The book addresses the constitution of the high culture of modernity as an uneasy unity of the sciences, including philosophy, and the arts. Their internal dynamism and strain is established through, on the one hand, the relationship of the author - work - recipient, and, on the other, the respective roles of experts and the market.

We tested the hypothesis that “good feelings”—the central element of subjective well-being—are associated with interdependence and interpersonal engagement of the self in Japan, but with independence and interpersonal disengagement of the self in the United States. Japanese and American college students (total N = 913) reported how frequently they experienced various emotional states in daily life. In support of the hypothesis, the reported frequency of general positive emotions (e.g. calm, elated) was most closely associated with the reported frequency of interpersonally (...) engaged positive emotions (e.g. friendly feelings) in Japan, but with the reported frequency of interpersonally disengaged positive emotions (e.g. pride) in the United States. Further, for Americans the reported frequency of experience was considerably higher for positive emotions than for negative emotions, but for Japanese it was higher for engaged emotions than for disengaged emotions. Implications for cultural constructions of emotion in general and subjective well-being in particular are discussed. (shrink)

The ArgumentContemporary natural sciences succeed remarkably well in ensuring a relatively continuous transmission of their cognitively relevant traditions and in creating a widely shared background consensus among their practitioners – hermeneutical ends seemingly achieved without hermeneutical awareness or explicitly acquired hermeneutical skills.It is a historically specific – emerging only in the nineteenth century – cultural organization of the Author-Text-Reader relation which endows them with such an ease of hermeneutical achievements: an institutionally fixed form of textual and intertextual practices, normatively posited (...) ways of adequate reception and criticism, etc. The same organization also explains a number of their often-discussed epistemic and cultural characteristics: their depersonalized objectivity, the social closure of their discourse and their reduced cultural significance, the shallow historical depth of their activated traditions, etc.The cognitive structure and the social function of contemporary natural sciences are intimately interwoven with a set of sui generis cultural relations that are partially fixed in the textual characteristics of their literary objectivations. A comparative hermeneutical analysis of natural sciences as a specifically constituted and institutionalized cultural genre or discourse-type brings into relief those contingent cultural conditions and relations to which some of their fundamental epistemological characteristics are bound, or at least with which they are historically closely associated. (shrink)

Is the assessment of a view of life only a matter of personal preference? I argue that there is more than personal preference. I defend the position that a view of life must be useful for the ascription of meaning and therefore needs to fulfil the requirements of the process of ascribing meaning. In this article I analyse this process and its requirements and deduce from them a set of criteria by which views of life can be assessed.

The two main domains of high culture - the arts and the sciences - seem to be completely different, simply unrelated. Is there any sense then in talking about culture in the singular as a unity? A positive answer to this question presupposes that there is a single conceptual scheme, in terms of which it is possible to articulate both the underlying similarities and the basic differences between these domains. This article argues that - at least in respect of ‘classical’ (...) modernity - there is such a framework: the normatively conceived Author-Work-Recipient relation. It allows the disclosure of the paradoxical unity of culture: its two main realms are constituted as polar opposites and thus as strictly complementary. Through such an organization, culture could fulfil an affirmative, compensatory role. At the same time however, it also allowed culture to acquire the character of social critique, a function realized through the antagonistically opposed projects of Enlightenment and Romanticism - projects whose illusions are now evident. (shrink)

In Western medicine the interpretation prevails that mental illness is a psychological and/or biological disorder. Most important concepts in health psychology, such as sense of coherence, self‐efficacy, hope, or dispositional optimism are all very cognition and individual centered. In this individualized perspective, mental illness is constructed in such a way that it can be treated in a dyadic doctor–patient or therapist–patient relationship with the help of drugs or therapeutic techniques. In this article, I would like to develop a contrasting social (...) construction of mental illness. In Umbanda and Candomblé temples in Brazil, what is interpreted in the Western model as illness is understood as a “spiritual problem.” Here, the individual is constructed in relationship to the community, and individual health and healing is footed in moral‐spiritual orders. In presenting the details of my investigation, I will apply Grawe’s common factors as a foil for developing the link between mental illness and its social context. (shrink)

The problematics of alienation have played a rather significant role in the discussions\nabout the sense and relevance of Marxism which have taken place in\nthe last twenty years. &dquo;Back to Marx&dquo; was at least one of the main slogans of\nthat ideological/intellectual movement, which evolved both in the East and\nWest from the mid-fifties and which is sometimes referred to as the trend of\n&dquo;humanist&dquo; Marxism. The idea of a &dquo;Marx-Renaissance&dquo; was undoubtedly\ndirected first of all against the completely petrified framework of institutionalized\nMarxism, turned into (...) a &dquo;religion of state&dquo; legitimating the domination\nof a bureaucratic apparatus over the population of East European societies.\nThe &dquo;rediscovery&dquo; and &dquo;rehabilitation&dquo; of the young Marx, the emphasis on\nthe continuity of his thought, meant not only a reintroduction of a number\nof categories, problems and ideas, which were thought fruitful in their critical\ninsight into contemporary conditions and which the impoverished and distorted\nversion of Marxism in official communist ideology (deliberately) failed\nto take into account: it also meant a global challenge to the appropriation of\nthe Marxian tradition by an apologetic ideology, which disguised its positivistic\ncontent through the form of an old-fashioned, dogmatic metaphysics; it\nwas an attempt to recover the critical/emancipatory meaning of this tradition\nwithin the realities of the twentieth century. It was in this context that the\nnotion of &dquo;alienation&dquo; again reappeared -- as a concept through which one\ncould articulate an attitude which was critical simultaneously of Western\ncapitalist and so-called &dquo;socialist&dquo; Eastern societies. Within the framework of\nEast European realities even the rather abstract character of this notion found\nin young Marx, was well suited to the theoretical vagueness and the practical\nlimitations of this new-found leftist criticism of home-societies. (shrink)

From the late seventeenth century on the idea of culture underwent a gradual transformation. Originally this concept referred essentially to the “refined” way of life of the ruling social elite. Popular culture, on the other hand, refers to the usually collective practices of groups of rural and urban workers taking the form of performance. They were not only excluded from refined culture, but it was regarded as completely unsuitable for them, potentially creating dangerous social aspirations. It is with the great (...) social transformation from feudal to bourgeois society that the idea of refined culture was replaced by that of “high culture” encompassing both the arts and the sciences: works claiming universal human significance. This “high culture” for a considerable time coexisted with the remnants of popular culture. It has been only due to the great technical advances that its true opposite, “mass culture” emerged, at the turn to twentieth century, claiming an empirical universality: being understandable and truly interesting to everyone. In economic respect, there is a competitive relation between high and mass culture. However, it is argued that there can be no cultural competition between them. For they posit differing and potentially co-existing receptive attitudes. The characterisation of this difference and the discussion of the seeming exceptions to the so-articulated conceptual scheme occupies the concluding part of this essay. (shrink)

Rubin and Pearl offered approaches to causal effect estimation and Lewis and Pearl offered theories of counterfactual conditionals. Arguments offered by Pearl and his collaborators support a weak form of equivalence such that notation from the rival theory can be re-purposed to express Pearl’s theory in a way that is equivalent to Pearl’s theory expressed in its native notation. Nonetheless, the many fundamental differences between the theories rule out any stronger form of equivalence. A renewed emphasis on comparative research can (...) help to guide applications, further develop each theory, and better understand their relative strengths and weaknesses. (shrink)

If we think of recognition as the practical relation consciously enacted by concerned individual subjects as social actors, which allows them to fulfil their intersubjectively valid social roles, this by no means exhausts the significance that recognition is accorded by Hegel. In fact the problem of recognition is central to the understanding and evaluation of Hegel’s metaphysical system. Thus a close scrutiny of the presentation of self-consciousness in Phenomenology of Spirit and the interpretative difficulties it poses leads on to the (...) question of the subject and Hegel’s distinction between finite, accidental individuals and the true subject in his system: the concept of Spirit, understood not as a separate entity but as a system of relations, objectified in the historical forms of the Absolute Spirit. But what is the price of Hegel’s metaphysics of subjectivity? Hegelian recognition signifies the recognition by individuals of recognition in its truth, that is, the self-recognition by finite individuals that they participate in Spirit as the true universal subject to the degree that they recognize their shared world of actions as the world of their own making. Modernity is therefore defined for Hegel as the recognition and realization of ‘conscious freedom’, whose telos lies in the actualization of universal reciprocal recognition that brings the unfreedom of history to an end. The idea of freedom and the thesis of the ‘end of history’ remain, however, the preserve of the thinking few. Hegelian recognition and with it Hegel’s whole metaphysical system founders on the rock of finitude, on the unfreedom of finite human beings. (shrink)

The dynamic differentiation of various social spheres in modernity has not been matched by any similarly dynamic development of new forms of trust which would help to maintain the connection between the impersonal/ systemic forms and the personal ones. Instead, we face today an increasing gap between the forms of trust related to the proliferating ‘abstract systems’ and the personal forms of trust. It is, above all, in this context that the topic of friendship became reintroduced into theoretical debates in (...) search for a model of human relationships which might bridge this gap. It is argued that such transformation of friendship into a ‘radical utopia’ is only the latest phase in the long series of historical transformations it has undergone in the context of changing social articulation of the relation between privacy and publicness. (shrink)

Introduction, by R. A. Markus.--St. Augustine and Christian Platonism, by A. H. Armstrong.--Action and contemplation, by F. R. J. O'Connell.--St. Augustine on signs, by R. A. Markus.--The theory of signs in St. Augustine's De doctrina Christiana, by B. D. Jackson.--Si fallor, sum, by G. B. Matthews.--Augustine on speaking from memory, by G. B. Matthews.--The inner man, by G. B. Matthews.--On Augustine's concept of a person, by A. C. Lloyd.--Augustine on foreknowledge and free will, by W. L. Rowe.--Augustine on free will (...) and predestination, by J. M. Rist.--Time and contingency in St. Augustine, by R. Jordan.--Empiricism and Augustine's problems about time, by H. M. Lacey.--Political society, by P. R. L. Brown.--The development of Augustine's ideas on society before the Donatist controversy, by F. E. Cranz.--De Civitate Dei, XV, 2, and Augustine's idea of the Christian society, by F. E. Cranz.--Chronological table.--Note on further reading (p. [422]-423). (shrink)

Hegel's Philosophy of Right represents a unique theory type in the history of political philosophy. It is a normative theory that departs in its construction from an empirical facticity without reducing norms to facts. It unifies teleological and deontic considerations. It is a theory of the normatively requisite institutional structures able to realize the demands of a historically particular form of individuality, and simultaneously it presents the phenomenology of modern subjectivity committed to the ultimate value of true freedom. In this (...) way it aims to transform into genuine self-knowledge the illusory social-political self-image of its addressees. The paper discusses the connection between this phenomenological method and Hegel's conception of freedom - his critique of unconditional, abstract normativity, his solution to the problem of collision between equally valid norms and the possible relevance of his methodological principles to contemporary political philosophy. (shrink)

Adorno’s extended conception of ‘culture industry’ renders the usual criticism of his views as ‘elitist’ meaningless. The same expansion creates, however, logical strains and contradictions in his analysis of the character and function of the culture industry: a strain in its ‘psychosocial’ and ‘status compulsion’ interpretation. In his late work Adorno attempts to solve this contradiction, but at a heavy price, by creating a conceptual barrier between pleasure and happiness.

Culture and Enlightenment are the two words that best characterise the essence of György Markus's career, in whose honour this book is published. Markus devoted the last twenty years of research towards a theory of cultural objectivations and their pragmatics, and the great depth of his knowledge of the history of culture and philosophy informs all his teaching and writing. The pursuit of Enlightenment ideals attains reflective self-consciousness in Markus' works; forged in the knowledge of its own historicity, of the (...) embeddedness of rationalities in culture and in an awareness of the paradoxes that cling to the conscious affirmation of ideals which are no longer self evident or beyond questioning. In taking up the challenge of these paradoxes, Markus spans the whole history of modern philosophy and culture with a matchless authority.This book draws together contributions from leading figures in contemporary philosophy, who are also friends, colleagues and former students of György Markus. The book is divided into two sections: the first presents critical assessments of various aspects of Markus' wide-ranging works; the second presents contributions in celebration of his influence and his wide interests. In their critical assessment of Markus' work and in the demonstration of his influence, the contributors hope to convey something of the breadth and something of the excitement of doing philosophy in the company of György Markus. (shrink)

Causal inference plays a central role in behavioral science. Historically, behavioral science methodologies have typically sought to infer a single causal relation. Each of the major approaches to causal inference in the behavioral sciences follows this pattern. Nonetheless, such approaches sometimes differ in the causal relation that they infer. Incremental causal inference offers an alternative to this conceptualization of causal inference that divides the inference into a series of incremental steps. Different steps infer different causal relations. Incremental causal inference is (...) consistent with both causal pluralism and anti-pluralism. However, anti-pluralism places greater constraints the possible topology of sequential inferences. Arguments against causal inference include questioning consistency with causation as an explanatory principle, charging undue complexity, and questioning the need for it. Arguments in favor of incremental inference include better explanation of diverse causal inferences in behavioral science, tailored causal inference, and more detailed and explicit description of causal inference. Incremental causal inference offers a viable and potentially fruitful alternative to approaches limited to a single causal relation. (shrink)

Adorno's first musical monograph, his book on Wagner, represents his most consistent effort to apply commodity analysis to one of the seminal oeuvres of cultural modernity. The notion of commodity character and the associated concept of phantasmagoria are to fulfil the function of mediation between the more narrowly conceived technical analysis of Wagner's music and the disclosure of its aesthetic-social substance, providing the ultimate social ground for their unity. This project, however, fails. Commodity analysis proves to be radically vague, incapable (...) of disclosing the historical specificity of the music dramas either in respect of the tradition of Vienna classicism, or the ensuing development of aesthetic modernism. At the same time its application is burdened by contradictions. Ultimately, Adorno's critical interpretation relapses into a form of ideology critique the simplifications of which he originally attempted to overcome. (shrink)

" ... the political situation into which Poland has been brought is a thoroughly revolutionary one, and it leaves Poland with no other choice but to be revolutionary or perish.".

The detrimental effect of the public recital on the quality of epic production in the first century is a stock theme both in ancient and in modern literary criticism. While previous studies on the epic recital emphasize its negative effects, or aim at its reconstruction as social reality, I focus on its conflicting representations by the ancients themselves and the lessons that we can learn from them. The voices of critics and defenders reveal anxieties about who controls the prestigious high (...) genre of epic and about the construction of gender and social status through epic's public performance. Critics of the recitatio such as Horace, Persius, Petronius and Juvenal represent it as an informal and popular event that panders to public taste and incurs infamy. These critics charge that the epic recital has an effeminizing effect both on the recitator and on his audience, a charge traditionally advanced against orators and actors. Because the epic recital in Rome lacks a performative context similar to the rhapsodic performances in Greece, its public image mirrors that of other public performances . The main point of divergence is the presence of the book, the symbol of permanent fame, which casts upon the recital the shadow of an evanescent entertainment. Defenders see the recital as instrumental to the maintenance of literature's value in society. This means that well into the first century there were those who felt nostalgia for the epic recital as a bulwark of male aristocratic values and who wanted to reclaim its prestige. Both Statius as a poet, who performed regularly at Domitian's court, and Suetonius, who acted as Hadrian's ab epistulis some twenty years after Statius' death, defend the waning reputation of the contemporary epic recital in an effort to reclaim it as a prestigious component of imperial literary culture. While critics unanimously negate the recital's role in the achievement of poetic fame in favor of the book, Suetonius chooses anecdotal evidence about the early performances by grammarians grammarians that show the important role of the recital in forging poetic fame. The emperor and the members of the new aristocracy whom Statius explicitly names as the target audience of his epic recitals have a stake in reclaiming for imperial culture an institution that went back to the second century B.C.E. and carried the prestige of an aristocratic event. (shrink)