The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism. Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles (...) between the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task--and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity.". (shrink)

The crisis of contemporary art is a paradigmatic example of the crisis of spiritual values in today's world. The main cause of this crisis, it is argued, lies in the spirit of modern sciences. These do not find their object as a ready given, but rather determine it themselves, from their own standpoint, and thus basically produce it. Due to enormous technological development, modern civilization has turned the whole world into the Eleatic One. In materializing the uniform (...) spirit of technology in our world the role of the new audio-visual media: cinema, radio, television, video and the internet, has been crucial. Technology has become a powerful instrument of modern power: it has enabled a concentration of power in the hands of technical, cultural and political administration, as well as automatically expanding mass production and consumption, and finally subordination of people to methodic education, control and manipulation. These are main features of the spirit of the contemporary technical civilization where technology is not understood as something technical but rather as a mode of existence, connected with science and industry. By changing the way in which human life is lived, and the way in which human community is ordered, the purpose and perception of the work of art has also changed. Beauty is not taken to be a result of subjective experience and something belonging to the object as such. The sphere of the aesthetic has become the ground for manifesting relativism and subjectivism in various forms. With the development of knowledge and human power, the contemporary world has begun to sink into nihilism, losing a sense for anything bearing the stamp of individuality. In such a world, everything, including the sphere of spiritual values, is reduced merely to what is useful and efficient.. Kriza savremene umetnosti predstavlja paradigmatican primer krize duhovnih vrednosti u savremenom svetu. Glavni uzrok te krize autor vidi u duhu modernih nauka za koje je karakteristicno da svoj predmet ne nalaze kao gotovu datost, vec ga same odredjuju sa svog stanovista i tako ga iz osnova proizvode. Zahvaljujuci ogromnom razvitku tehnike moderna civilizacija je ceo svet pretvorila u elejsko jedno. Kljucnu ulogu u realizaciji uniformnog duha tehnike u nasoj savremenosti imali su novi audio vizuelni mediji: film, radio, televizija, video i Internet. Tehnika je postala mocan instrument moderne vlasti: ona je omogucila koncentraciju moci u rukama tehnicke, kulturne i politicke uprave, masovnu proizvodnju i potrosnju koje se automatski sire, podcinjavanje ljudi metodskom skolovanju, kontroli i manipulaciji. To su najvaznija obelezja duha savremene tehnicke civilizacije u kojoj se tehnika ne shvata kao nesto tehnicko vec kao jedan nacin egzistencije povezan s naukom i industrijom. Promenom nacina vodjenja ljudskog zivota, nacina uredjenja ljudske zajednice, promenjena je svrha i percepcija umetnickog dela. Lepota se shvata kao plod subjektivnog dozivljaja i ne pripada predmetu kao takvom. Sfera estetskog postala je najsire podrucje za razlicite vrste ispoljavanja relativizma i subjektivizma. Razvojem saznanja i ljudske moci, savremeni svet poceo je da tone u no? nihilizma i da gubi smisao za sve sto ima pecat individualnosti. U takvom svetu sve se, pa i sfera duhovnih vrednosti, svodi samo na ono sto je korisno i delotvorno. (shrink)

Volume 16, Issue 4, September 2019, Page 381-388.

We investigate the indestructibility properties of strongly compact cardinals in universes where strong compactness suffers from identity crisis. We construct an iterative poset that can be used to establish Kimchi–Magidor theorem from (in The independence between the concepts of compactness and supercompactness, circulated manuscript), i.e., that the first n strongly compact cardinals can be the first n measurable cardinals. As an application, we show that the first n strongly compact cardinals can be the first n measurable cardinals while the (...) strong compactness of each strongly compact cardinal is indestructible under Levy collapses (our theorem is actually more general, see Sect. 3). A further application is that the class of strong cardinals can be nonempty yet coincide with the class of strongly compact cardinals while strong compactness of any strongly compact cardinal κ is indestructible under κ-directed closed posets that force GCH at κ. (shrink)

(2013). The “Crisis of Pity” and the Radicalization of Solidarity: Toward Critical Pedagogies of Compassion. Educational Studies: Vol. 49, No. 6, pp. 504-521.

Translated by Ciaran Cronin. In the midst of the current crisis that is threatening to derail the historical project of European unification, Jürgen Habermas has been one of the most perceptive critics of the ineffectual and evasive responses to the global financial crisis, especially by the German political class. This extended essay on the constitution for Europe represents Habermas’s constructive engagement with the European project at a time when the crisis of the eurozone is threatening the very (...) existence of the European Union. There is a growing realization that the European treaty needs to be revised in order to deal with the structural defects of monetary union, but a clear perspective for the future is missing. Drawing on his analysis of European unification as a process in which international treaties have progressively taken on features of a democratic constitution, Habermas explains why the current proposals to transform the system of European governance into one of executive federalism is a mistake. His central argument is that the European project must realize its democratic potential by evolving from an international into a cosmopolitan community. The opening essay on the role played by the concept of human dignity in the genealogy of human rights in the modern era throws further important light on the philosophical foundations of Habermas’s theory of how democratic political institutions can be extended beyond the level of nation-states. Now that the question of Europe and its future is once again at the centre of public debate, this important intervention by one of the greatest thinkers of our time will be of interest to a wide readership. (shrink)

Translated by Ciaran Cronin. In the midst of the current crisis that is threatening to derail the historical project of European unification, Jürgen Habermas has been one of the most perceptive critics of the ineffectual and evasive responses to the global financial crisis, especially by the German political class. This extended essay on the constitution for Europe represents Habermas’s constructive engagement with the European project at a time when the crisis of the eurozone is threatening the very (...) existence of the European Union. There is a growing realization that the European treaty needs to be revised in order to deal with the structural defects of monetary union, but a clear perspective for the future is missing. Drawing on his analysis of European unification as a process in which international treaties have progressively taken on features of a democratic constitution, Habermas explains why the current proposals to transform the system of European governance into one of executive federalism is a mistake. His central argument is that the European project must realize its democratic potential by evolving from an international into a cosmopolitan community. The opening essay on the role played by the concept of human dignity in the genealogy of human rights in the modern era throws further important light on the philosophical foundations of Habermas’s theory of how democratic political institutions can be extended beyond the level of nation-states. Now that the question of Europe and its future is once again at the centre of public debate, this important intervention by one of the greatest thinkers of our time will be of interest to a wide readership. (shrink)

In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism.

The paper deals primarily with the standard question in what exactly, according to Husserl, consists the crisis of the European sciences. In the literature so far, there have been two tendencies on this question, one focusing on the loss of the sciences’ meaningfulness for life, the other emphasizing the inadequacy of their scientificity. Instead of arguing for one of these two options or for some sort of combination of both, another interpretation of this topic will be suggested. The focus (...) will be on Husserl’s notion of historicity and its connection with the concept of life-world. It will be argued that it is the historical detachment of sciences from ideas and consequently the sphere of meaning altogether which lies at the core of their ill state. On this basis, it will show that Husserl’s approach to science in Crisis is actually double. For one, it is an attempt to supplement science with a philosophical justification. The other is a historical de-construction of scientific objectivism as a misleading metaphysical claim concerning the lived world. This second, historical approach is developed exclusively in the Crisis. However, it does bring out questions leading to rethinking the meaning and goals of transcendental phenomenology itself. (shrink)

The twentieth century began with the deconstruction of the image, as it is ending with the effort to restore it. Cubism, dada, and abstract expressionism took apart what, in their various ways, pop art, magic realism, and neoexpressionism have tried to put back together. Tonality in music and narrative in literature have undergone similar change.1 What has been at stake in each case has been the redefinition of a center, a normative or ordering principle as such. Yeats intuited this general (...) phenomenon in his famous observation that “the center cannot hold,” and though whether one applauds or, with Yeats, condemns the result, it is undeniable that the crisis of contemporary culture has been in large part experienced as a deprivation of norms.This sense of deprivation has been most apparent in the plastic arts. The fashioning of images has been one of the primary impulses of human art. It has been the basis of most systems of visual representation and constitutes the earliest record we have off art itself. Its loss or abandonment has been in good part responsible for the bewilderment and hostility much of the general public continues to express toward modern art.The experience of this loss, however, has not been confined to the public alone. For many artists, the sense of modern art’s expressive potential has been tempered by an anxiety about its ultimate direction.2 For these artists, the image had not been transcended but rather rendered inaccessible, and implicitly or explicitly they sought its restoration. At the same time, they were keenly aware that there could be no return to exhausted modes of representation, no looking back except as parody or quotation.3 1. Among the studies comparing changes across the arts in the early twentieth century are Georges Edouard Lemaître, From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature , and Bram Dijkstra, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams . More recently, visualization in cubist art and relativity theory has been compared in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art . For a general overview, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 . Marxist critics, notably Walter Benjamin, have long insisted on the relationship between modernism in the arts and the crisis of the traditional order.2. This is clearly visible in the work and writing of pioneers such as Kandinsky and Klee or, to take a later case, Adolph Gottlieb. The correspondence between Kandinsky and Schönberg is illuminating as well.3. Much of the neoimagistic art of the past twenty-five years falls into these categories, and thus signals a prolongation rather than a resolution of the crisis. Pop art was clearly an art of parody, while work of an artist such as Malcolm Morley might almost be taken as an illustration of Benjamin’s thesis about the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. His “imitations,” like those of Robert Lowell in verse, betray a deep anxiety about mastery and tradition. Much the same can be said for such musical compositions as Lukas Foss’ “Baroque Variations” and “Phorion” or Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia,” to name but a random few among many. Robert Zaller is professor of history and head of the department of history and politics at Drexel University. He was formerly on the faculties of Queens College , the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Miami. His books include The Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflict and The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show in what sense the institutions of the welfare state are key to the struggles that are developing around the debt crisis and against the austerity policies carried out in its name. The first part is dedicated to isolating some elements which contribute to explaining the nature of the current crisis of capitalism and the strategic issues at stake in the policies of expropriation of welfare institutions. The second part emphasizes how, (...) around the question of welfare institutions, the crisis articulates two alternative models of society and regulation of a knowledge-based economy. Within this framework, we will put forward a few lines of analysis in order to think of a different model of development, one which is founded on the ‘Welfare of the Common’ as a new mode of production. (shrink)

The European Stability Mechanism is the rescue fund that may grant loans to struggling euro zone governments by issuing bonds, collectively by the euro zone members. The implementation of the ESM spawned a lot of legal challenges brought to higher judicial authority in Ireland, Austria, Estonia, Germany and Poland. In the fall of 2012 the ESM was subject to legal analysis in the Estonian National Court, the German Constitutional Court, and in the European Court of Justice. Delivering much anticipated rulings (...) in legal challenges to the legal provisions establishing the ESM, courts avoided upsetting the complex arrangements in question by producing legal decision of direct political import and letting EU bailout measures go forward. In looking over different critical responses, we have seen an argument raised by media and legal scholars, according to which courts’ capitulation before the power of financial markets in the EMS rulings represents “a sign of judicial crisis” that marks the weakness of modern European jurisprudence. In light of their importance, we undertake a preliminary semiotic analysis of the ESM rulings of the Estonian National Court, the German Constitutional Court, and in the European Court of Justice. Our analysis aims at discerning the crucial aspects of those rulings is performed on the basis of different semiotic methodologies combined with the refined ideas of the Scandinavian analytical school of the doctrinal study of law. In traditional legal studies there seems to be a taken for granted assumption that there is one analytical way to dissect judicial reasoning of the supreme courts. This paper argues that the manner of analyzing the constitutional reasoning needs to be congruent with the particular research methodology. (shrink)

According to Husserl, the mathematization of the lifeworld involves reducing it, as object of knowledge, to what is measurable, as well as excluding other forms of knowledge of it. This has important implications in relation to the modern conception of rationality, and, significantly, of practical rationality. More precisely, it issues in an impoverishment of the notion of reason. This article examines the idea that the process of commodification associated with the consolidation and expansion of capitalism has motivated another aspect of (...) the mathematization of nature to which Husserl alludes: the mathematization of value. Born from capitalist economy and from practical attitudes, this mathematization of value is a tendency to reduce all value to use value. In such context, this article offers a phenomenological reflection on the crisis of modern rationality, especially in relation to the difficulty to undertake collective actions that follow logics that are different from that of the accumulation of capital, based on the examination of this other aspect of the mathematization of the lifeworld. (shrink)

In The Crisis of Global Capitalism, George Soros claims that the international financial economy is inherently unstable, and that while economists have failed to recognize this because of their commitment to static equilibrium theory, politicians have failed to stabilize the global economy because of their commitment to an unquestioned faith in the complete efficiency of laissez faire. While Soros is right to argue that market participants’ expectations about the future can cause instability, he is wrong to maintain that this (...) has gone unrecognized by economists, and his notion that we live in a world of economic laissez faire is equally mistaken. Indeed, his own analysis of the Asian financial crisis points to the “moral hazard” created by expectations of government intervention, rather than to laissez faire, as the culprit. (shrink)

Trust is indispensable not only for interpersonal relationships and social life, but for good quality healthcare. As manifested in the increasing violence and tension in patient-physician relationships, China has been experiencing a widespread and profound crisis of patient–physician trust. And globally, the crisis of trust is an issue that every society, either developing or developed, has to face in one way or another. Yet, in spite of some pioneering works, the subject of patient-physician trust and mistrust – a (...) crucial matter in healthcare especially because there are numerous ethical implications – has largely been marginalized in bioethics as a global discourse. Drawing lessons as well as inspirations from China, this paper demonstrates the necessity of a trust-oriented bioethics and presents some key theoretical, methodological and philosophical elements of such a bioethics. A trust-oriented bioethics moves beyond the current dominant bioethical paradigms through putting the subject of trust and mistrust in the central agenda of the field, learning from the social sciences, and reviving indigenous moral resources. In order for global bioethics to claim its relevance to the things that truly matter in social life and healthcare, trust should be as vital as such central norms like autonomy and justice and can serve as a potent theoretical framework. (shrink)

In "The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, " Lubica Ucnik examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl s final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Patocka. For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing irrationalism that threatened (...) to undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary life-world: the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl s concerns in today s context, Ucnik first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Patocka. Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocka. Ucnik provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.". (shrink)

Purpose of the article American university and college campus law enforcement, like their peers in American munipal law enforcement agencies, find themselves interacting frequently with civilians experiencing mental health disturbances. An innovative model for law enforcement, the Crisis Intervention Team model, has been developed to address the difficulties law enforcement professionals and civilians in mental health crisis face during encounters. This article explores how CIT can enhance police response to mental health crisis on the college campus. Methodology/methods (...) Methods of applied research were conducted, borrowing from a benchmarking model and including interviews with multiple key informants representing law enforcement and mental health. Informants were affiliated with three universities and multiple municipal jurisdictions in Virginia, USA. Scientific goal The goal was to assess the relevance of CIT on the college campus and explore creative approaches to enhancing campus police response to mental health crisis. Findings The results supported the scholarly literature regarding the efficacy of the CIT model. Creative adaptations to the CIT model for campus possibly can be implemented to address concerns of mental health crisis on campus. Conclusions CIT is a highly innovative model requiring extensive collaboration between law enforcement, mental health agencies, and mental health advocates. As standard qualitative research was not conducted, the sample size of key informants may not have reached saturation. However, findings from the interviews support the body of literature on CIT. The implementation of CIT on the college campus could possibly help to alleviate difficulties on campus arising from mental health crisis, including reducing inappropriate arrest or disciplinary action, improving campus safety, addressing concerns related to threat assessment and management, and enhancing collaborative efforts on campus and with resources in the broader community. (shrink)

The crisis of our times is science in a world without wisdom. The immense intellectual success of modern science and technology have given some of us unprecedented powers to act, which has led to all the great benefits of the modern world, and to the grave global crises we now face. Before modern science, we lacked the power to do too much damage to ourselves or the planet; now we have science, wisdom has become, not a private luxury but (...) a public necessity. Unless we learn to become a bit wiser, sooner or later we will destroy ourselves. But how can we learn to become wiser? We can learn from the last place many would look - namely science! We can learn from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards a wiser world. This is in fact an old idea. It goes back to the 18th century French Enlightenment. But, in developing the idea, the philosophes of the Enlightenment made three gross blunders. They failed to capture correctly the nature of the progress-achieving methods of science; they failed to generalize these methods properly; and, most disastrously of all, they applied their misconstrued scientific method, not to the social world directly, not to the task of making social progress towards an enlightened world, but instead to the task of improving knowledge of social phenomena, to the task of developing social science. This botched version of the profound Enlightenment idea was developed throughout the 19th century, and built into universities in the early 20th century with the creation of disciplines of social science. As a result, academic inquiry today is a botched version of what we need. Instead of giving priority to problems of living, and devoting itself to helping humanity acquire a bit more wisdom, academia today devotes itself to the pursuit of knowledge. That is the key disaster of our times. Our institutions of learning seek knowledge, but fail disastrously to devote themselves to helping humanity acquire a bit more wisdom. If the world is to acquire global wisdom, it needs institutions of learning rationally devoted to the task. As a matter of supreme urgency, we need to bring about a revolution in academia so that the basic task becomes, not just to acquire knowledge, but to seek and promote social wisdom. (shrink)

The crisis of democracy unfolding in the United States was identified by John Paul II as due to misunderstanding the relationship of truth and freedom. This crisis has grown worse due to a libertinism that sees objective moral truths as impositions on both free choice and fulfilling relationships, that identifies self-fulfillment with a self-creation in which one creates one’s own values, that seeks to build democracies apart from moral objectivity, and that dismisses the relevance of God for living (...) well. I argue that democracy cannot survive these libertine errors and that they cannot be successfully countered by utilitarianism, Rawls’s political liberalism, or democratic proceduralism. Survival requires adopting the Thomistic personalism formulated by Aquinas and developed by Karol Wojtyła as indispensable for understanding those lived experiences through which one encounters the ethical moment of self-determination, achieves moral objectivity, avoids loneliness by loving truly, and seeks—via collaboration with women exercising their feminine genius for discerning the welfare of others—the common good, without which democracies collapse into atheistic tyranny. (shrink)

This article analyzes the current state of scientific activity from the point of view of the place and role of its subject: the one performing that activity, the scholar the active participant in the research process, the subject of scientific creativity. Using contemporary phenomena as examples, the author demonstrates the crisis of the subject of scientific activity and the change in the nature of the subjectivity involved here. The article also examines how the development of scientific research influences social (...) processes and vice versa, and shows that the state of crisis is evident. The level of responsibility in the process of constructing various social relationships between scientific entities is insufficient to meet the ethical norms that govern the normal functioning of scientific development, transforming the process of scientific creativity into a set of technological undertakings, a process that threatens to erode and eliminate the subject of scientific activity. (shrink)

Avner Baz presents a critique of the working practices of analytic philosophy in recent decades. He challenges the assumptions on which the philosophical 'method of cases' rests, and he presents a pragmatist conception of language on which the method of cases as used both 'armchair' and 'experimental' philosophers is fundamentally misguided.

The goal of this paper is to provide an account of the role played by logic in the context of what Husserl names the “crisis of European sciences.” Presupposing the analyses offered in the Krisis, I look at Formale und Transzendentale Logik to demonstrate that the crisis of logic stems from the deviation of its original meaning as a “theory of science” and from its restriction to a mere “theoretical technique.” Through a comparison between Aristotelian syllogistic and modern (...) logic, I show why the modern discovery of the purely formal dimension of knowledge which makes possible such a mathematical technization is a positive achievement that hinders at the same time the disclosure of the truly philosophical nature of logic. The correct appraisal of this ambiguous phenomenon will explain why the rise of modern logic represents a decisive challenge for the success of Husserl’s late phenomenological project. (shrink)

Google Trends reveals that at the time we were writing our article on ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’ in 2007 almost nobody was searching the internet for ‘Big Data’. It was only towards the very end of 2010 that the term began to register, just ahead of an explosion of interest from 2011 onwards. In this commentary we take the opportunity to reflect back on the claims we made in that original paper in light of more recent discussions (...) about the social scientific implications of the inundation of digital data. Did our paper, with its emphasis on the emergence of, what we termed, ‘social transactional data’ and ‘digital byproduct data’ prefigure contemporary debates that now form the basis and rationale for this excellent new journal? Or was the paper more concerned with broader methodological, theoretical and political debates that have somehow been lost in all of the loud babble that has come to surround Big Data. Using recent work on the BBC Great British Class Survey as an example this brief paper offers a reflexive and critical reflection on what has become – much to the surprise of its authors – one of the most cited papers in the discipline of sociology in the last decade. (shrink)

The Crisis of German Historicism Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss - two major political thinkers of the twentieth century, both of German- Jewish background and forced into exile in America - were never friends or intellectual interlocutors. Yet they shared a radical critique of contemporary idioms of politically oriented discourses and a lifelong effort to modify reflective approaches to political experience. Liisi Keedus reveals how Arendt's and Strauss's thinking about political modernity was the product of a common intellectual formation (...) in Weimar Germany, by examining the cross-disciplinary debates guiding their early work. Through a historical reconstruction of their shared interrogative horizons - comprising questions regarding the possibility of an ethically engaged political philosophy after two world wars, the political fate of Jewry, the implications of modern conceptions of freedom, and the relation between theoria and praxis - Keedus unravels striking similarities, as well as genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers. (shrink)

“The Crisis of representation” – a discussion that was hold from the middle of 1980 to the middle of 1990 s in social sciences, when the legitimation of the big social theories was questioned as well as the deconstruction of scientific texts and the process of knowing, based on positivistic principles, were done. In this article the author offers the analysis of intellectual context of the development of social sciences (sociology and anthropology) in the crisis. The latter are (...) analyzed in three aspects. Firstly, the crisis concerned the process of knowing, based on principle of the unity of methods and concepts: some authors argued the influential role of language in the construction of reality. Other authors referred to implicit moral and political dimensions while the third provided deconstruction of the scholar figure and the notion of reality. In a similar vein, the crisis was articulated in the critics of scientific texts where implicit meanings and rhetorical devices were found. To the author’s view, the need of reconstruction of the crisis of representation can be explained by the want of more reflexive approach to the practices of social sciences today. (shrink)

The article deals with the problem of representation and considers such points as its necessity in science, contemporary crisis of representation and its possible outcome. The paper also scrutinizes the case of representation of scientific researches by means of scientometrics methods. The need of the representations in science is determined by three points: absence of the direct access to the fact, certainty of the fact which exceeds the certainty of the immediate experience and consolidation of the scientific community by (...) any stable representation. The sense of crisis concerns the confusion of the representation with the reality and the fact that it hides the reality as well. The scientific research is necessarily represented by means of scientometrics methods, which is connected with the unintelligibility of the idea of the scientific researches to the outsiders. The idea of quantitatively estimated scientific outcome replaces the essential, qualitative intentions and impedes to achieve them. This fact evokes the criti­cism against scientometrics methods from the side of scientific community. The authors suggest the ways to overcome this crisis. One of the steps against it implies the attention to the genesis of such type of representation. This means keeping in mind the fact that scientometrics appeared on the basis of the scientific com­munity’s necessity to search for the information about already existing researches and to disseminate the ideas. (shrink)

The article deals with the problem of representation and considers such points as its necessity in science, contemporary crisis of representation and its possible outcome. The paper also scrutinizes the case of representation of scientific researches by means of scientometrics methods. The need of the representations in science is determined by three points: absence of the direct access to the fact, certainty of the fact which exceeds the certainty of the immediate experience and consolidation of the scientific community by (...) any stable representation. The sense of crisis concerns the confusion of the representation with the reality and the fact that it hides the reality as well. The scientific research is necessarily represented by means of scientometrics methods, which is connected with the unintelligibility of the idea of the scientific researches to the outsiders. The idea of quantitatively estimated scientific outcome replaces the essential, qualitative intentions and impedes to achieve them. This fact evokes the criti­cism against scientometrics methods from the side of scientific community. The authors suggest the ways to overcome this crisis. One of the steps against it implies the attention to the genesis of such type of representation. This means keeping in mind the fact that scientometrics appeared on the basis of the scientific com­munity’s necessity to search for the information about already existing researches and to disseminate the ideas. (shrink)

An unnerving parallel to the latest crisis of the Left gently ambushes the reader long before the last page of Rabinbach's monograph has been turned. Between 1904 and 1914 a group of sharp, well-read, generously thoughtful University of Vienna men created a form of Marxism “which has perhaps made more original contributions to die history of the doctrine than any other” — an intellectual and political program tensely poised between orthodox revisionism and Bolshevism. Then, over the next 20 years, (...) they resolutely marched into historical oblivion by paying less attention to “petty tactical artifices” than to elegant thought on behalf of their Utopia, a Bildungsgemeinschaft sans politics. (shrink)

In the current crisis of liberal democracy, Confucianism has been cited as offering superior alternative models of government. With the resources from Dewey’s Pragmatism, this paper defends democracy, which should not be equated to de facto liberal democracies, as desirable for Confucian societies. It examines the affinities between Confucian and Dewey’s conception of the person and community and argues for an understanding of democratic values that brings together Dewey’s democratic values and Confucian ideals of personal cultivation and virtuous governance.

ABSTRACT The financial crisis is, in part, an embarrassment for economic theory. Economists tended to think that severe business cycles had been conquered; that free markets require no regulations to constrain self‐interest; and that large, established companies could be trusted to monitor their own behavior so as to preserve their reputational capital. These three beliefs have proved to be inaccurate. On the other hand, economists justifiably believe that as a process of creative destruction, capitalism requires institutions that allow for (...) innovation and the reallocation of resources toward firms that have successfully innovated. This suggests that we should not condemn wholesale even the financial innovations that played a role in the crisis, which have been remarkably productive and will continue to be, given the right regulations. Nor should economists hesitate to say that political reactions to the crisis that hamper such innovation and reallocation may do far more harm than good. (shrink)

The subject of the paper is the crisis of the concept of enlightenment examined at three levels: polemic-rhetorical, historical-descriptive, and philosophical-normative. The author argues that the inconsistency of substantive definitions of enlightenment does not necessarily result in rejection of this concept but rather in its continuous transformation. By way of conclusion, the author stresses that the normative revival of the concept of enlightenment may be rendered more viable by making a distinction between Enlightenment, as a particular historical period and (...) intellectual legacy, and enlightenment, as a continuous process. He argues that the former is not the only possible form of the latter, but just one of its historical manifestations and one among many agents in the complex and uncertain history of modern process of enlightening. (shrink)