The article will be devoted to such problems as a idea of subsidiarity, a cosmopolitan right and a visitor figure in context and interpretation of ancient and modern philosophy. The article deals with the concept of subsidiarity which is taken as a point of departure for the discipline of borderology, an academic study with Kantian roots. Borderology, according to the principle of subsidiarity, can present as a new field of investigation which invites philosophers and social scientists to replace a “top (...) down” with a “bottom up” procedure. The figure of the visitor is close linked with the experience of subsidiarity which means the freedom and initiative below the level of State. In Immanuel Kant’s strategy for perpetual peace, the figure of the visitor launches a critique of a tendency to self-aggrandizement, characteristic of the modern State and thereby a defense of the political independence of local border regions. The visitor also invites us to see, think and work to liberate our own subjectivity from false voices of sovereignty. Kant articulates the offer of the visitor by bringing in the term Verkehr. Using Kant scholar Otfried Höffe,s methodology we show how idea of subsidiarity is overlooked in international political theory, explain some constitutive principles of borderology, from which is more important is the methodological principle of an intercultural discourse and presents borderology as an anti-Huntingtonian model for border studies. (shrink)

This article is a presentation of borderologyBorderology by relating the concept to three different senses of the word “natureNature”; wild natureNature, natureNature as dynamic activity and c) natureNature as Stoic. It is the third sense of “natureNature” that is my main concern. By “natureNature as Stoic” I am approaching the Stoic idea according to which ManMan and culture are embedded in NatureNature, due to ManMan’s membership not only in his own, but also in the “city of NatureNature”. My point is (...) that Kant’s engagement to establish cosmopolitan rightsCosmopolitan rights is based on a reinterpretation of the relation of manMan and natureNature by taking the Stoic idea of manMan as belonging to another city as his point of departure. To support my argument, the article launches an interpretation of Kant’s idea of the Visitor, which makes the cosmopolitanCosmopolitan right of visiting the other city politically concrete. (shrink)

Interest in Wittgenstein came to Norway in a period of unrest on the Norwegian philosophical scene. The dominant Oslo School of empirical semantics was dissolved during the same period, not because it refused to take the locutionary/ illocutionary distinction seriously enough, but mainly because of its blind spot, caused by its exaggerated honesty. This paper argues that the semantic theory of ?proposition and occurrence? led the empirical semanticist into an intellectual attitude, overlooking language as part of a cultural landscape. Through (...) overlooking this possibility, the empirical semanticist became an animal without a habitat. The way out was an interpretation of the notion of a language?game which makes Wittgenstein a philosopher of culture. (shrink)