Periods of transition are often symbolically associated with death, making the latter the paradigm of liminality. Yet, many volumes on death in the social sciences and humanities do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these "ultimate ambiguities," assuming they can pose a threat to social relationships because of the disintegrating forces of death, but they are also crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life. Contributors explore death and liminality from an interdisciplinary perspective and (...) present a global range of historical and contemporary case studies outlining emotional, cognitive, artistic, social, and political implications. (shrink)

This book reformulates the sociological subdiscipline known as the sociology of knowledge. Knowledge is presented as more than ideology, including as well false consciousness, propaganda, science and art.

The existence and uniqueness of a maximum point for a continuous real—valued function on a metric space are investigated constructively. In particular, it is shown, in the spirit of reverse mathematics, that a natural unique existence theorem is equivalent to the fan theorem.

Dini's theorem says that compactness of the domain, a metric space, ensures the uniform convergence of every simply convergent monotone sequence of real-valued continuous functions whose limit is continuous. By showing that Dini's theorem is equivalent to Brouwer's fan theorem for detachable bars, we provide Dini's theorem with a classification in the recently established constructive reverse mathematics propagated by Ishihara. As a complement, Dini's theorem is proved to be equivalent to the analogue of the fan theorem, weak König's lemma, in (...) the original classical setting of reverse mathematics started by Friedman and Simpson. (shrink)

Society is a dialectical process: men produce society, which in turn produces them. Certain Marxist categories are especially useful for the sociology of knowledge, dealing with the relation between consciousness and society. Social structure is nothing but the result of human enterprise. Alienation-rupture between producer and product-leads to a false consciousness in neglecting the productive process. Reification, historically recurrent though not anthropologically necessary, while bestowing ontological status on social roles and institutions only sees society as producing men. Certain social conditions (...) encourage de-reification. Philosophy and sociology, superstructures rooted in intersubjectivity, must co-operate in pursuing the sociology of knowledge. (shrink)

The many gods of modernity -- The dynamics of relativization -- Relativism -- Fundamentalism -- Certainty and doubt -- The limits of doubt -- The politics of moderation.

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism continues to serve as a rich source of moral and theoretical insight. This collection of articles by top scholars offers fresh interpretations of Mill's ideas about happiness, moral obligation, justice, and rights. Applying contemporary philosophical insights, the articles challenge the conventional readings of Mill, and, in the process, contribute to a deeper understanding of utilitarian theory as well as the complexity of moral life.

In 2017, a variety of events are planned on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the event, which is usually regarded as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Planning and carrying out of them have already begun. I just received an invitation to take part in the Assembly of the Protestant Church of Germany in 2017. This is a great Biennale Kirchentag, which will take place in Berlin.