This piece presents the work of academics and architects in a collaborative venture. It provides an architectural design and a series of statements towards the hypothetical creation of an unconventional city centre in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The idea is to create a linear university that would run the 20-kilometer length of the Shenzhen Strip: the 20K university. The contributors outline, in the diversity of their idioms, a complex spatial condition fundamental to life, and demonstrate new relationships between knowledge (...) and the city. The design of the proposed ‘open university space’ responds to two simultaneous and interrelated challenges: that posed to architecture, and that posed to science. The university would embody the meeting of these at the intersection of the urban infrastructure and the knowledge infrastructure. The purpose is thus also to develop the notion of knowledge, embodied in institutions, as urban infrastructure. (shrink)

What is the identity of the best regime in Aristotle's Politics? Although there are a few references to the best regime in Book III, the obvious answer is the regime discussed in Books VII and VIII. Aristotle calls it the best regime on numerous occasions and discusses it at great length. Yet, this is not the complete answer. In Book IV Aristotle makes certain curious remarks on the best regime that, on examination, do not fit the best regime of Books (...) VII and VIII. They lead, instead, to the discovery of a systematic, though quiet, teaching on a very different best regime in Book III. The Politics actually contains a complicated yet coherent teaching on two best regimes. Grasping this teaching is key to arriving at a proper understanding of the distinctive character of Aristotle's political thought. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a discussion of R.G. Collingwood's cultural criticism, as a critique of the modern world, referring, beyond social and political institutions, to definite aspects of everyday existence, such as trends in aesthetics and technology, and to the form of rationality that disciplines the general attitudes of men. For this type of criticism, modernity becomes problematic as a 'form of life'. I therefore intend to provide a commentary of certain passages of Collingwood's writings, in order to reconstruct (...) the historical narrative where the genesis and the development of the modern world is represented as a process full of tensions and contradictions, thus allowingme to stress the coexistence of different patterns in cultural criticism. At the same time, I propose to discuss somemethodological and category problems arising from them: principally the explanatory problem about the specific causal relationships that take into account the traits of modern civilization which are the object of criticism, and the normative problem concerning the criteria applied in this criticism. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Die Natur und Entstehung der Träume" verfügbar.

-- ch. 2. Uchenie o prirode cheloveka v kontekste kriticheskoĭ filosofii -- ch. 3. Kriticheskai︠a︡ transt︠s︡endentalʹnai︠a︡ filosofii︠a︡ kak teorii︠a︡ poznanii︠a︡ i deĭstvii︠a︡.

This book explains why Tocqueville saw the central task of modern statesmanship as combating 'individualism,' a type of civic apathy that he thought capable of robbing modern citizens of human virtue and issuing in a historically unprecedented form of despotism. It looks in depth at the mechanisms he proposed for avoiding the perils and securing the promise of democracy in his own day, and discusses how Tocqueville's insights might be applied in our own time.

Social change; Sufism; doctrines; religious aspects.

This volume includes fifteen chapters, case studies and broader reflections, on the notion of ‘radical enlightenment,’ separated into three main sections entitled, respectively, “The Big Picture,” “Origins and Fate of the Radical Enlightenment, ca. 1660–1720,” and “The Radical Enlightenment in Europe and the New World after ca. 1720.” It is presented as “the first stand-alone collection of studies in English on the Radical Enlightenment.” It is worth mentioning, however, that two very similar volumes already exist in French and German. Like (...) its French and German... (shrink)

This essay is part of a larger project exploring the extent to which the market paradigm might be usefully employed to explain and in some instances justify nonmarket institutions. The focus of the market paradigm in this essay is the relationship between the idea of a perfectly competitive market and aspects of both the rationality of political association and the theory of collective choice. In particular, this essay seeks to identify what connections, if any, exist between one kind of market (...) account of the rationality of political association and one kind of market-based social choice rule. The market theory of political association I intend to discuss I call “market contractarianism,” and the collective choice rule whose relation to it I intend to explore is the unanimity rule. What, if anything, is the relationship between market contractarianism and the unanimity rule? (shrink)