The Scottish historian William Robertson's works on European encounter with non-European civilizations (History of America, 1777; Historical Disquisition [?] of India, 1791) received a great deal of attention in contemporary Germany. Through correspondence with Robertson, as well as by reviewing and translating his texts, Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg took an active part in this process. The younger Forster also became simultaneously involved in a debate which was unfolding on the German intellectual scene concerning the different or equal (...) ?value? (Wert) of the various ?races of mankind? (Menschenrassen), engaging especially the relevant views advanced by the Göttingen historian Christoph Meiners and Immanuel Kant. The debate was firmly embedded in the context of an emerging ?science of man? in the German Enlightenment, to which Forster contributed an almost incomparable richness of empirical knowledge as well as theoretical sophistication. Forster's direct engagement with Robertson's work during the same period (mid-1780s to the early 1790s) creates a context through which the Wissenschaft vom Menschen in the Aufklärung and the Scottish version of the science of man ? built on the neighbour disciplines to which Robertson's historiography was crucially indebted ? is set in an interesting comparative light. This paper, part of a comprehensive project tracing the German reception of Robertson as an instance of inter-cultural exchange in the Enlightenment, will exploit the opportunities presented by one particular and documented case for a general comparison of enlightened ?sciences of man? (shrink)

The Enlightenment can usefully be conceived as a confrontation with eroding Christian and classical republican ethics. It was permeated with assumptions about women and the gendered dichotomy between public and private spheres. While William Robertson and Edmund Burke, along with many of their contemporaries, remained committed to Christian- and republican-based conceptions of virtue, they were working within a new Enlightenment paradigm. Its political agenda has to be understood by way of its configurations of beauty, taste, and morality as these relate (...) to the imperatives and needs of modern societies of a high level of sophistication and differentiation. An examination of two themes in the work of Robertson and Burkesavagecivilizedbeauty in distressreveals how long-held convictions about the character of women, especially with regard to their capacity and right to appear in the public domain, were modified and adjusted to the idea of progress, and became central to an enlightened affirmation of modern European civilization. The result had its ironies. On the one hand, a positive public and indeed political role was invented for women that is central to understanding the overall thrust of a political discourse based on politeness, civility, refinement and similar values specifically associated with modern commercial societies. On the other hand, though the complexity of this model of society gave ample scope to informal and spontaneous vehicles of social disciplining, whatever room was left for the more traditional ways of governing polities through the direct exertion of political power remained closed to women: the very features that opened for them the opportunity to play political roles through sociability in the public sphere also circumscribed them. (shrink)

This volume advances a better, more historical and contextual, manner to consider not only the present, but also the future of ‘crisis’ and ‘renewal’ as key concepts of our political language as well as fundamental categories of interpretation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:William Robertson’s History of Manners in German, 1770–1795László KontlerThe work I have had in preparing this new edition of Robertson’s History of Charles V has not been very agreeable. To compare an already existing translation line by line with the original... costs more trouble than a new translation would require. I do not flatter myself that I have noticed everything that could have been improved, and would hardly undertake (...) such a task for a second time.... 1Anybody familiar with the frustrating side of editorial work can only sympathize with the sentiments expressed in these sentences by Julius August Remer, the editor of the second German edition of William Robertson’s The History of the Reign of Emperor Charles V in 1779. What makes this complaint somewhat peculiar is that just shortly before its author had spoken very highly about their object: “The translator, the late councillor Mittelstedt had too much wisdom and common sense, and was too proficient in both languages... to produce a translation that is not faithful,” and the “excellent book” only needed to be supplemented with a few notes in order to improve its accuracy. 2 Nevertheless, a few years later Remer thought it appropriate to revise Robertson’s work completely, radically changing its structure and its organizing principles and adding substantially to its size. In the process much of the meaning of the [End Page 125] original was lost; and what was gained instead bore the imprint of the environment, the personality, and the limitations of the stature of the new author. At the same time Robertson’s History—in the original, in Mittelstedt’s translation, and in Remer’s version alike—was held in considerable esteem in German-speaking areas well into the nineteenth century. 3A study of the patterns of thought involved in its several incarnations may offer an insight into the way of the transmission of ideas through cultural boundaries. Looking at the German publishing history of the celebrated Scottish historian William Robertson’s greatest accomplishment between the 1770s and the 1790s, this article is intended as a contribution to the study of the limits of translatability as well as of the intellectual horizons of cultural exchanges, through translation, between such different enlightened intellectual communities as those of late-eighteenth-century Scotland and North Germany. 4Although it is only recently that William Robertson has started to emerge from the obscurity he suffered in the shadow of the more glittering names of the Scottish Enlightenment, an analysis of the ways in which he was influential no longer needs either to be defended or prefaced by a survey of his various activities. Robertson is the protagonist of Richard B. Sher’s study of Church, academe, and polite society in Edinburgh; and his character and oeuvre as a historian have been analyzed from several points of view. 5 Robertson’s contemporary admirers already placed him on a par with Hume and Smith, describing him as a chief component in Scotland’s “strong ray of philosophic [End Page 126] light.” 6 His “combination of philosophy and history” was said to have avoided, more successfully than all others, “the inconveniences which it threatens.” 7 Indeed, his History of Charles V was one of the most formidable eighteenth-century attempts to use “stadial” or conjectural history—which figured prominently not only in the thought of the Scottish theorists but also of the French physiocrats and the German-Swiss thinker Isaak Iselin—as a conceptual background to his account of the historical process as a result of which the foundations of modernity were laid.Such development studies were deemed essential to the proper understanding of contemporary commercial society; and especially in the long introduction of Robertson’s work, A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, “descriptive and narrative history” 8 were magisterially interwoven to produce a richly documented piece of historiography. It also offered an overview of the natural succession of various stages in people’s mode of subsistence from hunting through shepherding and agriculture to commerce and the ways in which these gave rise... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines a translation of the Scottish historian William Robertson’s probably most famous text in the journal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the 1830s, as a case study on continuity between the Enlightenment and the era of liberal reform in Central Europe. It underlines the benefits of the comparative study of Scotland in Robertson’s time and Hungary in the Reform Age as partners in composite polities at the opposite ends of Europe, where patriotic projects of overcoming limitations (...) of political sovereignty via cultural and economic improvement were pursued. The belated reception of Robertson in Hungary took place within a larger initiative of progress and refinement, associated with the liberal Count István Széchenyi, in an environment where many potential sympathizers with his programme were ambivalent about the values of cosmopolitanism and commerce promoted by Robertson, indebted as they remained to more archaic modes of patriotism. In view of the peculiarities of translation, and selection the Hungarian rendering of the View of the Progress was attuned to the sentiments of this constituency, and may be interpreted as a set of discursive gestures aimed at conquering it for the cause of ‘liberalism as refinement.’. (shrink)

Translations, Histories, Enlightenments is an excellent example of a work that starts with a tightly defined research focus and then ripples outwards to leave many important issues looking somewhat...

A striking feature of atrocities, as seen in genocides, civil wars or violence against certain racial and ethnic groups, is the attempt to dehumanize – to deny and strip human beings of their humanity. Yet the very nature of dehumanization remains relatively poorly understood. The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization is the first comprehensive and multidisciplinary reference source on the subject and an outstanding survey of the key concepts, issues and debates within dehumanization studies. Organized into four parts, the Handbook covers (...) the following key topics: (I) The history of dehumanization from Greek Antiquity to the Twentieth century, contextualizing the oscillating boundaries, dimensions, and hierarchies of humanity in the history of the ‘West’. (II) How dehumanization is contemporarily studied with respect to special contexts: as part of social psychology, as part of legal studies or literary studies, and how it connects to the idea of human rights, disability and eugenics, the question of animals, and the issue of moral standing. (III) How to tackle its complex facets, with respect to the perpetrator’s and the target’s perspective, metadehumanization and selfdehumanization, rehumanization, social death, status and interdependence, as well as the fear we show towards robots that become too human for us. (IV) Conceptual and epistemological questions on how to distinguish different forms of dehumanization and neighboring phenomena, on why dehumanization appears so paradoxical, and on its connection to hatred, essentialism, and perception. -- Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, history, psychology, and anthropology this Handbook will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as politics, international relations, criminology, legal studies, literary studies, gender studies, disability studies, or race and ethnic studies, as well as readers from social work, political activism, and public policy --- Table of Contents: Introduction. 1. Mapping dehumanization studies. – Maria Kronfeldner. Part I. Oscillating boundaries, dimensions, and hierarchies of humanity in historical contexts. 2. Dehumanization Before the Columbian exchange – Siep Stuurman. 3. 'Humanity' and its Limits in Early Modern European Thought – László Kontler. 4. Enlightenment Humanization and Dehumanization and the Orang-utan – Silvia Sebastiani. 5. Dehumanizing the Exotic in Living Human Exhibitions – Guido Abbattista. 6. Dehumanizing Strategies in Nazi Ideology and their Anthropological Context – Johannes Steizinger. 7. Theorizing the Inhumanity of Human Nature, 1955-1985 – Erika Lorraine Milam. Part II: Further special contexts of dehumanization. 8. The Social Psychology of Dehumanization – Nick Haslam. 9. Dehumanization and the Loss of Moral Standing – Edouard Machery. 10. Dehumanization and the Question of Animals – Alice Crary. 11. Dehumanization, Disability, and Eugenics – Robert A. Wilson. 12. Dehumanization and Human Rights – Marie-Luisa Frick. 13. Dehumanization by Law – Luigi Corrias. 14. Dehumanisation in Literature and the Figure of the Perpetrator – Andrea Timár. Part III: The complex facets of dehumanization. 15. Dehumanization and Social Death as Fundamentals of Racism – Wulf D. Hund. 16. How Status and Interdependence Explain Different Forms of Dehumanization – Susan T. Fiske. 17. Exploring Metadehumanization and Self-dehumanization from a Target Perspective – Stéphanie Demoulin, Pierre Maurage, Florence Stinglhamber. 18. The Dehumanization and Rehumanization of Refugees – Victoria M. Esses, Stelian Medianu, Alina Sutter. 19. Motivational and Cognitive Underpinnings of Fear of Social Robots that become ‘Too Human for Us’ – Maria Paola Paladino, Jeroen Vaes, Jolanda Jetten. Part IV: Conceptual and epistemological questions regarding dehumanization. 20. Objectification, Inferiorization and Projection in Phenomenological Research on Dehumanization – Sara Heinämaa and James Jardine. 21. Why Dehumanization is Distinct from Objectification – Mari Mikkola. 22. On Hatred and Dehumanization – Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang. 23. Dehumanization, the Problem of Humanity, and the Problem of Monstrosity – David Livingstone Smith. 24. Psychological Essentialism and Dehumanization – Maria Kronfeldner. 25. Could Dehumanization Be Perceptual? – Somogy Varga. (shrink)

Introductory essay / Peter Jones -- The usefulness of the arts and the humanities : the case of Descartes / Gábor Boros -- Roads of remembrance : the treatment of imagination and memory in Gerard's Essay on genius / Zsolt Komáromy -- Diderot's untimeliness / László Kisbali ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Melody vs. harmony : Rousseau, or, The aesthetics of vowels / Mária Ludassy ; transl. Zsolt Komáromy -- Judgement and taste : from Shakespeare to Shaftesbury / Ferenc Hörcher (...) -- Lord Shaftesbury's "aesthetic freedom" / Endre Szécsényi -- Why one should imitate the Greeks : on Winckelmann / Sándor Radnóti ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Beauty or beast, or, Monstrous regiments? : Robertson and Burke on women and the public scene / László Kontler -- The concept of nature and the theodicy problem in the Malebranche-Arnauld-Leibniz debate / Dániel Schmal -- Lessing's anti-candide : between reason and revelation / Krisztina Utasi ; transl. Márton Dornbach. (shrink)

Semantics of Detachment A Review of Burkhard Hasebrink, Susanne Bernhardt, and Imke Früh, eds., Semantik der Gelassenheit: Generierung, Etablierung, Transformation [Semantics of detachment: Formation, establishment, transformation] Silke Schwandt Beyond the Untranslatability of Concepts A Review of Martin J. Burke and Melvin Richter, eds., Why Concepts Matter: Translating Social and Political Thought László Kontler Emotional Modernities A Review of Ute Frevert, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, Pascal Eitler, Bettina Hitzer, Nina Verheyen, Benno Gammerl, Christian Bailey, and Margrit Pernau, Gefühlswissen: Eine lexikalische (...) Spurensuche in der Moderne [Emotional knowledge: In search of lexical clues in modernity] Anu Korhonen Beyond Peace as a Process A Review of Julia Harfensteller, The United Nations and Peace: The Evolution of an Organizational Concept Marie-Christine Boilard Human Rights as Conceptual History A Review of Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century Johan Strang. (shrink)

Semantics of Detachment A Review of Burkhard Hasebrink, Susanne Bernhardt, and Imke Früh, eds., Semantik der Gelassenheit: Generierung, Etablierung, Transformation [Semantics of detachment: Formation, establishment, transformation] Silke Schwandt Beyond the Untranslatability of Concepts A Review of Martin J. Burke and Melvin Richter, eds., Why Concepts Matter: Translating Social and Political Thought László Kontler Emotional Modernities A Review of Ute Frevert, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, Pascal Eitler, Bettina Hitzer, Nina Verheyen, Benno Gammerl, Christian Bailey, and Margrit Pernau, Gefühlswissen: Eine lexikalische (...) Spurensuche in der Moderne [Emotional knowledge: In search of lexical clues in modernity] Anu Korhonen Beyond Peace as a Process A Review of Julia Harfensteller, The United Nations and Peace: The Evolution of an Organizational Concept Marie-Christine Boilard Human Rights as Conceptual History A Review of Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century Johan Strang. (shrink)

Semantics of Detachment A Review of Burkhard Hasebrink, Susanne Bernhardt, and Imke Früh, eds., Semantik der Gelassenheit: Generierung, Etablierung, Transformation [Semantics of detachment: Formation, establishment, transformation] Silke Schwandt Beyond the Untranslatability of Concepts A Review of Martin J. Burke and Melvin Richter, eds., Why Concepts Matter: Translating Social and Political Thought László Kontler Emotional Modernities A Review of Ute Frevert, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, Pascal Eitler, Bettina Hitzer, Nina Verheyen, Benno Gammerl, Christian Bailey, and Margrit Pernau, Gefühlswissen: Eine lexikalische (...) Spurensuche in der Moderne [Emotional knowledge: In search of lexical clues in modernity] Anu Korhonen Beyond Peace as a Process A Review of Julia Harfensteller, The United Nations and Peace: The Evolution of an Organizational Concept Marie-Christine Boilard Human Rights as Conceptual History A Review of Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century Johan Strang. (shrink)

Semantics of Detachment A Review of Burkhard Hasebrink, Susanne Bernhardt, and Imke Früh, eds., Semantik der Gelassenheit: Generierung, Etablierung, Transformation [Semantics of detachment: Formation, establishment, transformation] Silke Schwandt Beyond the Untranslatability of Concepts A Review of Martin J. Burke and Melvin Richter, eds., Why Concepts Matter: Translating Social and Political Thought László Kontler Emotional Modernities A Review of Ute Frevert, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, Pascal Eitler, Bettina Hitzer, Nina Verheyen, Benno Gammerl, Christian Bailey, and Margrit Pernau, Gefühlswissen: Eine lexikalische (...) Spurensuche in der Moderne [Emotional knowledge: In search of lexical clues in modernity] Anu Korhonen Beyond Peace as a Process A Review of Julia Harfensteller, The United Nations and Peace: The Evolution of an Organizational Concept Marie-Christine Boilard Human Rights as Conceptual History A Review of Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century Johan Strang. (shrink)

The book aims to provide a comprehensive, new look at business ethics topics and models from a European perspective. Apart from theoretical arguments and empirical data, case studies and games are used to get closer to real life problematics of business. The book is written by leading business ethics professors of the Community of European Management Schools (CEMS). Chapters of the handbook first describe the central issue and the latest theories and practices. They then introduce new approaches and analyze real (...) world examples. Finally conclusions are provided, which include ethical warning signals, proposals for future research and suggested policy recommendations. (shrink)

Each work of Kafka's is so rich in "interrelationships" that it is virtually impossible to engage in reasoning about them without analysis of notions "pertaining to content." Here an estheticist, even one who regards the immanent approach as obligatory, faces a dilemma that, as a general rule, confronts only someone just starting a career as critic: whether, upon having analyzed a work, to leave it to the reader himself to draw the conclusions in social philosophy, or whether to construct his (...) analysis directly on the basis of historical, sociological, philosophical, esthetic, and psychological reasoning. (shrink)

How are ownership relationships distributed in the geographical space? Is physical proximity a significant factor in investment decisions? What is the impact of the capital city? How can the structure of investment patterns characterize the attractiveness and development of economic regions? To explore these issues, we analyze the network of company ownership in Hungary and determine how are connections are distributed in geographical space. Based on the calculation of the internal and external linking probabilities, we propose several measures to evaluate (...) the attractiveness of towns and geographic regions. Community detection based on several null models indicates that modules of the network coincide with administrative regions, in which Budapest is the absolute centre, and where county centres function as hubs. Gravity model-based modularity analysis highlights that, besides the strong attraction of Budapest, geographical distance has a significant influence over the frequency of connections and the target nodes play the most significant role in link formation, which confirms that the analysis of the directed company-ownership network gives a good indication of regional attractiveness. (shrink)

The relationship between humans and non-human animals has received considerable attention recently. Animal advocates insist that non-human animals must be included in the moral community. Consequently, eating meat is, at least in most cases, morally bad. In an article entitled “In Defense of Eating Meat”, Hsiao argued that for the membership in the moral community, the “root capacity for rational agency” is necessary. As non-human animals lack this capacity, so the argument runs, they do not belong to the moral community. (...) Consequently, harming non-human animals for human nutrition can be justified. In this short comment I would like to highlight some of the most important errors of the above argument, primarily from the perspective of a biologist. I conclude that assuming the existence of a mysterious “root capacity for rational agency” is a biological nonsense. It cannot be verified, and it only obscures reality. In my opinion, the greatest problem with Hsiao’s argument is that it tries to defend anthropocentrism, a view that has presumably been the very cause of the spoiled non-human–human relationships. Perhaps adopting a vegan lifestyle is a better solution than quieting one’s conscience. (shrink)

Dr. Laszlo’s hypothesis (2009) is in my opinion appealing on many levels. He proposes that phenomena of apparent transpersonal communication between human beings are due to the intermediary of information-carrying holograms in the reactive quantum vacuum produced by human brain activity. He also suggests that valid information regarding the world in general is available through the same mechanism, on the grounds that all material objects “excite the ground state of the [zero point] fi eld” and produce further such holograms. On (...) this hypothesis we are literally immersed in a sea of information, with the capacity for accessing that information as well as producing more of it by our own thought processes. (shrink)

This paper proposes a specific approach to understanding the nature of technology that encompasses the entire field of technological praxis, from the making of primitive tools to using the Internet. In that approach, technology is a specific form of human agency that yields to (an imperfect) realization of human control over a technological situation—that is, a situation not governed to an end by natural constraints but by specific human aims. The components of such technological situations are a given collection of (...) natural or artificial beings, humans, human aims, and situation-bound tools. By performing technological situation analysis, the essential form of tool making, the complex system of relationships between science and technology, technological practices with and without machines, the finiteness or imperfectness of any technology, and engineering (i.e., the possibility of the creation of technological situations) can be considered. For a better characterization of the approach to technology, the paper also presents a comparison of other philosophies of technology. Following Feenberg’s comparative analysis, the so-called fundamental question of the philosophy of technology is formulated, its two sides are identified, and it is applied for clarification of our position within philosophy of technology. In our approach, all human praxis can be considered to be technological; more precisely, every human activity has a technological aspect or dimension. (shrink)

This essay presents an argument, which it calls the Bias Argument, with the dismaying conclusion that (almost) everyone should significantly reduce her confidence in (too many) philosophical beliefs. More precisely, the argument attempts to show that the most precious philosophical beliefs are biased, as the pervasive and permanent disagreement among the leading experts in philosophy cannot be explained by the differences between their evidence bases and competences. After a short introduction, the premises of the Bias Argument are spelled out in (...) the first part. The second part explains why the objections to the Bias Argument are not compelling. Even though the essay does not adopt the conclusion of the Bias Argument, partly because it seems to be self-defeating, the authors know no plausible way to refute its premises. Thus, the primary aim of the essay is to clarify why the aporetic situation of the Bias Argument arises. (shrink)

By means of the Rollback Argument, this paper argues that metaphysically robust probabilities are incompatible with a kind of control which can ensure that free actions are not a matter of chance. Our main objection to those (typically agent-causal) theories which both attribute a kind of control to agents that eliminates the role of chance concerning free actions and ascribe probabilities to options of decisions is that metaphysically robust probabilities should be posited only if they can have a metaphysical explanatory (...) role but probabilities can explain anything only if chance has a role. First, we reconstruct the Rollback Argument. Second, we criticize the standard ways of reconciling non-chancy control with metaphysically robust probabilities. Finally, we respond to those worries that are related to the thought experiment of the Rollback Argument. (shrink)

It is an increasingly popular view among philosophers that moral responsibility can, in principle, be attributed to unconscious autonomous agents. This trend is already remarkable in itself, but it is even more interesting that most proponents of this view provide more or less the same argument to support their position. I argue that as it stands, the Extension Argument, as I call it, is not sufficient to establish the thesis that unconscious autonomous agents can be morally responsible. I attempt to (...) show that the Extension Argument should overcome especially strong ethical considerations; moreover, its epistemological grounds are not too solid, partly because the justifications of its premises are in conflict. (shrink)

Lakatos constructed his major contribution to the philosophy of science, the methodology of scientific research programmes (MSRP), in the late sixties and early seventies in England, after he had already become estranged from the Popperian philosophy of science. In this paper, we attempt to show that the MSRP was motivated by his philosophical and political ideas from the forties and fifties in Hungary, when he was imbued with the communist ideology and was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Lukács. From (...) this point of view, the MSRP can be considered to be a special representation of Lakatos' earlier political values and practice in the field of history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

This chapter argues that mental fictionalism can only be a successful account of our ordinary folk-psychological practices if it can in some way preserve its original function, namely its explanatory aspect. A too strong commitment to the explanatory role moves fictionalism unacceptably close to the realist or eliminativist interpretation of folk psychology. To avoid this, fictionalists must degrade or dispense with this explanatory role. This motivation behind the fictionalist movement seems to be rather similar to that of Sellars when he (...) came up with the Myth of Jones, his proto-theory of mental concepts. He was faced with the problem of preserving the explanatory status of mental concepts without turning them into proper theoretical entities. By introducing the Sellarsian proto-theory of concepts related to the mental and outlining its main points, this chapter aims to provide a critique of the two versions of mental fictionalism that are arguably the strongest: Adam Toon’s prop-oriented pretence theory and Tamás Demeter’s expressive storyism. (shrink)

The paper argues for the necessity of building up a philosophy of the Internet and proposes a version of it, an «Aristotelian» philosophy of the Internet. First, an overview of the recent trends in the Internet research is presented. This train of thoughts leads to a proposal of understanding the nature of the Internet in the spirit of the Aristotelian philosophy i. e., to conceive the Internet as the Internet, as a totality of its all aspects, as a whole entity. (...) For this purpose, the Internet is explained in four (easily distinguishable, but obviously connected) contexts: we regard it as a system of technology, as an element of communication, as a cultural medium and as an independent organism. Based on these investigations we conclude that the Internet is the medium of a new mode of human existence created by late modern man; a mode that is built on earlier (i. e., natural, and social) spheres of existence and yet it is markedly different from them. We call this newly formed existence web-life. Finally using two enlightening cultural-historical analogies (the reformation of knowledge and the formation of web-life) several fundamental characteristics of the web-life is presented. (shrink)

The need to establish a research field within psychology didactics at secondary level has recently been voiced by several researchers internationally. An analysis of a Swedish case coming out of secondary level education in psychology presented here provides an illustration that complexity thinking – derived from complexity theory – is uniquely placed to consider and indicate possible solutions to challenges, described by researchers as central to the foundation of a new field. Subject-matter didactics is defined for the purpose of this (...) paper as a combination of general didactics and subject- matter content, and considering the international nature of research traditions coming out of psychology, the implications of the results presented here cannot be regarded as limited solely to national concerns. An on-line survey was sent to secondary schools in Sweden. Discussions and lectures along with teaching to the book – alternatively used as inspiration – emerged as central from the thematic analysis of the results, providing the first mapping of teaching practices in secondary level psychology in Sweden. An analysis, founded on complexity thinking – combined with a model enabling a delimitation of the scope of study – focused on time use and the importance placed on self-knowledge, along with the transformation of theory into practice. The former pointing to a teacher centred nested subsystem (e.g. asymmetric relations between teachers and students), the latter pointing to student centred nested subsystems coming out of embodied knowledge (e.g. students as node) where psychological perspectives are learnt through self-reflexion, case studies and everyday life experiences (turning theory to practice), implying a holistic approach. The analysis applied to the Swedish case provides an illustration of how complexity theory has the potential to address challenges at micro and macro level to the establishment of a new research field in psychology didactics and to indicate possible solutions. Psychologies high relevance to everyday life, multi-causality, perspective pluralism, dynamic systems character and scientific character, makes complexity thinking a relevant approach in the consideration of challenges to the establishment of a research field in didactics of psychology. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Walter Gilbert's group has estimated the number of original exons from which all extant proteins might have been constructed. The approach used is subjected to a critical analysis here. It is shown that there are flawed assumptions about both the mechanism and generality of exon‐shuffling and in the sequence comparison procedures employed, the latter failing to distinguish chance similarity from similarity due to common ancestry. These methodological errors lead to the omission of many known cases of (...) exonshuffling and the inclusion of others which may not be genuine. In consequence, the analysis from the Gilbert group cannot give a reliable estimate of those modules that actually participated in exon‐shuffling and provides no information on the number of protein archetypes that did not participate in these processes. (shrink)

_A leading European intellectual reflects on the changing concept of melancholy throughout history_ Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.” Földényi’s extraordinary _Melancholy_, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to such praise. His book, part history of the term _melancholy_ and part analysis of the melancholic disposition, explores many centuries to explore melancholy’s ambiguities. Along the way Földényi discovers the unrecognized role melancholy may (...) play as a source of energy and creativity in a well-examined life. Földényi begins with a tour of the history of the word _melancholy,_ from ancient Greece to the medieval era, the Renaissance, and modern times. He finds the meaning of melancholy has always been ambiguous, even paradoxical. In our own times it may be regarded either as a psychic illness or a mood familiar to everyone. The author analyzes the complexities of melancholy and concludes that its dual nature reflects the inherent tension of birth and mortality. To understand the melancholic disposition is to find entry to some of the deepest questions one’s life. This distinguished translation brings Földényi’s work directly to English-language readers for the first time. (shrink)

Based on a brief overview of the history of ontology and on some philosophical problems of virtual reality, a new approach to virtuality is proposed. To characterize the representational technologies in the Internet age, I suggest that Aristotle’s dualistic ontological system be complemented with a third form of being: virtuality. In the virtual form of being actuality and potentiality are inseparably intertwined. Virtuality is potentiality considered together with its actualization. In this view, virtuality is reality with a measure, a reality (...) which has no absolute character, but which has a relative nature. This situation can remind us the emergence of probability in the 17th century: then the concept of certainty, now the concept of reality is reconsidered and relativized. Currently, in the descriptions of the world created by representational technologies, there are two coherent worldviews with different ontologies: the world is inhabited by actual and potential beings—or all the beings in the world are virtual. (shrink)

Indigenous health is becoming a top priority globally. The aim is to ensure equal health opportunities, with a focus on Indigenous populations who have faced historical disparities. Effective health interventions in Indigenous communities must incorporate Indigenous knowledge, beliefs, and worldviews to be culturally appropriate.