High Culture is a collection of essays containing reflections on addiction. Some of the essays are original and some are reprints. The volume is divided into two sections: the first dealing with literature, philosophy, and the arts and the second with sociology, psychology, and the media. The editors promise something different from the usual “insistent drive to medicalize, discipline, rehabilitate, and contain the subject of drugs within frameworks that disguise deeply rooted moral and religious fears, values and beliefs (...) or prejudices” and that addiction will emerge as something “not reducible to substance abuse or compulsiveness per se” .The editors also lay claim to demonstrating the “complexity, creative value and diversity” of addiction in place of what they describe as the limited …. (shrink)

The authors attempt to outline a notion of high culture and its role within education, following a broad modern tradition springing from Matthew Arnold. The book is written with a concern for clarity and argument that is not always found within that tradition, and the authors reject the elitist conclusions of many who have followed the tradition, such as Eliot, Leavis, Bantock and Scruton.

The author claims that recent publications on the theory of music and literature show some new trends in constructivist philosophy of culture. One of them is the idea of subconscious roots of cultural artifacts that has been applied in music studies. It was at this point it becomes clear that in order to identify variants of constructivism as indicators you can use some very simple assumptions, for example, the assumption of the possibility of the ontological significance of the “artistry" (...) of the text. Such an assumption implicitly contains epistemological realism. So it becomes clear that realism is not something completely dead, including those for constructivism. Where constructivism allows the existence of good (“classic") texts, that is, of “high culture", he is tolerant to realism. On the other side, rejection of the classics is a sign of the radical versions of constructivism. There is possibility of fixing the difference between ontologies, which differ among themselves as a state of loss and forgetting the reality. (shrink)

My theme at its most general is the relation between culture and power; at its most specific, the relation between a particular type of culture, so-called high culture, and two types of power, namely governmental power, and the related but more diffuse power prevailing in society at large.

Theories of a new phase of earth history, the Anthropocene, position human world-making activity as a bio-geological force. Social interventions into earth systems have been extensive and malignant, altering the earth’s surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of nutrient cycling. To adapt and respond to emerging planetary dangers requires the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines. In this paper, I argue that a coalition of the arts and sciences might draw upon György Márkus’s extensive studies of the topography of ‘ (...) class='Hi'>high’ culture. I reconstruct Márkus’s conceptual map of the arts and sciences as regions of ‘high’ cultural activity, each with their own criteria of value yet subject to an integral unity and shared ambition. Both regions of ‘high’ culture aim to create original works of significance for an engaged public. I then examine the implications of Márkus’s claim that the classical vocation of robust, public-oriented culture has run aground. The field of problems that this paper traverses are not the ecological crises of the Anthropocene per se. I attend rather to Márkus’s account of the neoliberal erosion of cultural infrastructure where democratic publics might engage with such problems. (shrink)

Addresses the place of addiction in modern art, literature, philosophy, and psychology, including its effects on the works of such thinkers and writers as Heidegger, Nietzsche, DeQuincey, Breton, and Burroughs.

It would be idle to pretend that Mr. Macdonald's article is not about a most serious problem. In this age of disillusion one of the most serious grounds for concern, one of the deepest sources of the disillusion is the state of popular culture, if by culture we mean anything more than the sum of intellectual, moral, aesthetic habits of a people in any given moment of historical time. For to many observers who are hostile to the political (...) movement of democracy, the present state of popular culture justifies all their fears, and to believers in democracy, the state of popular culture deceives some of the most profound hopes of the democratic movement since the French Revolution. And at this stage of the argument it is not, I think, worth making the distinction between popular and mass culture that Mr. Macdonald usefully insists on. Where the optimists have been deceived and the pessimists confirmed in their pessimism has been in the kind of culture that the people now choose or accept, and it does not, at the moment, matter whether the ‘people’ and the ‘masses’ are identical concepts. (shrink)

György Márkus’s post-Marxist writings on high culture are evaluated in terms of their possible contribution to a neo-Marxist theory of high culture. Because of the highly essayistic character of Márkus’s presentation, this necessarily involves investigation of their dependence on his previous work. According to Márkus, Marxism can be critically reconstructed and superseded on the basis of an independent theorization of the consequences of Marx’s most basic theoretical move: the identification of production as paradigmatic for social action (...) in general. In section 3 this idea of the production paradigm is criticized. In section 4 I show how in Márkus this idea is made the basis of an ostensibly historicist concept of critical theory, in which not only the theory’s object is historicized, but the theory is itself organized as an articulation of the needs of historically specific constituencies. I argue, however, that in reality the idea of the production paradigm stands in fundamental contradiction to this methodological ideal. Márkus’s theory of high culture likewise combines historicist ambitions and reliance on the dehistoricized ‘production paradigm’. I argue that his ‘systematically dialectical’ deployment of this notion allows a quasi-historicist conceptualization of modern high culture as a whole, but that this method simultaneously renders theorization of high culture’s connection with more ‘infrastructural’ social relations problematic, and tends to exclude reflection on the ‘utopian moment’ in high cultural practice today. Section 5, and some remarks at the end of Section 11 suggest horizons for a genuinely historicist theory of high culture, in relation to the constitutive failure of Marxism to confront its dependency on the institutions of high culture, and also suggest a possible confluence and conflict with Roy Bhaskar’s work. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Kathleen Stock’s book Material Girls, by way of imitation. I have attempted to write a faux chapter in the book’s style, identifying four moments in overcoming the low-high culture divide in responses to the arts.

In the first part of this essay I sum up the theoretical genesis and foundations of Márkus’s theory of culture as a theory of modernity. Central to the high culture of modernity, defined in terms of the future-oriented creation of the new, is the structure of authorship, work, and reception that pertains across the sciences, philosophy, the humanities, and the arts. In the second part I question the scope of the concept in relation to the arts and (...) philosophy in the present and point to the inconsistency internal to Márkus’s conception that manifests itself in his neglect of the Romantic tradition in philosophy from Schelling to Heidegger, despite the integral role that the opposition between Enlightenment and Romanticism plays in his theory of cultural modernity. (shrink)

Who has the power to institutionalize culture? How is it that cultural forms become legitimated and appropriated by certain groups? And what are the organizational forms that guarantee the continuity of the interlocks among classifications, etiquette, and resources in the long run? This article explores these questions by observing the struggle over the institutionalization of opera as high culture during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Buenos Aires, a region of the world understudied by (...) cultural sociologists. It contends that to answer these questions we need to observe the contested dynamics though which the process of institutionalization happens. It also shows how this contestation affects, in the long-term, the processes of evaluation and legitimation of the classification upheld, and the consequences it has in terms of audience stratification. In the Discussion section, I present a novel framework for the study of pathways to high culture institutionalization that highlights how the role of the state and competing stakeholders can introduce variable relationships among the elites, the arts, and social closure. (shrink)

Defenders of high culture can be found invoking many and various allies. Many are, we think, out of place. These defences raise issues that we do not need to worry about or themselves create unnecessary difficulties for clarity of thought on these matters. In this chapter we will touch upon a number of such irrelevancies. We will begin by examining the assimilation of high culture to religion and religious concerns in the thought of Eliot and Scruton: (...) this will allow us to indicate our stance on the place of religion in schools. We will then examine some psychological and sociological issues that Bantock has invoked in defending his secular vision of the role of culture, and conclude with Barrow's curious identification of culture with general intelligence. (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)

Rachel Scarborough King’s Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres offers a fascinating investigation into the culture of letter-writing in the long eighteenth century,...

I>Diversity High offers special insight into school change and social transition in racially divided communities.

It is a study of the discursive construction of high achievers’ identities in American culture. A corpus of 100 commencement speeches delivered during 2016 and 2017 graduation ceremonies in American universities has been used to analyse how commencement speakers, as a rule highly successful individuals, construct their identities through discourse. Besides celebrating academic achievements, one of the communicative purposes of the commencement speech is giving the graduates advice for the future. It has been investigated how the speakers legitimize (...) their qualifications as a role model and the source of life wisdom. Due to the specificity of the discourse to be investigated, based on the foundations of American ethos of hard work and drive for success, Critical Discourse Analysis has been chosen as a methodological approach which can most adequately help analyze the discursive formation of identity. As the discourse to be analyzed is agentive discourse, culture-specific both in its form and content, I have decided to combine Critical Discourse Analysis with cultural studies. (shrink)

The article presents an in-depth analysis of epistemic cultures in conflict by exemplifying the epistemic conflict between high energy physics and astronomy which emerged after the discovery of “dark energy” and the accelerating expansion of the universe. It suggests a theoretical framework combining Knorr-Cetina’s concept of epistemic cultures with Whitley’s theory of dependencies in the sciences system, which explains that epistemic conflicts occur, if the strategic and functional dependency of two incommensurable epistemic cultures is suddenly growing. The pre-history of (...) the conflict is discussed on a micro-level for the two research groups involved in the breakthrough. The analysis of the consequent epistemic conflict on a macro-level reveals that it embraces the preferred epistemic strategy, the collaboration style, the instrumental concepts and the question how social legitimacy can be generated. (shrink)

This article employs empirical history and the philosophy of science to study cultural convergences and divergences in international collaborations in high energy physics. We examine two cases: (1) E-36, an experiment on small angle proton-proton scattering conducted during the Cold War at the National Accelerator Laboratory (NAL) in the USA by Soviet and US scientists and (2) an ongoing collaborative experiment, NICA, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR, Dubna), which is a project devoted to heavy-ion physics. The (...) JINR, particularly its Laboratory of High Energy Physics (formerly the “Laboratory of High Energies”) is the main mediating actor between these two cases (i.e., E-36 and NICA), as the majority of Soviet participants in E-36 were representatives of the Institute. Using empirical data collected through archival searches, field observations conducted at JINR in 2018–2019, and in-depth interviews, we tell a story of cultural differences in high energy physics by applying the concepts of ‘trading zones’ (P. Galison) and the translation of interests in actor-networks (B. Latour, M. Callon and others). We analyze three types of cultural diversity (specialization, nationality, and generational) in light of the implications of temporal context and the dichotomy between East and West, showing the roles cultural diversity plays in scientific collaboration (which is an integral part of as well as obstacle to scientific research that can nevertheless provide learning opportunities). Our study aims to demonstrate how disunity and diversity may function in scientific research and how high energy physics collaborations can remain productive despite sometimes deep divergences, including those between East and West. (shrink)

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.

: The purposes of this critical analysis are to clarify why high stakes testing reforms have become so prevalent in the United States and to explain the connection between current federal and state emphases on standardized testing reforms and educational opportunities. The article outlines the policy context for high stakes examinations, as well as the ideas of testing and accountability as major tenets of current education reform and policy. In partial explanation of the widespread acceptance and use of (...) standardized tests in the United States, we argue that there is a pervasive testing culture, in addition to other contributing factors such as administrative utility, profit motives, and political ideology. Finally, we offer a critique of high stakes testing reforms in light of concerns about equality of educational opportunity. (shrink)

At the Intersection of High and Mass Culture analyses the contradictions and interaction between high and low art, with particular reference to Hollywood and European cinema. Written in the essayist, speculative tradition of Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno, this study also includes analyses of several key films of the 1980s. Tracing the boundaries of such genres as film noir, science fiction and melodrama, it demonstrates how these genres were radically expanded by such filmmakers as Neil Jordan, Chris (...) Merker and Georges Franju. This work also reflects on kitsch, the star system, racial and gender stereotypes, and the nature of audience participation. While defining the conditions under which the symbiotic relationship between high and mass culture can be cross-fertilising, this study stresses their inevitably contradictory characteristics. (shrink)

Theoretical approaches on the relationship between 'high' and 'popular' culture appear side by side with case studies covering classical and Heavy Metal music, TV series and pornographic films, zombies and 'Creature Features', philosophically infused comics and hypertext literature.

Through listening to the voices of students, educators and community members can begin to reconstruct the culture of urban schools that are often full of stories about student deficits, genetic explanations about achievement, and cultural mismatch theories that may be traced to historical and sociological ideologies. The purpose of this heuristic qualitative investigation was to explore the ways in which student voice can contribute to reculturing high schools in urban settings. Data sources for this study included videotaped interviews (...) and observations in two Midwestern urban high schools to explore the stories of 28 culturally and linguistically diverse students in grades 10 through 12. Findings suggested that the teens in these urban high schools want caring teachers who listen attentively, provide engaging learning opportunities, and who demonstrate high expectations for achievement. They did not want teachers who, in essence, perpetuate hegemonic discourses via pedagogical practices, and school environments that resemble prisons. At the same time, students wanted more structure to ?avoid chaos? and asked teachers to give attention to the paradigm of the personal within the school curriculum. We extend the meaning of the study to include student voice as a critical stance for reconstructing the cultural context of urban schools, which entails listening to students to identify complex and sensitive topics for dialogue and inquiry. (shrink)

In this study, it is aimed to determine the perceptions of high school students about the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge course and their teachers through metaphors. In the study, which was designed in a phenomenological (factual) design, one of the qualitative research designs, the participants were determined by the criterion sampling method, one of the purposive sampling methods. The data were collected from 262 students studying in 4 different high school institutions in the 2021-2022 academic year. (...) The research data were obtained by completing the sentences “Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge teacher…like/because…and Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge lesson…-similar/ because……like” in the form given to them. The metaphors obtained at this stage were categorized according to their semantic content, divided into sections, expressed numerically and tabulated, and interpreted in a way that the reader can understand. As a result of the research in which the students' perceptions of the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge course were gathered under three themes as positive, neutral and negative, it was determined that the majority of the students produced positive metaphors for the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge Lesson and teacher. (shrink)

Middle- and upper-middle-class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds. Most attempts to redress this inequality focus on the issue of access to financial resources, but as _Producing Success_ makes clear, the problem goes beyond mere economics. In this eye-opening study, Peter Demerath examines a typical suburban American high school to explain how some students get ahead. Demerath undertook four years of research at a Midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives (...) students to advance. _Producing Success_ reveals the many ways the community’s ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethics and employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; and administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students “valedictorians.” Yet, as Demerath shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress and fatigue, incivility and vandalism, and the alienation of the less successful. Insightful and candid, _Producing Success_ is an often troubling account of the educationally and morally questionable results of the American culture of success. (shrink)

The 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanche on Mount Everest generated one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters in modern times, bringing to media attention the physical-cultural world of high-altitude climbing. Contributing to the current sociological concern with embodiment, here we investigate the lived experience and social ‘production’ of endurance in this sociologically under-researched physical-cultural world. Via a phenomenological-sociological framework, we analyse endurance as cognitively, corporeally and interactionally lived and communicated, in the form of ‘endurance work’. Data emanate from in-depth interviews (...) with 18 high-altitude mountaineers, ten of whom experienced the 2015 avalanche. The article responds to Shilling’s (2016) call to address an important lacuna identified in sociological work: the need to investigate the embodied importance of cognition in the incorporation of culture. The concept of endurance work provides a powerful exemplar of this cognitive-corporeal nexus at work as a physical-culturally shaped, embodied practice and mode-of-thinking in the social world of high-altitude climbing. (shrink)

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on (...) the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is “no,” then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation. (shrink)

To understand the impact of social, financial, cultural capitals, negative culture, and socioeconomic status of families on educational aspiration in the senior high school student athletes, it will be beneficial to promote their career developments. The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of ethnicity, year of sport experience family income, the educational expectations of significant others, and the three aforementioned types of capital on educational aspiration among the senior high school student athletes. This study (...) was conducted with a sample of 262 U-18 male baseball student athletes. Of the participants, 20.20% had attained the qualifications to play on the national team. The results showed that monthly family income positively affected social capital and positively indirectly affected educational aspirations through social capital, whereas monthly family income negatively affected negative culture and positively affected educational aspirations through negative culture. Moreover, social capital positively affected educational aspirations compared with negative culture negatively affected educational aspirations. The results serve as a reference for the formulation of educational policy as it relates to student athletes. (shrink)

Culture is the source of fostering the systems of philosophy, the philosophical ideologies/thoughts, and is the condition and material, the origin and condition for development of philosophy. A nation may have no its own system of philosophy, but cannot have no its own culture. Without its own culture, such nation cannot exist. Culture is the necessary conditions, requisites for existence of each nation in both aspects of the material and spiritual life. According to that meaning, (...) class='Hi'>culture is also the requisites for the existence and development of the systems of philosophy. Different from the systems of scholarly philosophy in which the thinkers, scientists completely define and create the philosophies, the universals are commonly nameless, appear and exist in the different forms such as: folkverse, folk-speech, in the daily life, in architecture, etc... Cannot determine exactly the time of generating one certain universal, one specific philosophy. But can determine the author and the appearance time of one specific system of philosophy. Such philosophies, abundant and diverse universals have existed for a long time in the life of each national community, however they can exist only side by side, reflect the specific aspects, processes of the social life, but they cannot incorporate into a system of philosophy having an internal structure, a system of reasons/arguments. Their generalization level cannot be high and closely systematical like the systems of scholarly philosophy. The life reality of the nations shows the national cultures cannot be short of philosophies, universals because they are the orientations for their activities, communication and communication. The more and more a culture develops, the bigger and bigger quantity and depth of philosophies get. The farther and farther go towards the modernity, the bigger and bigger quantity, depth and polyhedral diversity of the entire philosophies become. The more and more go backward the ancient past, the smaller and smaller quantity, depth and polyhedral diversity of the entire philosophies become. The most important is that when the system of philosophies increases in both quantity and depth, the other factors in the national culture also develop in both width and depth according to the development orientation of system of philosophies, since how far philosophies develop and expand,they will pave the way, create the direction, form the patterns for actions, communication and activities in order to create new cultural value, new cultural environment, new cultural products. Another aspect in the relationship between culture and philosophy that relates to the philosophies in the national culture is the role of the philosophies for the systems of scholarly philosophy. Only a few nations have the systems of scholarly philosophy. The systems of philosophy are normally at the high argumentative level in comparison with the philosophies in the national culture. The systems of philosophy are also an important component of the national culture. Can say, the doctrines of the scholarly philosophy is the high-leveled crystallization at the high argumentative level presenting the world outlook and the outlook on life of the nation in that era which were refracted through the concrete philosophists’ prism. The philosophies in the national culture are the direct materials for forming the structure for all factors of the systems of scholarly philosophy. On another side, the philosophies can take part more or less by their contents of knowledge, way of thinking, and deduction... into the systems of philosophy in the form of archetype. On the other hand, many philosophies indirectly take part in the doctrines of the scholarly philosophy through influencing the philosophist’s thought, consciousness during the study process, throughthe life experience, through adopting the experiences of the other people, in order to take part into the system of the scholarly philosophy since such system appeared, formed, developed and was expressed to become the systematical argumentation. The national culture is the living environment of the systems of scholarly philosophy, is the place supplying food, drinking water, oxygen and sunlight to those systems of scholarly philosophy. Like fruit trees in the garden being planted in the national culture gardens, the fatter, the richer with appropriate temperature, humidity, light they are, the more they develop with the more fruit. The systems of scholarly philosophy are the products firstly of the national culture that were piled up, distilled and sublimed through talent of the awareness, meditation, skill and spirit combined with the other virtues of the philosophists who have created the systems of scholarly philosophy that were also sprouted, fostered in the national culture. Can say there is no national culture that developed to a certain degree, cannot have the systems of scholarly philosophy. Culture is the spiritual foundation of society, at the same times is the spiritual foundation of philosophy. Culture in the broad sense of the word is the foundation of the existence of the humankind, at the same time is the decisive foundation for the birth, existence, development and perdition of the systems of philosophy.Culture despite the broad sense of the word or the narrow meaning is regularly the motive force of the social development in general in which there is the development of philosophy. A nation without a developed culture cannot have the abundant, diverse philosophies, even cannot have the systems of philosophy. A nation may be enslaved for thousands years, but it has not lost, eliminated its own culture, then that nation can exist as an independent nation. The nations can borrow the systems of philosophy, but cannot borrow the philosophies, moreover cannot borrow the culture in general. That is the relative independence of philosophy with culture and the role of culture for philosophy. (shrink)

Cultural schemas are a central cognitive mechanism through which culture affects action. In this article, we develop a theoretical model of cultural schemas that is better able to support empirical work, including inferential, sensitizing, and operational uses. We propose a multilevel framework centered on a high-level definition of cultural schemas that is sufficiently broad to capture its major sociological applications but still sufficiently narrow to identify a set of cognitive phenomena with key functional properties in common: cultural schemas (...) are socially shared representations deployable in automatic cognition. We use this conception to elaborate the main theoretical properties of cultural schemas, and to provide clear criteria that distinguish them from other cultural or cognitive elements. We then propose a series of concrete tests empirical scholarship can use to determine if these properties apply. We also demonstrate how this approach can identify potentially faulty theoretical inferences present in existing work. Moving to a lower level of analysis, we elaborate how cultural schemas can be algorithmically conceptualized in terms of their building blocks. This leads us to recommend improvements to methods for measuring cultural schemas. We conclude by outlining questions for a broader research program. (shrink)

Doping poses a threat to sport worldwide. Studies have revealed that, in addition to elite athletes, amateur and recreational sportsmen and sportswomen are making increasing use of performance-enhancing drugs. Worryingly this trend has been documented among young people. Anti-doping efforts seeking to deter elite athletes from doping through detection of the use of prohibited substances are costly and have not been completely effective either at the top-level or the amateur/recreational level. A thoughtful education program, inspired by honesty and respect, might (...) be more effective in shaping attitudes towards doping in young people and protecting their health. For these reasons, the Italian “Lotta al Doping” (Fight Against Doping) project sought to cause a cultural shift in young people by taking anti-doping seminars to high schools. In the 2017-2018 school year we reached more than 20,800 students from 157 high schools through 202 seminars. Before and after the seminars, we administrated anonymous, voluntarily completed surveys with a set of questions (items = 15), taken from the WADA-Play-True-Quiz. Upon completion of the 2-hour seminar, the majority of the answers given by the students resulted correct (13 out of 15 items, p<0.000001, McNemar) confirming the value of the initiative. This project stands out as promising in the doping prevention process at the youth and amateur levels. (shrink)

György Márkus’s Culture, Science, Society: The Constitution of Cultural Modernity is the most sophisticated attempt among contemporary philosophies to proffer a radical critical theory of culture based upon a Marxian philosophical anthropology and an emphatically post-metaphysical re-interpretation of the paradigm of production. In this paper, I aim to evince how the content of Márkus’s published writings is related to the cultural form of his philosophical practice that he describes as ‘orientation in thought’. First, I provide an overview of (...) several key features appertaining to Márkus’s heuristic conceptual framework. Second, I clarify the theoretical and practical horizons of his project through a schematic characterization of the three categories of studies that Márkus has not included in his theory of cultural modernity. In conclusion, I raise the question of the exclusion of religion from high culture and propose some counter-arguments. (shrink)