Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Movements - General

Gerhard Preyer rekonstruiert in diesem essential den harten Kern von Shmuel N. Eisenstadts allgemeiner Soziologie, wie Eisenstadt sie in der Untersuchung der Beziehung zwischen Handeln (Kreativitat) und Struktur sowie zwischen Kultur und Sozialstruktur durchgefuhrt hat. Preyer ordnet seine Untersuchung in dem von ihm sogenannten semantischen Map als eine evolutionare Universalie des konstitutiven basalen Bezugsrahmens der Erforschung der sozio-strukturellen Evolution an. Aus Eisenstadts Sicht legen die grundlegenden semantischen Maps das zentrale Problem der menschlichen und der...

This book examines "Taylorean social theory," its sources, main characteristics and impact. Charles Taylor's meta-narrative of secularization in the West, prominently contained in his major work A Secular Age (2007), has brought new insight on the social and cultural factors that intervened in such process, the role of human agency, and particularly on the contemporary conditions of belief in North America and Europe. This study discusses what Taylor's approach has brought to the scholarly debate on Western secularization, which has been carried on mostly in sociological terms....

This volume analyses, from a computational point of view, how culture may arise, develop and evolve through time. The four sections in this book examine and analyse the modelling of culture, group and organisation culture, culture simulation, and culture-sensitive technology design.

Different research disciplines have different perspectives on culture, making it difficult to compare and integrate different concepts and models of culture. By taking a computational perspective this book nevertheless enables the integration of concepts that play a role in culture, even though they might...

This collection of papers investigates the most recent debates about individualism and holism in the philosophy of social science. The debates revolve mainly around two issues: firstly, whether social phenomena exist sui generis and how they relate to individuals. This is the focus of discussions between ontological individualists and ontological holists. Secondly, to what extent social scientific explanations may and should, focus on individuals and social phenomena respectively. This issue is debated amongst methodological holists and methodological individualists.

In social...

This book develops a philosophico-methodological analysis of prediction and its role in economics. Prediction plays a key role in economics in various ways. It can be seen as a basic science, as an applied science and in the application of this science. First, it is used by economic theory in order to test the available knowledge. In this regard, prediction has been presented as the scientific test for economics as a science. Second, prediction provides a content regarding the possible future that can be used for prescription in applied economics. Thus, it can be used as a guide for...

The Manifesto of the Communist Party, one of the most important political documents in the history of the world, begins with the prophetic words "A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of communism." This brief book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand modern European history.

The outlook for philosophy in our society is buoyant. But philosophy is like music in that, although it has many practical use+s, its supreme value lies not in any of them but in what it is in itself. It may be that from within the confines of our human imitations we will never be able to find the answers to some of our most fundamental questions. But, as this book has tried to show, we can make such worthwhile progress in our understanding of the human situation that even if we never reach any ultimate goal in that respect that we will find that the journey is a hugely enriching...

Life is often a series of contradictions. On the one hand, our subjective experience of the world seems to indicate that we have choice over our actions. Yet on the other, the physical laws of the universe can be read such that, in a real sense, everything is determined--that we are merely subject to a predetermined series of causes and effects. But how can we live with this contradiction--or is it even a contradiction at all?

In Speak to Me of Insanities, author Deick Conrad Williams explores the interconnected axioms of choice, determinacy, and causality, and he provides a...

Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer is one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. A twenty-year undertaking, this project is a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope investigating the deepest foundations of every major Western institution and discourse.

This single book brings together for the first time all nine volumes that make up this groundbreaking project. Each volume takes a seemingly obscure and outdated issue as its starting point--an enigmatic figure in Roman law, or medieval debates about God's management of...

This book concentrates upon how economic rationalities have been embedded into particular historical practices, cultures, and moral systems. Through multiple case-studies, situated in different historical contexts of the modern West, the book shows that the development of economic rationalities takes place in the meeting with other regimes of thought, values, and moral discourses.
The book offers new and refreshing insights, ranging from the development of early economic thinking to economic aspects and concepts in the works of classical thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and...