskonstellationen auf und basiert auf verschiedenen Motiven und Ausgangslagen. Julia Masurkewitz-Möller nimmt sich dieser Vielfalt an und erarbeitet eine Systematisierung der Solidarität, die Ordnung in den begrifflichen Dschungel des Konzepts bringt. Sie zeigt, dass verschiedene Solidaritätsformen trotz ihrer Unterschiede einen gemeinsamen Kern und eine Beziehung zueinander haben - und damit die Transformationen von Solidaritätsformen möglich machen.

This essay is a response to Askegaard and Linnet’s : 381–404) call for a greater epistemological plurality within consumer culture theory. The article begins with a brief review of what these authors refer to as the dominant existential–phenomenological perspective and their Morinian alternative and then presents contemporary political philosophy as another alternative. Political philosophy has experienced quite a renaissance in recent years, and the school of thought has inspired major epistemological and ontological interventions throughout the academy. Here, I provide a (...) general introduction to this field of social inquiry and then focus specifically on the contributions of French philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou’s work is particularly valuable for fields such as CCT, as it presents a unified epistemological framework for developing knowledge of social structures, cultural forms and subjectivities. The utility of political philosophy in general as well as the Badiouian framework is then demonstrated with recourse to the extant CCT literature. Ultimately, a Badiouian perspective has the potential to fulfil Askegaard and Linnet’s call for epistemologies that can attend to everyday experience while also considering the operation of cultural, political and sociological forces. (shrink)

Während Nietzsche in der Debatte um Anerkennung bisher vorwiegend in Bezug zur Verkennungslinie interpretiert wird, geht es in dem Beitrag dagegen um die Abgrenzung Nietzsches zu dieser vorwiegend französisch geprägten Verkennungslinie. Dies soll an der sozialen Praktik der Scham als distinktes Beispiel für eine konkrete Situation von Anerkennungsbeziehungen im Lebenszusammenhang gezeigt werden. Für die Verkennungslinie wird exemplarisch Jean Paul-Sartres Verständnis von Scham aus Das Sein und das Nichts als Anerkennungsbeziehung herangezogen. Dazu kontrastierend soll auf Nietzsches Beschreibung des „Scham-Ersparens“ als konkrete (...) Form von Anerkennungsverhältnissen eingegangen werden. Hierbei geht es Nietzsche um eine grundsätzliche Fragilität, durch die das Anerkennungsgeschehen stets in eine Form von Verletzung und Verkennung umzuschlagen droht. Dabei soll gezeigt werden, dass Nietzsche nicht Sartres Weg einschlägt, in dem der Andere sein Gegenüber immer schon durch seinen Blick verdinglicht und dadurch die Freiheit des Anderen verunmöglicht. Wie schwierig die Umsetzung im konkreten Fall bei Nietzsche auch sein mag, so gesteht Nietzsche ihr dennoch grundlegend eine gelingende Möglichkeit im ‚Scham-Ersparen’ zu, oder anders gewendet: Es geht Nietzsche um ein Anerkennen im Angesicht der wechselseitigen Verletzlichkeit. (shrink)