This paper focuses on the novel and leading innovations and investments into the new energy technologies. Energy issues, including sustainability, energy security and energy dependency are probably one of the most crucial and critical issues that humanity must face at the moment. Recent global challenges, such as climate change and the rise of the “green” energy (represented by the increasing deployment of the renewable energy sources (RES)), as well as distributed energy generation and platform energy markets (e.g. peer-to-peer (P2P) markets (...) for electricity) that were made possible thanks to the rise of Internet, social networks and sharing economy, all create a demand for the new energy technologies. The leaders in energy innovations, such as Tesla are becoming the true trendsetters who are marking the way for the humankind to go forward.We provide an overview of the innovative energy technologies that might change the energy market as we know it and discuss their outcomes and possible implications. Moreover, we contemplate the changes that might be caused by the ongoing transition from the fossil fuels to RES. Our results might be of some interests to researchers and stakeholders dealing with energy economics and policy. (shrink)

1 Context The idea for the current issue of _Philosophia Scientiæ_ emerged from discussions which took place in the Manchester Ethnomethodology Reading Group. This reading group has its origins in Wes Sharrock’s weekly discussion groups, which have taken place in Manchester (UK) since the early 1970s. As the global Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the reading group moved online, facilitated by Phil Hutchinson and Alex Holder. Being an online reading group opened up participation to people beyond Northwest UK and (...) within weeks the group became global, with the membership including participants logging on from Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. While the name of the group might indicate an exclusive focus on ethnomethodology, following the naming conventions for academic discussion groups, the name really fails to indicate both the heterogeneity of the group’s reading materials, the interests of t... (shrink)

Politics, and in particular the question of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, is currently dealt with rather through fiction and art, and much less through genuine political actions, is a strong sign of the failure of politics as a positive, voluntaristic political project. Rap /hip hop music, the most naturally political art, does not have the political agenda anymore. The particular history or Israeli rap illustrates this process in a striking way, embodying the recent evolution of the Israeli society. The country was (...) established on a political project and previously unknown social generosity. Yet, the economical and geopolitical context of Israel, as well as increasingly difficult relationship with Palestinians, made its citizens surprisingly uninterested in rethinking the political project of the country. Individual preoccupations, also economical, family and friends’ problems, started to occupy the central place in art and in daily life in Israel, and politics has been definitively associated to corruption and self-interest of an elite. Rap reflects this evolution, is its condensed version. (shrink)

In view of the critique of the methodology of the dominant interdisciplinary re-search involving language studies as the main component, in particular clinical linguistics, Cummings (2014) proposes that “It is perhaps appropriate at this point to move the debate onto non-empirical grounds.” In Cummings (2014: 113) she starts such a debate on the grounds of the philosophy of language and pragmatics. In this article, I propose to expand that debate by including the input of the philosophy of science. I start (...) the discussion by presenting the way one may carry out language research in the paradigm of empirical sciences from the perspective outlined in Bunge (1967, 1973, 2003) and constrained by Altmann’s (1978) assumption about self-originating and self-regulatory nature of language. (shrink)

Compte tenu de la critique de la méthodologie de la recherche interdisciplinaire dominante impliquant des études linguistiques comme élément principal, en particulier la linguistique clinique, Cummings (2014) propose qu’« il est peut-être approprié à ce stade de déplacer le débat sur des bases non empiriques ». Dans Cummings (2014), elle entame un tel débat sur la base de la philosophie de la langue et de la pragmatique. Dans cet article, je propose d’élargir ce débat en incluant l’apport de la philosophie (...) de la science. Je présente la façon dont on peut mener des recherches linguistiques dans le paradigme des sciences empiriques tel qu’exposé dans Bunge (1967, 1973, 2003) et limité par l’hypothèse d’Altmann (1978) sur la nature autocréée et autorégulatrice du langage. (shrink)