Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel’s last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.

Published in 1918, _The View of Life_ is Georg Simmel’s final work. Famously deemed “the brightest man in Europe” by George Santayana, Simmel addressed a variety of topics across his essayistic writings, which have influenced scholars in aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and sociology. Nevertheless, a set of core issues emerged over the course of his career, most centrally the genesis, structure, and transcendence of social and cultural forms and the nature and genesis of authentic individuality. Composed in the years before his (...) death, _The View of Life_ was, according to Simmel, his “testament,” a capstone work of profound metaphysical inquiry intended to formulate his conception of life in its entirety. Now Anglophone readers can at last read in full the work that shaped the argument of Heidegger’s _Being and Time_ and whose extraordinary impact on European intellectual life between the wars was extolled by Jürgen Habermas. Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel’s last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers. (shrink)

Contrary to common perceptions of Simmel’s work as dividing into three stages of Darwinism, Kantianism, and Goethean/Bergsonian Life-Philosophy, consideration of the full scope of the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe demonstrates Simmel’s concern with both Kant and Goethe as life-long, just as was his engagement with core principles respectively associated with them: Form and Life. What changed in his mind over time was how those two principles were construed and related. In this view, Simmel’s Soziologie can be read as a treatise on (...) the properties of social forms that emerge out of vital processes – following a dynamic akin to Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, whereas the Lebensanschauung puts more emphasis on the ways in which forms channel, constrain, and inspire the streams of life. This opens the door for creative work pursuing lines of connection between the two disciplines – a sociology of authentic individuality and a kind of existentialized sociology – and, beyond that, to a unified theory of action and evolution. (shrink)

Although Parsons encountered the works of both Simmel and Weber during his stay at Heidelberg in the late 1920s, his appropriation of the two became increasingly asymmetrical, issuing in a lifelong devotion to Weber and a pronounced disavowal of Simmel around the time Parsons published The Structure of Social Action. This reaction deprived Parsons of the substantial support he could have found in Simmel's work for his effort to counteract `utilitarian' theories of action. Simmel not only went beyond Parsons in (...) revealing a number of perspectives that demonstrate the permeation of action by moral orientations, but he counteracted economistic thinking along a number of other dimensions. These include: showing the limits of cost-benefit calculations in social exchange; presenting strong theoretical arguments against the assumption of hedonism; presenting strong theoretical arguments against the assumption of egoism. (shrink)

In his final work, Donald N. Levine, one of the great late-twentieth-century sociological theorists, brings together diverse social thinkers. Simmel, Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, and Merton are set into a dialogue with philosophers such as Hobbes, Smith, Montesquieu, Comte, Kant, and Hegel and pragmatists such as Peirce, James, Dewey, and McKeon to describe and analyze dialogical social theory. This volume is one of Levine's most important contributions to social theory and a worthy summation of his life's work. (...) class='Hi'>Levine demonstrates that approaching social theory with a cooperative, peaceful dialogue is a superior tactic in theorizing about society. He illustrates the advantages of the dialogical model with case studies drawn from the French Philosophes, the Russian Intelligentsia, Freudian psychology, Ushiba's aikido, and Levine's own ethnographic work in Ethiopia. Incorporating themes that run through his lifetime's work, such as conflict resolution, ambiguity, and varying forms of social knowledge, Levine suggests that while dialogue is an important basis for sociological theorizing, it still vies with more combative forms of discourse that lend themselves to controversy rather than cooperation, often giving theory a sense of standing still as the world moves forward. The book was nearly finished when Levine died in April 2015, but it has been brought to thoughtful and thought-provoking completion by his friend and colleague Howard G. Schneiderman. This volume will be of great interest to students and teachers of social theory and philosophy. (shrink)

It is one thing to lament the financial pressures put on universities, quite another to face up to the poverty of resources for thinking about what universities should do when they purport to offer a liberal education. In Powers of the Mind, former University of Chicago dean Donald N. Levine enriches those resources by proposing fresh ways to think about liberal learning with ideas more suited to our times. He does so by defining basic values of modernity and (...) then considering curricular principles pertinent to them. The principles he favors are powers of the mind—disciplines understood as fields of study defined not by subject matter but by their embodiment of distinct intellectual capacities. To illustrate, Levine draws on his own lifetime of teaching and educational leadership, while providing a marvelous summary of exemplary educational thinkers at the University of Chicago who continue to inspire. Out of this vital tradition, Powers of the Mind constructs a paradigm for liberal arts today, inclusive of all perspectives and applicable to all settings in the modern world. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to computer modelling of the development and regeneration of multicellular biological structures. Some species are able to regenerate parts of their body after amputation damage, but the global rules governing cooperative cell behaviour during morphogenesis are not known. Here, we consider a simplified model organism, which consists of tissues formed around special cells that can be interpreted as stem cells. We assume that stem cells communicate with each other by a set of signals, and that the (...) values of these signals depend on the distance between cells. Thus the signal distribution characterizes location of stem cells. If the signal distribution is changed, then the difference between the initial and the current signal distribution affects the behaviour of stem cells—e.g. as a result of an amputation of a part of tissue the signal distribution changes which stimulates stem cells to migrate to new locations, appropriate for regeneration of the proper pattern. Moreover, as stem cells divide and form tissues around them, they control the form and the size of regenerating tissues. This two-level organization of the model organism, with global regulation of stem cells and local regulation of tissues, allows its reproducible development and regeneration. (shrink)

LIBERTY IN HUME'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND In his own lifetime, Hume was feted by his admirers as a great historian, and even his enemies conceded that he was a controversial historian with whom one had to reckon. On the other hand, Hume failed to achieve positive recognition for his philosophical views. It was Hume's History of England that played an influential role in public policy debate during the eighteenth century in both Great Britain and in the United States. Hume's Hist01Y (...) of England passed through seven editions and was beginning to be perceived as a classic before Hume's death. Voltaire, as an historian, considered it "perhaps the best ever written in any lan guage. " Gibbon greatly admired Hume's work and said, of a letter written by Hume in 1776 praising the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that a compliment from Hume "overpaid the labor of ten years. " After Hume's death on August 20, 1776, the History became a factor in the revolutionary events that began to unfold. Louis XVI was a close student of Hume's History, and his valet records that, upon having learned that the Convention had voted the death penalty, the King asked for the volume in Hume's History covering the trial and execution of Charles I to read in the days that remained. But if Louis XVI found the consolations of philosophical history in the Stuart volumes, Thomas Jefferson saw in them a cause for alarm. (shrink)

What differentiates expressions of pain from other facial expressions? Which facial features convey the most information in an expression of pain? To answer such questions we can explore the expertise of human observers using psychophysical experiments. Techniques such as change detection and visual search can advance our understanding of facial expressions of pain and of evolved mechanisms for detecting these expressions.

This essay examines two stories in Zhuangzi chapter 6 that provide detailsabout the formal, substantive, and applied features of friendship between daoadepts. Using a template of seven characteristics, dao adept friendship is thencompared with ren adept friendship, described in the Analects and theMencius. It is argued that dao living contains features of friendship that arecomparably robust. As unconventional as dao adept living may be, friendshipis not lacking but integral to such a life.

The use of logico-semiotic and systems-structural approaches in the analysis of types of abstraction and forms of generalization of concepts was begun in the '50s and '60s by D. P. Gorskii, who at that time introduced the concept of idealization into the terminology. In the early '70s he continued his analysis of the problem of scientific understanding, delineating the specific features of definitions in the theories of natural sciences and in the social science disciplines. In the book under review, Gorskii (...) in a certain sense sums up his results and develops them further. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 609-629.

This paper explores the extent to which the Confucian concept of ren (humaneness) has application in ways that are comparable tocontemporary versions of environmental virtue ethics. I argue that the accounts of self-cultivation that are developed in major texts of the Confucian tradition have important direct implications for environmental thinking that even the Neo-Confucians do not seriously entertain.

I explore the features of universalist thinking in the work of Zhu X i, examining the following: the importance of li in Zhu Xi's cosmology and ethics; the course of moral development of a Confucian sage and the spheres of expanding identity and responsibility; the ideal of impartiality in achieving a composure of unity with the world; and the ideal of differentiated love as an expression of living in accord with li and xing. I conclude with some critical observations regarding (...) these major features of Zhu Xi's universalism, noting some hazards of such cross-cultural analysis, and acknowledging general problems facing the non-pluralistic perspective of his work. (shrink)