Zygmunt Bauman has always approached sociology as an imagination, as an ongoing conversation with experience rather than a discipline within tight boundaries. This has enabled his work to move outside of the academy, and over the past decade or so he has become a leading public sociologist. But what does this status mean for the practice and possibilities of sociology? In this conversation Bauman reflects on the role, status and opportunities of sociology, who it is for, and what this means (...) for the sociologist. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman has always approached sociology as an imagination, as an ongoing conversation with experience rather than a discipline within tight boundaries. This has enabled his work to move outside of the academy, and over the past decade or so he has become a leading public sociologist. But what does this status mean for the practice and possibilities of sociology? In this conversation Bauman reflects on the role, status and opportunities of sociology, who it is for, and what this means (...) for the sociologist. (shrink)

Series editor's foreword -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- The life and times of Erving Goffman -- Reading Goffman "backwards" -- Goffman's "mixed methods" -- Goffman's sociology of everyday life interaction -- Goffman's sociology of deviance -- Goffman and the self -- Goffman on frames, genderisms and talk -- Reading Goffman "forwards" -- The legacy of Erving Goffman -- Further readings.

In this article, Zygmunt Bauman's deep-seated utopian sensibilities are dissected and discussed. It is shown how Bauman already early on in his career took a keen interest in the topic of utopia and how he throughout the years has continued to pursue the idea of utopia - its perversions and possibilities. The article suggests that Bauman is basically an ‘ambivalent utopian’ - that he, on the one hand, regards utopianism as an important and ineradicable constant in the human-being-in-the-world, something creating (...) the hopeful possibility for a better world and a brighter future, but also that he, on the other hand, is concerned with attempts to turn utopia into a ‘project’ or a ‘concrete reality’. Bauman's utopian ambivalence owes perhaps as much to the inherently two-sided nature of utopian ideas as to his own personal experiences throughout his life in the 20th century. (shrink)

This volume explores the emotions that are intricately woven into the texture of everyday life and experience. A contribution to the literature on the sociology of emotions, it focuses on the role of emotions as being integral to daily life, broadening our understanding by examining both ¿core¿ emotions and those that are often overlooked or omitted from more conventional studies. Bringing together theoretical and empirical studies from scholars across a range of subjects, including sociology, psychology, cultural studies, history, politics and (...) cognitive science, this international collection centres on the ¿everyday-ness¿ of emotional experience. (shrink)

Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Poul Poder, Om Bauman. Kritiske essays.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Poul Poder, Om Bauman. Kritiske essays.

In Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer articulates an approach to distributive ethics based on complex equality that is closely attentive to the specific ways particular communities value goods. A renewed interest in place and geography among practitioners and theoreticians is giving rise to questions that are beyond the scope of Walzer's system and reveal abstractions at the geographic level that undercut his overall approach. This internal inconsistency weakens, but does not ultimately discount, Walzer's overall system of distributive ethics. When (...) calibrated to allow for geographic particularity, Walzer's approach becomes even more useful to critique a range of contemporary development movements. (shrink)

Philosophers continue to locate themselves on a landscape in which scepticism is a prominent feature. By treating sceptical scenarios, from evil demons to brains-in-vats, as "real possibilities" that would, if actual, suffice to "explain our experience as of a world beyond our senses", we can locate the strong independence of the world from knowledge characteristic of metaphysical realism. But, by taking scepticism this seriously, realists deprive themselves of any justification for other theses they nonetheless continue to advocate. In order to (...) advance beyond scepticism, metaphysical realists must then treat sceptical scenarios as mere logical possibilities, but by doing so they jettison the strong independence of the world that characterizes their own form of realism. This "concurrent need to admit and deny a thesis, especially a sceptical one", is the "neurosis" or "epistemic dissociative disorder" of Michael Hymers's title. Hymers makes a persuasive case for regarding this simple story as the right diagnosis for a succession of ills afflicting self-described metaphysical realists. On his telling of the tale, the mind-independence of the world needed for metaphysical realism requires taking scepticism seriously; but accompanying positive theses require that the same seriousness be dampened. (shrink)

RésuméPaul Boghossian soutient contre Wittgenstein que le normativisme au sujet de la logique et des mathématiques est incompatible avec le fait de tenir les énoncés logiques et mathématiques pour vrais et que le normativisme entraîne une régression indue. Je soutiens, pour ma part, que le normativisme n'entraîne pas une telle régression, parce que les normes peuvent être implicites et que le normativisme peut bien être «factualiste» si l'on rejette ce que Rockney Jacobsen appelle le «cognitivisme sémantique». Je tiens en (...) outre que la position de Boghossian repose sur la façon trompeuse dont il découpe le terrain conceptuel. (shrink)

According to the received account of guilt in the philosophical literature, one cannot feel guilt unless one takes oneself to have done something morally wrong. But ordinary people feel guilt in many cases in which they do not take themselves to have done anything morally wrong. In this paper, I focus on one kind of guilt without perceived wrongdoing, guilt about being merely causally responsible for a bad state-of-affairs. I go on to present a novel account of guilt that explains (...) guilt about mere causal responsibility, according to which guilt represents part of the self as bound up with what is bad. (shrink)

This editorial points back to the papers published in volume 18. It also announces the transfer of the position of main editor of Outlines – critical practice studies.One of the papers in vol. 18 relates directly to what is foundational to Outlines - critical practice studies: The encouragement of critique. For this reason it has been given some extensive attention here. Raffnsøe wrote: What is critique? Critical turns in the age of criticism.

It is a common mistake, especially, perhaps, among students of the religions and philosophies of India, to assume that the word prakti, best known as the ultimate material principle in the Sākhya and Yoga systems of religious thought, the material cause of the world in Hindu theologies and, as such, an epithet of the goddesses in Hinduism, always refers to an ultimate principle. Even in Sākhya and Yoga texts the word prakti is used in various ways. Prakti does not always (...) refer to the ultimate principle. Translators often leave the word prakti untranslated and mislead the reader to assume that the ultimate principle is referred to, when it is not. This article discusses the use of prakti in the Sākhya-Yoga texts the Yogastra and the Vyāsabhāya and criticises some translation practices. (shrink)

It is a common mistake, especially, perhaps, among students of the religions and philosophies of India, to assume that the word prakṛti, best known as the ultimate material principle in the Sāṃkhya and Yoga systems of religious thought, the material cause of the world in Hindu theologies and, as such, an epithet of the goddesses in Hinduism, always refers to an ultimate principle. Even in Sāṃkhya and Yoga texts the word prakṛti is used in various ways. Prakṛti does not always (...) refer to the ultimate principle. Translators often leave the word prakṛti untranslated and mislead the reader to assume that the ultimate principle is referred to, when it is not. This article discusses the use of prakṛti in the Sāṃkhya-Yoga texts the Yogasūtra and the Vyāsabhāṣya and criticises some translation practices. (shrink)

It is a common mistake, especially, perhaps, among students of the religions and philosophies of India, to assume that the word prakṛti, best known as the ultimate material principle in the Sāṃkhya and Yoga systems of religious thought, the material cause of the world in Hindu theologies and, as such, an epithet of the goddesses in Hinduism, always refers to an ultimate principle. Even in Sāṃkhya and Yoga texts the word prakṛti is used in various ways. Prakṛti does not always (...) refer to the ultimate principle. Translators often leave the word prakṛti untranslated and mislead the reader to assume that the ultimate principle is referred to, when it is not. This article discusses the use of prakṛti in the Sāṃkhya-Yoga texts the Yogasūtra and the Vyāsabhāṣya and criticises some translation practices. (shrink)

Mental time travel is the ability to mentally project oneself backward in time to relive past experiences and forward in time to pre-live possible future experiences. Previous work has focused on MTT in its voluntary form. Here, we introduce the notion of involuntary MTT. We examined involuntary versus voluntary and past versus future MTT in a diary study. We found that involuntary future event representations—defined as representations of possible personal future events that come to mind with no preceding search attempts—were (...) as common as involuntary autobiographical memories and similar to them regarding cuing and subjective qualities. Future MTT involved more positive and idyllic representations than past MTT. MTT into the distant future/past involved more representations of cultural life script events than MTT into the immediate past/future. The findings are discussed in relation to cultural learning and MTT considered as a higher mental process. (shrink)

"An astutely argued and elegantly written (and translated) book on the philosophical genealogy and logical implications of the work of Jacques Lacan."Choice.

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, (...) we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

Buddhism teaches that the diversity of living beings in the world is caused and upheld by intentional acts performed in this and previous lives by karmic trajectories, beings whose continuity through rebirths is not dependent on a transcendent substratum such as a self (ātman), and that the order of beings in the world exactly correlates with the consequences of acts (karrnan) operative for their present life. The central Buddhist doctrine of dependent co‐arising (pratītya‐samutpāda) shows how these karmic trajectories are sustained (...) by twelve conditions, the primary of which is ignorance. The goal of Buddhists is ultimately to transcend rebirth and attain nirvāṇa. This is possible because the world is both a rebirth realm and a realm in which awakening from ignorance can be attained. The natural world of living beings is a moral order and this moral order functions in a physical setting. The physical setting of the rebirth system is the cosmos as the abode of beings, and the beings participating in the rebirth system constitute the world of living beings. These together constitute the world of rebirth (saṃsāra). By nature in this article is understood that part of the cosmos that constitutes the physical setting of humans and the world of non‐human beings also living there – that is, animals and plants. This is, one should note, only a very small part of the Buddhist cosmos, which consists of a huge number of world systems, and which is immense in time and space and eternally manifests and dissolves. (shrink)

In Sāṃkhya similes are an important means to communicate basic philosophical teachings. In the texts similes are frequently used, especially in the Sāṃkhya passages in the Mahābhārata, in the Sāṃkhyakārikā and in the Sāṃkhyasūtra. This paper compares the similes in these three texts and analyses changes in the philosophy as revealed in the similes. A comparison of the similes of Sāṃkhya texts produced over more than one thousand years reveals changes in the emphasis in this philosophical system. The purpose of (...) the similes in the Sāṃkhya passages of the Mahābhārata is to produce an intuitive understanding of the separateness of puruṣa and prakṛti. The similes are designed to lead the listener to understand this basic dualism. In the Sāṃkhyakārikā the most difficult issues are the relationship between prakṛti and puruṣa and the idea of prakṛti working for the salvation of puruṣa. One whole chapter of the Sāṃkhyasūtra is devoted to similes. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to present the distinct ways in which Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant understand the relationship between necessitation, constraint, and reluctant action in an effort to illustrate the subtle ways in which their conceptions of obligation differ from each another. Whereas Wolff conceives of natural or moral obligation as incompatible with constraint, Baumgarten holds that constraint and reluctant action are, in some instances, compatible with natural obligation. Kant departs from Baumgarten by conceiving of obligation as necessarily (...) involving constraint: as Kant’s reply to Schiller’s famous objection reveals, obligation must take on the character of constraint to reluctant action on account of the fact that human beings possess inclinations that always threaten to impel them in directions that oppose morality. (shrink)

What is the relation between small-scale collaborative plans and the execution of those plans within interactive contexts? I argue here that joint attention has a key role in explaining how shared plans and shared intentions are executed in interactive contexts. Within singular action, attention plays the functional role of enabling intentional action to be guided by a prior intention. Within interactive joint action, it is joint attention, I argue, that plays a similar functional role of enabling the agents to act (...) in a collaborative way such that their actions are rationally guided by a prior shared intention. This understanding of joint attention – as having a key functional role of enabling the rational guidance of joint intentional action by a prior shared intention – allows for an alternative understanding of the kind of minimal cooperation that infants can engage in. On this understanding, infants’ capacity to engage in joint actions is already an incipient capacity to engage in rational and intentional joint actions, albeit a capacity that is necessarily scaffolded by an adult rational co-partner. (shrink)

The most important analytical tool in non-cooperative game theory is the concept of a Nash equilibrium, which is a collection of possibly mixed strategies, one for each player, with the property that each player's strategy is a best reply to the strategies of the other players. If we do not go into normative game theory, which concerns itself with the recommendation of strategies, and focus instead entirely on the positive theory of prediction, two alternative interpretations of the Nash equilibrium concept (...) are predominantly available.In the more traditional one, a Nash equilibrium is a prediction of actual play. A game may not have a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies, and a mixed strategy equilibrium may be difficult to incorporate into this interpretation if it involves the idea of actual randomization over equally good pure strategies. In another interpretation originating from Harsanyi, see also Rubinstein, and Aumann and Brandenburger, a Nash equilibrium is a ‘consistent’ collection of probabilistic expectations, conjectures, on the players. It is consistent in the sense that for each player each pure strategy, which has positive probability according to the conjecture about that player, is indeed a best reply to the conjectures about others. (shrink)

An Essay on Human Action seeks to provide a comprehensive, detailed, enlightening, and (in its detail) original account of human action. This account presupposes a theory of events as abstract, proposition-like entities, a theory which is given in the first chapter of the book. The core-issues of action-theory are then treated: what acting in general is (a version of the traditional volitional theory is proposed and defended); how actions are to be individuated; how long actions last; what acting intentionally is; (...) what doing one thing by doing another is; what basic action is; and what omitting to do something is. Attention is also given to the concepts of causation, intention, volition, deciding, choosing, and trying. Finally, a libertarian account of free action is tentatively proposed and defended. (shrink)

This a clear and concise introduction to Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.ichael Watts uses Kierkegaard's own writings to introduce his theoriesbout living a truthfu; and spiritual life, while explaining the enormousnfluence of the philosopher's personal life on his work and beliefs. As theounder of 20th century existentialism, and the first philosopher to definehe idea of angst, Kierkegaard's profound influence on modern life is clearlyefined in accessible terms in this guide for students and general readers.