Social Systems on the Cross

Author(s):  
Marinos Diamantides ◽  
Anton Schütz

While early 20th century Social Darwinism has been discredited, post-WW2 theories have re-emphasized Darwin's notion of the environment. On this basis, and substituting social systems for natural species, society has been analyzed as a system-in-evolution, a machinery that, reflexively or self-referentially, produces itself at every moment anew. Modern society, according to social systems theory, continuously makes itself, thanks to countless simultaneous communications taking place at once. There are two equally disquieting lessons here. On the one hand, modern law, understood as the communicative system that applies the distinction lawful/unlawful to everything that gets in its way, is placed within an environment constituted by other communicative social systems (the economy, politics, religion, art etc) and the conditions created by those. On the other hand, social systems at large are separated from the realm of human consciousness, i.e. of collective or individual identity (the ‘psychic systems’). While ‘social' and ‘psychic’ systems never meet, they rely on absolute indifference with respect to their other side, as only this indifference enables especially social systems to assure their (superior) fact-creating potential. Our own project consists in spelling out the implications of this scissile sense of ‘meaning’, at once understood as a shorthand for what is actually happening (fragmented communications) and as consciousness-as-identity (imaginary unity).

Author(s):  
Tikhon V. Spirin ◽  

The article addresses the core anthropological concepts of Carl Du Prel’s philosophy and explores the significance of those concepts for the Russian spiritualism of the late 19th – early 20th century. The Du Prel’s theory built up upon the concept of Duality of the Human Being. Du Prel insisted on simultaneous co-existence of two subjects – one pertaining to the sensible world and the other related to the extrasensory (‘the transcendental subject’) – that are divided by the ‘perception threshold’. He argued that in dormant and somnambular state the threshold would shift and thus enable the Transcendental Subject to act in the Extrasensory World. Du Prel believed that the human evolution is not over yet. He suggested that one could estimate what the new form of the human life would be judging by the conditions in which the transcendental subject comes out. Like many other spiritualists, Du Prel foretold the upcoming dawn of a new era where the boundary between science and religion on the one part and the Sensible and Extrasensory World on the other part will vanish. Anthropological doctrine of Du Prel correlated well with the views on the future human being held by the Russian spiritualists, and therefore he became one of the most reputable authors for them


Author(s):  
Beloglazov I.A. ◽  
Biryukova N.V. ◽  
Nesterova N.V.

The authors of the work analyzed the sources that characterize the influence of absinthe on human culture. Absinthe, an alcoholic drink containing wormwood (Artemisia absinthium L.), was banned in the early 20th century due to unusual properties attributed to the side effects of drinking this alcohol. This review contains information about the history of the drink. On the one hand, absinthe left its mark in the culture as a “muse” for the creators, remaining forever imprinted in the works of various types of art, on the other hand, it became the main enemy for the most part of society because of the harmful properties that was characterized by researchers of the 19th century.


2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Linsky ◽  
Edward N. Zalta

Logicism is a thesis about the foundations of mathematics, roughly, that mathematics is derivable from logic alone. It is now widely accepted that the thesis is false and that the logicist program of the early 20th century was unsuccessful. Frege's [1893/1903] system was inconsistent and the Whitehead and Russell [1910–1913] system was not thought to be logic, given its axioms of infinity, reducibility, and choice. Moreover, both forms of logicism are in some sense non-starters, since each asserts the existence of objects (courses of values, propositional functions, etc.), something which many philosophers think logic is not supposed to do. Indeed, the tension in the idea underlying logicism, that the axioms and theorems of mathematics can be derived as theorems of logic, is obvious: on the one hand, there are numerous existence claims among the theorems of mathematics, while on the other, it is thought to be impossible to prove the existence of anything from logic alone. According to one well-received view, logicism was replaced by a very different account of the foundations of mathematics, in which mathematics was seen as the study of axioms and their consequences in models consisting of the sets described by Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF). Mathematics, on this view, is just applied set theory.


Mäetagused ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 71-88
Author(s):  
Merili Metsvahi ◽  

The article gives a short overview of the Estonian werewolf tradition in the 16th and 17th centuries and a glimpse into the 19th–20th-century werewolf beliefs. The image of werewolf of the earlier and later periods is compared. The differences between the images of these two periods are explained with the help of the approaches of Tim Ingold and Philipp Descola, which ground the changes in the worldview taking place together with the shift from the pre-modern society into modernity. The mental world of the 16th–17th-century Estonian and Livonian peasant did not encompass the category of nature, and the borders between the human being and the animal on the one side and organism and environment on the other side were not so rigid as they are in today’s people’s comprehension of the world. The ability to change into a wolf was seen as an added possibility of acquiring new experiences and benefits. As the popular ontology had changed by the second half of the 19th century – the human mind was raised into the ultimate position and the animal was comprehended as being inferior – the transformation of a man into an animal, if it was seriously taken at all, seemed to be strange and unnatural.


Author(s):  
Runa Das Chaudhuri

Early 20th-century Bengal witnessed the budding of a constituency of spiritually inclined psychic healers who provided miraculous treatment to ailing patients through practices widely referred to as sammohan. Practicing healers seemed to recklessly borrow from Western healing therapies of mesmerism and hypnotism, on the one hand, and simultaneously appear, on the other, to vigorously harp, albeit covertly on the mystical kernel of indigenous occult tantric knowledge. This, I argue, had the marks of an unsure modernity, which produced its own enchantment ironically in the public discourse by retaining the mystical essence of occultism under the shell of popular healing. This article explores whether practices of sammohan placed between the medically sober and the erotically intoxicated provide a way to unravel the complexities of the “Bengali modern.” It also investigates whether the occult turn of psychic healing constituted an enormous, complex, and internally complicated phenomenon yet posited simultaneously a coherent response to the dilemmas of modernity.


2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-21
Author(s):  
Barry Gibson ◽  
Jane Gregory ◽  
Peter G Robinson

The aim of this paper is to outline how a theoretical intersection between systems theory and grounded theory could be articulated. The paper proceeds by marking that the important difference between systems theory and grounded theory is primarily reflected in the distinction between a revision of social theory on the one hand and the generation of theory for the social world on the other. It then explores figures of thought in philosophy that relate closely to aspects of Luhmann’s theory of social systems. An effectual intersection, an operational intersection, an intersection based on the concept of primary redundancy and a global/transcendental intersection between systems theory and grounded theory are proposed. The paper then goes on to briefly outline several methodological consequences of the intersection for a grounded systems methodology. It concludes by discussing the sort of knowledge for the social world that is likely to emerge from this mode of observation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 238
Author(s):  
Peter Worsley

The present essay is about the interpretation of paintings and how an interest which Balinese painters display in gender relationships in the context of illustrations of ritual in their narrative works on the one hand, contrasts with strong expressions of Dutch disapproval of the despotic nature of the rule of Balinese kings and consequentially the unjust treatment of women in Balinese society on the other. With this in mind, the present paper first considers the representation of gender relationships in a number of Balinese paintings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then turns to a discussion of the understanding of Balinese gender relationships of two members of Dutch colonial society in the Dutch East Indies, one a senior bureaucrat, Graaf C.W.S van Hogendorp and the other the protestant missionary R. van Eck. I discuss a play by Graaf C.W.S van Hogendorp, ‘Pièce de Circonstance sur la conquête de Bali 1846’, written to celebrate the victory of the Dutch army over the Kingdom of Buleleng in 1846 and an article about ‘Het Lot der Vrouw op Bali’ (‘The lot of the Balinese woman’), published in the journal Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde in 1872 by the protestant missionary R. van Eck.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-59
Author(s):  
Iris Clever

Abstract This article examines to what extent nationalist and sexist sentiment and international politics shaped attempts to universalize measurement practices in physical anthropology. On the one hand, racial scientists were interested in creating an international community with a universalized methodology and developing a global taxonomy of human races. On the other hand, they chauvinistically guarded their localized practices from outside influences. By following the standardization efforts of British biometrician Miriam Tildesley, a female racial scientist adamant on unifying a research field largely dominated by men from different countries, this article argues that intersecting forces of nationalism, internationalism, and sexism shaped anthropological practices in the early 20th century.


2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Roberts

Middling youth were centre stage in research on school-to-work transitions from the early-20th century up to and throughout the 1980s. Since then they have been overshadowed by sociological attention to the young unemployed/NEETs on the one side, and university students and graduates on the other. Simultaneously, economists have been crowding out sociologists in the study of education-to-work transitions, especially in the middle ground. However, this paper argues that this is not just a case of the sociological gaze missing the middle. It is argued that old middling labour market destinations have diminished in number, and the new middle remains elusive because the employment tends to be precarious. Thus today's middling groups of school-leavers must either try to move-up or face career-long threats of descent to the bottom.


Author(s):  
Pedro P. Palazzo

Traditional towns in Portugal and Brazil have evolved a finely tuned coordination between, on the one hand, modular dimensions for street widths and lot sizes, and on the other, a typology of room shapes and layouts within houses. Despite being well documented in urban history, this coordination was in the last century often interpreted as contingent, a result of the limited material means of pre-industrial societies. But the continued application and gradual adaptation of these urban and architectural patterns through periods of industrialization and economic development suggests that they respond both to enduring housing requirements and to piecemeal urban growth. This article surveys the persistence of urban and architectural patterns up to the early 20th century, showing their resilience in addressing modern housing and urbanization requirements.


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