In this article, we argue that the animated TV-show Rick and Morty depicts several important and relevant themes about the impact of technology in contemporary societies. By using certain concepts and ideas from the philosophy of technology, especially from thinkers like Jacques Ellul, Jacques Derrida, Neil Postman, and George Ritzer, we investigate how this show brings to the fore certain ontological and ethical assumptions and problems that stem from the advance of technology. We shall use the term technopolitical thinking to (...) refer to these core assumptions and principles which are inherent in contemporary technological societies. By providing various examples from certain episodes and scenes of the show, we shall illustrate how this animated series can provide a basis for a more extensive discussion. (shrink)

Although contemporary sociologists of science have sometimes claimed Max Weber as a methodological precursor, they have not examined Weber's own writings about science. Between 1908 and 1912 Weber published a series of critical studies of the extension of scientific authority into public life. The most notable of these concerned attempts to implement the experimental psychology or psycho-physics laboratory in factories and other real-world settings. Weber's critique centered on the problem of social measurement. He emphasized the discontinuities between the space of (...) the laboratory and that of the factory, showing how several qualitative and historically conditioned differences between the two settings rendered the transfer of instruments and methods between them highly problematic. Weber's critical arguments prepared the ground for his greatest foray into empirical sociology, a survey he directed for the Verein für Sozialpolitik investigating the conditions and attitudes affecting the lives and performance of industrial workers. Using a different measuring instrument — the questionnaire — Weber tried to implement a concept of social measurement which implied a different ontology, drawn not from natural sciences but from the historical sciences. (shrink)

An analysis of theological and philosophical understandings of debt and its role in contemporary capitalism. Max Weber’s account of the rise of capitalism focused on his concept of a Protestant ethic, valuing diligence in earning and saving money but restraint in spending it. However, such individual restraint is foreign to contemporary understandings of finance, which treat ever-increasing consumption and debt as natural, almost essential, for maintaining the economic cycle of buying and selling. In The Debt of the Living, Elettra Stimilli (...) returns to this idea of restraint as ascesis, by analyzing theological and philosophical understandings of debt drawn from a range of figures, including Saint Paul, Schmitt and Agamben, Benjamin and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and Foucault. Central to this analysis is the logic of “profit for profit’s sake”—an aspect of Weber’s work that Stimilli believes has been given insufficient attention. Following Foucault, she identifies this as the original mechanism of a capitalist dispositif that feeds not on a goal-directed rationality, but on the self-determining character of human agency. Ascesis is fundamental not because it is characterized by renunciation, but because the self-discipline it imposes converts the properly human quality of action without a predetermined goal into a lack, a fault, or a state of guilt: a debt that cannot be settled. Stimilli argues that this lack, which is impossible to fill, should be seen as the basis of the economy of hedonism and consumption that has governed global economies in recent years and as the premise of the current economy of debt. Elettra Stimilli is research fellow of theoretical philosophy at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Arianna Bove is the translator of many books, including Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin, by Antonio Negri. (shrink)

It seems hard to imagine a concept more significant to modern thought than critique. Critique involved distancing oneself from religious explanations and theological argumentation and came to represent the essence of secular consciousness's potential to deliver modernity's promise of human progress through rational inquiry and scientific development. Critiques of Theology debunks this common understanding. Based on a novel reading of previously less-discussed writings by Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt, the book shows how the practice of critique (...) emerged out of religious traditions and can, in many ways, be traced back to them. This study points to a persistent misreading of critique and demonstrates that it does not come from outside of religion to build a new world of ideas; on the contrary, it redeploys those already present within its theological constellations. (shrink)

Argues that truth, moral right, political right, and aesthetic value may be understood as arising out of a naturalist account of humanity, if naturalism is rightly conceived.

Confucian philosopher Xunzi’s moral thought is considered in light of the modern focus on self-realization. Self-Realization through Confucian Learning reconstructs Confucian thinker Xunzi’s moral philosophy in response to the modern focus on self-realization. Xunzi (born around 310 BCE) claims that human xing (“nature” or “native conditions”) is without an ethical framework and has a tendency to dominate, leading to bad judgments and bad behavior. Confucian ritual propriety (li) is needed to transform these human native conditions. Through li, people become self-directing: (...) in control of feelings and desires and in command of their own lives. Siufu Tang explicates Xunzi’s understanding of the hierarchical structure of human agency to articulate why and how li is essential to self-realization. Ritual propriety also structures relationships to make a harmonious communal life possible. Tang’s focus on self-realization highlights how Confucianism can address the individual as well as the communal and serve as a philosophy for contemporary times. (shrink)

Extols the virtue of small liberal arts colleges and the liberal arts tradition.

_A spirited defense of the Enlightenment against assaults from both the left and the right that explains its urgent implications for our contemporary politics_ Ours is an age when optimism about politics is hard to come by. Ian Shapiro explains why this is so and, without minimizing the daunting challenges, spells out an appropriate response. Written in the indomitable spirit exemplified by Tom Paine, _Uncommon Sense_ is a rich source of insight and inspiration in dark political times. The Enlightenment commitments (...) to reason and science are under assault from the Postmodern Left and the Authoritarian Right. Shapiro explains why the attacks are misguided and politically destructive. He agrees with the critics that there are no universal principles of justice that transcend political battles and no fair, impartial rules to govern the distribution of income, wealth, rights, or opportunities. But abandoning the search for them as futile does not mean junking the Enlightenment’s core political goal: to deploy the tools of reason and science to fight domination. Democracy is essential to vindicating that goal, yet citizens in many democracies are profoundly alienated and many democracies are in danger of failing. Shapiro explains what has gone wrong, debunks ill-considered remedies, and spells out better ones—deepening and extending his previous writing on political theory and democratic politics. (shrink)

Max Weber’s last in his life publications give grounds to correct the traditional notions of the ethics of responsibility as purely calculative and one that subordinates the ethical goal to the right means of achieving it and the strictness of its observance. For Weber devotion to certain values is ultimately the basis of any possible ethics: in the ethics of conviction, this devotion is contrasted with taking into account all the results of the ethical act, and in the ethics of (...) responsibility these results seek to take into account what should make certain values more reliable. Passionate commitment to political goals that express the interests of the community, rather than the selfish and vain intentions of the politician is a solid basis for the responsibility of the politician. The passionate pursuit of truth directs the scientist’s well-thought-out research pro- gram. In economics, the pursuit of personal gain, which is inherent for the “economic man”, requires consideration of the common economic good both for those with whom the man makes his business and for the community, which is his lifeworld and creates the necessary conditions for any possible economic activity. In any social sphere, each social system has its own logic of calculating success, but each time this calculation involves respecting and protecting the basic values for this system. In everyday life we observe numerous deviations from this clear and transparent logic of the ethics of responsibility, which create the illusion of its dysfunction. Similarly, insincere and inconsistent adherence to declared beliefs can give the wrong impression of the whole ethics of conviction. It is these deviations from the intrinsic integrity of the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of persuasion that create the false impression of them as mutu- ally exclusive behavioral strategies. In their conscientious pursuit, the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility complement each other. The formalism of the ethics of responsibility makes sense only for a stricter and more impartial protection of the values that are important to the adherents of this ethic. This formalism is a denial only of all other, irrelevant values, and not a designation of responsibility for a particular ethical commitment as a value-empty, indifferent form. Weber points to the prospect of recognition as a path to a collective ethic of responsibility in its positive sense — as a conscious commitment by a community of like-minded people to commit to values that are significant to them. (shrink)

_Challenges conventional understandings of Heidegger’s account of the body._.

In an attempt to re-envision economics, the paper analyses Robert Heilbroner’s philosophy of economics through the lens of Max Weber’s philosophy of science. Specifically, Heilbroner’s position on vision, ideology and value-freedom is examined by contextualising it within a framework of … More ›.

This article commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of The Sociological Imagination by recalling, renewing and updating C. Wright Mills’ pledge to expand a politically aware, self-reflective and publicly accessible intellectual culture between aestheticism and scientism. We begin by sketching how Mills’ ‘bifocal’ vision of the translation between the close-up perspective on personal milieus and the longer view of social structures contrasts with recent calls for a public sociology which would sustain its professional legitimacy while reviving its critical conscience. To illustrate this (...) point, we argue that his project can be reframed in a way that ‘provincializes’ the universalizing claims and scientific aspirations of much of North American sociology by exposing its imperial unconscious in pre- and post-war movements toward the professionalization and scientization of knowledge. Here our focus turns to the prospects for a ‘sociology of empire’ to trace imperial forms which are symptomatically manifested both in the discipline’s assumptions about historical progress and in Mills’ critique of these assumptions. Finally, with an example from the history of British colonialism in Egypt, we show how, despite its blindspots, Mills’ vision of the sociological imagination implicitly projects an alternative ‘sociological map’ with distinct vantage points that can account for the changing cultural tasks of our time, especially concerning how collectives of human and non-human agents are unequally mediated within networks of power. We conclude by revisiting Mills’ distinctive approach to ‘the craft of sociology’, considered more as a prayer than a profession, and undertaken more as a personal and political calling than as career. (shrink)

The spectre of Descartes figured as a perpetual presence in much of twentieth century philosophy, but nearly always as an emblem for positions to be avoided. Cartesian foundationalism in epistemology, the ontological dualism of mind and body, the associated conception of the mind as a substance, and as a “thing that thinks” – all these have figured in recent philosophy as positions to be refuted or simply renounced, the absurda in one or another reductio argument. But for one prominent twentieth (...) century tradition the story is much more nuanced and complex. Twentieth century phenomenology, which began to stir as a well-defined movement in the last decade of the nineteenth century and has persisted in one form or another into the twenty-first, found in Descartes much more a causa belli than the usual bête noire. As a first approximation we can say that allegiance to Cartesianism divided the phenomenological tradition. Edmund Husserl, who along with Franz Brentano is usually acknowledged as the founder of the phenomenological movement, described Descartes as “the genuine patriarch of phenomenology”; he dubbed his own transcendental phenomenology as “a new, twentieth century Cartesianism”, and insisted that “the only fruitful renaissance is the one which reawakens [Descartes’] Meditations” (Husserl 1929/1964, 3, 5). But Husserl’s most important assistant, Martin Heidegger, rebelled against the Cartesian legacy in modern philosophy, which he saw as the central wrong-turn in modern thought, and as the chief obstacle to a faithful phenomenology and phenomenologically informed ontology. The cogito sum, Heidegger insisted, must be “phenomenologically destroyed” (Heidegger 1927/1962, 123). In Descartes himself Heidegger found “an extreme.. (shrink)

William James, one of America’s most original philosophers and psychologists, was concerned above all with the manner in which philosophy might help people to cope with the vicissitudes of daily life. Writing around the turn of the twentieth century, James experienced firsthand, much as we do now, the impact upon individuals and communities of rapid changes in extant values, technologies, economic realities, and ways of understanding the world. He presented an enormous range of practical recommendations for coping and thriving in (...) such circumstances, arguing consistently that prospects for richer lives and improved communities rested not upon trust in spiritual or material prescriptions, but rather on clear thinking in the cause of action. This volume seeks to demonstrate how James’s astonishingly rich corpus can be used to address contemporary issues and to establish better ways for thinking about the moral and practical challenges of our time. In the first part, James’s theories are applied directly to issues ranging from gun control to disability, and the ethics of livestock farming to the meaning of “progress” in race relations. The second part shows how James’s theories of ethics, experience, and the self can be used to “clear away” theoretical matters that have inhibited philosophy’s deployment to real-world issues. Finally, part three shows how individuals might apply ideas from James in their personal lives, whether at work, contemplating nature, or considering the implications of their own habits of thought and action. (shrink)

_A critical introduction to Hegel's metaphysics and philosophy of nature._.

A comprehensive examination of Kristeva's work from the seventies to the nineties.

The dichotomy between emotion and rationality has been one of the most enduring of sociological theory. This article attempts to bypass this dichotomy by examining how emotion and rationality are conjoined in the practice of the choice of a mate. We posit the fundamental role of culture in determining the nature of this intertwinement. We explore the culturally embedded intertwining of emotion and rationality through the notion of modal configuration. Modal configuration includes five key features: reflexivity, techniques, modal emphasis, modal (...) overlap, and modal sequencing. We apply this framework to the topic of partner selection. Comparing primary and secondary sources on pre-modern partner selection and on internet dating, we show that emotion and rationality were intertwined in both periods but that what differs between them is precisely the emotion-rationality modality. (shrink)

By utilizing words, photographs, and motion pictures, this multimodal and multisited project traces a rhizomatic genealogy of Russian Cosmism—a nineteenth century political theology promoting a universal human program for overcoming death, resurrecting ancestors, and traveling through the cosmos—throughout post-Soviet techno-utopian projects and imaginaries. I illustrate how Cosmist techno-utopian, futurist, and other-than-human discourse exist as Weberian “elective affinities” within diverse ecologies of the imagination, transmitting a variety of philosophies and political programs throughout trans-temporal, yet philosophically bounded, communities. With a particular focus (...) on the United States and Ukraine, and taking an apophatic analytical position, I dissect how different groups of philosophers, technologists, and publics interact(ed) with Cosmism, as well as how seemingly disparate communities (re)shape and deterritorialize Cosmist political theology in an attempt to legitimize their constructed political imaginaries. (shrink)

Has the emergence of post-positivism in philosophy of science changed the terms of the “is/ought” dichotomy? If it has demonstrated convincingly that there are no “facts” apart from the theoretical frames and evaluative standards constructing them, can such a cordon sanitaire really be upheld between “facts” and values? The point I wish to stress is that philosophy of science has had a central role in constituting and imposing the fact/value dichotomy and a revolution in the philosophy of science should not (...) leave the dichotomy unaffected. The connection between post-positivism and naturalism will be my guiding thread in considering this “last dogma of positivism.” First this essay will specify the sense of naturalism that it will take to be essential to the post-positivist philosophy of science: the deflation of the notion of the “purity” of scientific knowledge. Then it will turn to the question of the implications that follow for the “autonomy” of ethics, including the danger posed by a new form of scientistic reductionism. (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)

In his book, The New Sociological Imagination, Steve Fuller criticizes what he calls “bioliberalism.” According to him, the social sciences are challenged on two sides: humanistic and biological. In particular, Fuller finds the biological challenge serious. Fuller tries to reinvent sociology as a socialist project to counterattack bioliberalism as the biggest threat to the social sciences. First, the author will examine Fuller's argument against bioliberalism, referring to the so-called “liberal eugenics.” Then the author will criticize him. By reinventing sociology as (...) a socialist project, Fuller seems to ignore the relation between value-freedom and education. One of the reasons Max Weber argued for value-freedom was to prevent sociology teachers from imposing their particular views on their students. We must consider this problem of teaching undergraduates sociology and other subjects in a better way if we are to have better social institutions. (shrink)

SUMMARYAmong the elements of the modern scientific ethos, as identified by R.K. Merton and others, is the commitment of individual effort to a long-term inquiry that may not bring substantial results in a lifetime. The challenge this presents was encapsulated in the aphorism of the ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates of Kos: vita brevis, ars longa. This article explores how this complaint was answered in the early modern period by Francis Bacon’s call for the inauguration of the sciences over several generations, (...) thereby imagining a succession of lives added together over time. However, Bacon also explored another response to Hippocrates: the devotion of a ‘whole life’, whether brief or long, to science. The endorsement of long-term inquiry in combination with intensive lifetime involvement was embraced by some leading Fellows of the Royal Society, such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. The problem for individuals, however, was to find satisfaction in science despite concerns, in some fields, that current observations and experiments would not yield material able to be extended by future investigations. (shrink)

This paper explores the political import of Husserl’s critical discussion of the epistemic effects of the formalization of rational thinking. More specifically, it argues that this discussion is of direct relevance to make sense of the pervasive processes of ‘technization’, that is, of a mechanistic and superficial generation and use of knowledge, to be observed in current contexts of governance. Building upon Husserl’s understanding of formalization as a symbolic technique for abstraction in the thinking with and about numbers, I argue (...) that processes of technization, while being necessary and legitimate procedures for the reduction of complexities, also may give rise to politically unresponsive and ultimately dysfunctional ‘economies of thinking.’ This paper is structured in three parts. In the first part I outline Husserl’s account of the formalization and technization of thought and knowledge. In the second part I make my case for the political import of this account, departing in this context from positions that (a) regard Husserl’s discussions of formalization and its effects as merely epistemological, or that (b) try to mobilize Husserl for a one-sided critique of instrumental reason. In the final part I address a major shortcoming of Husserl’s account, namely its neglect of the concrete and historically evolving technological infrastructures of processes of formalization/technization. (shrink)

As will be made clear below, the terms extremism, fundamentalism, Islamism and Jihadism are often used interchangeably by the public, something that has negative implications for both the integration of the Muslim community into Western society, and the efficacy of counter-extremism efforts. This paper aims to provide working for these terms by understanding them independent from their misinformed socio-political contexts, and by determining how they relate to one another in what will be identified as a series of conceptual subsets. In (...) doing so, this paper will attempt to provide a framework for the usage of these terms in the governmental, academic, and public contexts, while removing some of the noise surrounding the important, and often highly sensitive contexts within which these terms are referenced. In this paper, religious extremism will defined as an ideological prerequisite to fundamentalism, Islamism and jihadism. It is a rejectionist, and dogmatic orientation that neglects balance in all elements of an individual’s ideological outlook. However, a fundamentalist, when defined in terms of faith, seeks to legitimise his or her beliefs through a non-contextual analysis of the relevant religious texts. An Islamist seeks to implement his or her fundamentalist views with a view to altering the structures of governance in accordance with the aforementioned rejectionist traits. Finally, and in relatively simple terms, a jihadist is an individual that champions the violent, global imposition of the Islamists’ beliefs. Jihadism is a subset of Islamism, Islamism is a subset of fundamentalism, and fundamentalism is a subset of extremism. (shrink)

This essay argues that an account of vocation that ties one’s work with divine calling stands counter to the biblical witness of calling in the New Testament. Rather than calling to a particular profession, the biblical account of calling is to a unique way of living that is to exemplify the followers of Christ. Therefore, the re-enchantment of medicine is not accomplished when one makes the practice itself sacred simply by imagining it as one’s divine calling. Rather, the sacredness of (...) medicine is rooted in the character of the physician whose daily decisions and patient interactions are the outcomes of virtues inculcated in worship, prayer, Bible study, and all other practices that mark the life of faith. Thus, the practitioner avoiding burnout asks not “Am I called to be a physician?” but “How as a physician in the daily practice of medicine might I exemplify my calling to Christ-likeness?”. (shrink)

In this article I seek to relate the psychology of Carl Jung to sociological theory, specifically Weber. I first present an outline of Jungian psychology. I then seek to relate this as psychology to Weber’s interpretivism. I point to basic methodological compatibilities within a Kantian frame, from which emerge central concerns with the factors limiting rationality. These generate the conceptual frameworks for parallel enquiries into the development and fate of rationality in cultural history. Religion is a major theme here: contrasts (...) of eastern and western religion; the rise of prophetic religion and the disenchantment of modernity. Weber’s categories ‘ascetic’ and ‘mystic’ seem applicable to his own and Jung’s approaches and indeed temperaments, while a shared ironic view of rationality leads to similar visions of the disenchanted modern world. I conclude that Jung is sociologically coherent, but in an entirely different sense from Freud: rather than a constellation of family, socialization, ideology, social continuity, there is an analysis of cultural history against a background of adult normal psychology. I conclude that sociology should acknowledge Jung, but not in terms of over-arching theory. Rather Jungian insights might be used to orient new enquiries, and for reflexive analysis of sociology’s methodological debates. (shrink)

During the past two centuries, and in particular during the inter-war period, American ways of living and of thinking have become one principal object of European reflections on modernity. This essay explores some of the ways in which the rejection or affirmation of modernity in Europe has been channelled through observations on America. It is argued that the variety of European ways of looking at America also demonstrates the range of forms available to social theory for thinking the social world (...) under conditions of modernity and that this European debate provided some seeds for the current discussion about `multiple modernities'. (shrink)

In this article the author revisits Carol Smart’s 1989 publication Feminism and the power of law. She engages with Smart’s main claims by way of a number of other thinkers. Following Marianne Constable’s description of contemporary American legal thought as socio-legal, the author tentatively considers if it could be argued that some strains in contemporary legal feminism that adopted a sociological method resulted in a similar absence of justice that concerns Constable. Smart’s caution against the development of a feminist jurisprudence (...) is critically analysed with the benefit of hindsight. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Goodrich, the author tentatively considers the becoming of a feminist jurisprudence as a minor jurisprudence. What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us. (Deleuze 1995, 176)Sociology takes social creation to be the whole of what is and will be. (Constable 1994a, 589). (shrink)

Most aspects of the current crisis regarding society-biosphere interactions can be attributed to the knowledge strategy adopted by contemporary universites. The artificial separation of science, technology, and society in separate faculties makes it very difficult for teaching staff and students to cross their boundaries. It is argued that STS, with its emphasis on transdisciplinarity, can help to ameliorate this crisis by providing an integrated learning experience. To do this, however, STS has to restructure itself to overcome the limitations imposed by (...) the knowledge strategy of the contemporary university. (shrink)

This article is based on the general introduction and the opening sections of chapters 1 and 2 from the author's book,Living in the Labyrinth of Technology. It revisits the process of industrialization as having a dual component: people changing technology and technology changing people. The latter is almost universally overlooked and provides a different perspective.

Criteria for the evaluation of most scholars’ work have recently received wider attention due to high-profile cases of scientific misconduct which are perceived to be linked to these criteria. However, in the competition for career advancement and funding opportunities almost all scholars are subjected to the same criteria. Therefore these evaluation criteria act as ‘switchmen’, determining the tracks along which scholarly work is pushed by the dynamic interplay of interests of both scholars and their institutions. Currently one of the most (...) important criteria is the impact of publications. In this research, the extent to which publish or perish, a long standing evaluation criterion, led to scientific misconduct is examined briefly. After this the strive for high impact publications will be examined, firstly by identifying the period in which this became an important evaluation criterion, secondly by looking at variables contributing to the impact of scholarly papers by means of a non-structured literature study, and lastly by combining these data into a quantitative analysis. (shrink)

Contemporary civilization has created a fundamental contradiction between the intellectual approach to knowing and the technical approach to doing on the one hand, and the results of their application on the other. These approaches to knowing and doing begin with a process of abstraction that trades breadth for depth, while their application reveals a multitude of problems associated with ignoring the fact that everything is related to everything else in our world. Scientific disciplines and technical specialties create “pure” domains of (...) investigation “uncontaminated” by interactions with all other domains, thereby distorting the internal fabric of relations and its connections with everything else. Hence, the most powerful means humanity has ever created are indissociably linked with the production of chaos in human life, society, and the biosphere. A new domain of study is needed to the interactions between society, technology, science, and the biosphere (STSB). The scope, direction, and methodological challenges are briefly examined, and the possible mission of STSB within the contemporary university. (shrink)

Our experience of the present is defined by numbers, graphs and, increasingly, an algorithmically calculated future, based on the mathematical and formal reasoning that began with the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today, this reasoning is further modified and extended in the form of computer-executed, algorithmic reasoning. Instead of fallible human reasoning, algorithms—based on mining databases for ‘information’—are seen to provide more efficient processes, offering fast solutions. In this paper, then, I will follow Jan Patočka, (...) who suggests that we live in an age of supercivilisation, one in which human reasoning has become self-sufficient, ceasing to depend on the supernatural or cultural traditions that previously guided human lives. My argument is that Patočka’s analysis of supercivilisation can open up a different way to reflect on the ‘spiritual foundation of our times’. As Patočka says, to reflect on our situation does not mean that we can change it, but reflection can give us a new understanding that will open up different ways to think about our human future. (shrink)

The article problematizes in aphoristic condensation the heterogeneous concepts of creativity in philosophy, psychology and sociology and outlines their paradoxes. Creativity in these concepts is tied to the human potential to bring into being something new and to the capacity of drawing differences. In its contingency, creativity is ambivalent to a high degree—at one and the same time a desirable resource and a threatening potential. So on the one hand, creativity is meant to be mobilized and set free; on the (...) other hand, it is meant to be controlled and reined in. The imperative of being creative is nowadays connected to the mobilization of the entrepreneurial self. Entrepreneurial action demands permanent innovation—and consequently ceaseless creative exertion. Everybody not only has to be simply creative, but more creative than the others. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means” rereads the works of J. R. R. Tolkien as a study of pyrrhic victory. It argues that the origin of Tolkien's cycle of tales is inseparable from his experience of World War I, which ended in anomie and widespread fear of the coercive power of modern society. The price of the victory over evil, in these tales, is disenchantment. Tolkien is the first author to imagine disenchantment on a near-global (...) scale, using literal disenchantment as a metaphor for a kind he could expect his readers to know firsthand. Like disenchantment, this-worldly evil, centralized in a single figure such as Mordor, is a twentieth-century idea, an emanation of totalitarianism: the transformation of Elves into orcs is a horror that only our knowledge of the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulag has equipped us to imagine. If disenchantment is the price of victory over absolute evil, few would doubt that it was worth paying—within the framework of the tales. For the far future of Middle-Earth, however, the implications are less benign. The Elves accept their fate and either dwindle or depart. But the orcs, personifying disenchantment in its most radical and terrifying form, are routed but not all killed, and they do not depart. (shrink)

Pupils—the learners of both educational thought and of educational practice—exist ever more as data, as do the strictures and goals through which these pupils are pedagogically managed. I elaborate this thought by way of a single example: a particular kind of pupils whose number is reportedly on the increase, namely pupils diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In my analysis I combine Hacking’s nominalist conception of human kinds and Weber’s instrumental rationalism with recent thinking about the effects of digital technologies (...) on social organising. Discussed in more detail is a key consequence from data playing a primary role in bringing together ADHD as coherent idea and practice: if ADHD is primarily the digital and instrumental product of psychiatry and education, so that ADHD is only secondarily a reliable description of behaviour, then what is to count as valid description of ADHD as behaviour will depend firstly upon the character and application of the existing database and not on actual behaviours among pupils. The article concludes with the observation that such technological products as ADHD seem notably at odds with traditional values in education. Traditional notions of education as a form of personable nurture for example seem to contrast with the instrumental disinterestedness of managing pupils as data flows. Given the latter, there seems rising need to theorise social reproduction by data and of data in contemporary education. (shrink)

In this paper we present a theoretical hybrid framework for ethical decision making, drawing upon Emmanuel Levinas’ view on ethics as “first philosophy”, as an inherent infinite responsibility for the other. The pivotal concept in this framework is an appeal to a heightened sense of personal responsibility of the moral actor to provide the ethical context within which conventional approaches to applied business ethics could be engaged. Max Weber’s method of reconciling absolutism and relativism in ethical decision making is adopted (...) to provide the synergy between personal responsibility and contextual realities, forging a coherent framework. The paper concludes by discussing ways that business could make way for the flourishing of ethics of responsibility in individuals. (shrink)

This article focuses on an area of study that may be called folk economics and that is currently not on the social science agenda. Folk economics has as its task to analyze and explain how people view the economy and how it works; what categories they use in doing so; and what effect this has on the economy and society. Existing studies in economics and sociology that are relevant to this type of study are presented and discussed. A theoretical framework (...) for analyzing folk economic issues is suggested, centered on the distinction between episteme and doxa or between scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and everyday knowledge, on the other. This is then applied to an exploratory case study of the role that folk economics played in Trump’s presidential campaign. It is shown that Trump and his voters thought in a parallel way on key economic issues, especially protectionism. (shrink)

In this paper I reconstruct Schlegel's idea that romantic poetry can re-enchant nature in a way that is uniquely compatible with modernity's epistemic and political values of criticism, self-criticism, and freedom. I trace several stages in Schlegel's early thinking concerning nature. First, he criticises modern culture for its analytic, reflective form of rationality which encourages a disenchanting view of nature. Second, he re-evaluates this modern form of rationality as making possible an ironic, romantic, poetry, which portrays natural phenomena as mysterious (...) indications of an underlying reality that transcends knowledge. Yet Schlegel relies here on a contrast between human freedom and natural necessity that reinstates a disenchanting view of nature as fully intelligible and predictable. Third, therefore, he reconceives nature as inherently creative and poetic, rethinking human creativity as consisting in participation in natural creative processes. He replaces his earlier "idealist" view that reality is in itself unknowable with the "idealist realist" view that reality is knowable as creative nature, yet, in its spontaneous creativity, still eludes full comprehension. I argue that Schlegel's third approach to the re-enchantment of nature is his most consistent and satisfactory, and is important for contemporary environmental philosophy in showing how re-enchantment is compatible with modernity. (shrink)

Over one hundred years after Max Weber delivered his lecture “Science as a Vocation,” his description of the work of the physician in a disenchanted world still resonates. As a chronically ill patient who interacts with physicians frequently, I struggle with reconciling my understanding of my ill body with how my physician makes sense of my illness. My diagnosis created an existential crisis that caused me to search for meaning in my embodied experience, but I soon learned there is little (...) room for such a search within modern biomedicine. Instead, I turned to fine art to help me make sense of my ill body and its purpose in my life. With the aid of my printmaker sister, Darian Goldin Stahl, I have transformed the magnetic resonance images of my body into works of art, which help to re-enchant my body and give purpose to my illness. (shrink)