A tour de force examination of the contemporary ideological landscape by one of the world's leading analysts of globalization.

Globalization is now at its most disjunctive phase in human history. The planetary COVID-19 crisis has combined with the vulnerabilities of global capitalism to break down social routines. Yet, the current moment of the Great Unsettling also offers a critical opportunity to take stock of the present state of globalization. To this end, this article revisits and re-engages some pertinent themes raised in the pathbreaking 1990 TCS Global Culture issue. In particular, the article explores the crucial role of structural divergences (...) that have been developing among major formations of globalization. Gaining a better understanding of the current globalization system requires a new conceptual framework that captures different formations of globalization, ranging from the embodied to the disembodied. The multiple disjunctive relationships that have developed among and within these formations shape not only the morphology of the contemporary globalization system but also cast a long shadow on its future dynamics. (shrink)

This chapter reflects on why and how the forces of globalization have altered the conventional political belief systems codified by social power elites since the French Revolution. In order to explain these dramatic transformations, the chapter discusses at some length the crucial relationship between two ‘social imaginaries’—the national and the global—that underpin the articulation of political ideologies. The chapter suggests a new typology of three contemporary ‘globalisms’ based on the disaggregation of new ideational clusters not merely into core concepts, but, (...) perhaps more dynamically, into various sets of central ideological claims that play crucial semantic and political roles. These three globalisms—market globalism, justice globalism, and religious globalism—represent a set of political ideas and beliefs coherent and conceptually thick enough to warrant the status of mature ideologies. (shrink)

Much of what passes today as “global(ization) theory” falls within the new transdisciplinary framework of “global studies” (GS). GS constitutes an academic space of tension that gener­ates critical investigations into our age as one shaped by the intensifying forces of globaliza­tion. Indeed, the young field both embraces and exudes the “global imaginary” – a sense of the social whole that frames our age as one shaped by the forces of globalization. Moreover, few GS scholars would object to the proposition that (...) their field is significantly framed by “critical thinking.” But they need to be prepared to respond to a number of questions regard­ing the nature of their critical enterprise. What, exactly, does critical thinking signify in this context and how is it linked to GS? Do globalization scholars favor specific forms of critical thinking? If so, which types have been adopted and for what purposes? Finally, what forms of internal and external criticism have been leveled against GS itself and how have these objections been dealt with? These four questions provide the guiding framework for these reflections on the significance of critical thinking in GS. (shrink)

Arguing that today’s burgeoning globalization literature still neglects the investigation of powerful subjective dynamics of growing social interconnectivity, this article explores how various ideological articulations of globalization have shaped its material designs and in­stantiations. The thickening of global consciousness can be conceptualized along the three interrelated dimensions or layers of ideology, imaginary, and ontology. Each of these three layers of subjective globalization is constituted in practice at an ever-greater generality, durability, and depth. Normative contestations continue, but they tend to have (...) a common global point of reference—albeit not to the exclusion of the national. (shrink)

Examining the nature of Václav Havel's 'postmodernism,' we suggest that his use of this ambiguous label can be best understood if interpreted outside the conventional binary framework of modern/postmodern philosophy, which does not sufficiently answer to the lingering crisis of foundational certainty in political theory. In our view, the Czech playwright-turned-politician offers not merely a less confining sense of what it means to be 'postmodern,' but his commitment to moral political action also lends itself to overcoming some of the limitations (...) of contemporary postmodern theorizing by reentering the depreciated terrain of ontology. Specifically, we argue that an assessment of Havel's brand of postmodernism yields a rich interpretive harvest when read through ontological lenses. Indeed, Havel's theoretical posture serves as an instructive example of what political theorist Stephen K. White has called a 'felicitous weak ontology.'. (shrink)

Examining the nature of Václav Havel's 'postmodernism,' we suggest that his use of this ambiguous label can be best understood if interpreted outside the conventional binary framework of modern/postmodern philosophy, which does not sufficiently answer to the lingering crisis of foundational certainty in political theory. In our view, the Czech playwright-turned-politician offers not merely a less confining sense of what it means to be 'postmodern,' but his commitment to moral political action also lends itself to overcoming some of the limitations (...) of contemporary postmodern theorizing by reentering the depreciated terrain of ontology. Specifically, we argue that an assessment of Havel's brand of postmodernism yields a rich interpretive harvest when read through ontological lenses. Indeed, Havel's theoretical posture serves as an instructive example of what political theorist Stephen K. White has called a 'felicitous weak ontology.'. (shrink)

One hundred years after the death of Friedrich Engels, the longtime colleague of Karl Marx continues to influence the thought of socialist thinkers. This critical reappraisal of Engels addresses his relevance after both the death of Marx and the decline of Marxism, bringing Engels out from under the shadow of Marx to show the theoretical significance and historical impact of his wide-ranging criticisms for philosophy, science, political economy, history, and socialist politics. This collection of original essays seeks to determine the (...) nature of Engels's role as an independent socialist thinker, showing how his views coincided with or diverged from those of Marx. Leading experts in political theory examine such topics as scientific socialism, Engels's understanding of the relation between internationalism and the "national question," and feminist views on Engels. The contributors offer new readings of Engels's texts, pursuing errors and omissions, uncovering his rhetorical maneuvers, and pointing to insights and conclusions in his thought that appear to have withstood the test of time. _Engels after Marx_ attests both to the legacy of this political philosopher for contemporary left thought and to the legacy of Marxist socialism in the wake of upheavals in international Communism. (shrink)

Set in the immediate context of the recent UN conference on climate change in Glasgow and the sudden emergence of the variant, Omicron, this paper involves discussion of the present state of discourse concerning globalization in the broadest sense. It begins by contrasting the approaches and substance of two specific books: Globalization Matters by Manfred Steger and Paul James and Grave New World by Stephen King. The difference between the two books is brought into sharp relief by the (...) economism of the book by King and the multidimensionality of the volume by Steger and James. More generally, these recent books are chosen because they are almost complete opposites, the central difference being the adamant optimism about globalization in Globalization Matters and the extreme pessimism and negativity in Grave New World. It is also very important to emphasize the wide ranging and penetrative character of Globalization Matters compared with the latter. Also invoked is recent and very significant work by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Two themes are claimed here to be neglected, namely global history and the concept of glocalization. Attention is also drawn to the crucial omission of the fact that much of globalization talk began in the fields of religious study and theology. The disparity between these two latter fields of study and mainstream social science and conventional history is given attention. The contributions of other crucial commentators to the overall debate, Lovelock and Latour, are also invoked. The focus by Steger and James, on the one hand, and Chakrabarty on the other, on the Anthropocene is given attention. Overall, the article concludes by placing the global-local problematic at the centre of what is called here globalization discourse. (shrink)

This talk is based on Krifka (2001). Its topic is the interpretation of quantifiers in questions. I will use English data for illustration, but the phenomena to be discussed appear to be general enough to be relevant for other languages as well, at least those languages that have nominal quantifiers.

Argumentation mining is an application of natural language processing (NLP) that emerged a few years ago and has recently enjoyed considerable popularity, as demonstrated by a series of international workshops and by a rising number of publications at the major conferences and journals of the field. Its goals are to identify argumentation in text or dialogue; to construct representations of the constellation of claims, supporting and attacking moves (in different levels of detail); and to characterize the patterns of reasoning that (...) appear to license the argumentation. Furthermore, recent work also addresses the difficult tasks of evaluating the persuasiveness and quality of arguments. Some of the linguistic genres that are being studied include legal text, student essays, political discourse and debate, newspaper editorials, scientific writing, and others. The book starts with a discussion of the linguistic perspective, characteristics of argumentative language, and their relationship to certain other notions such as subjectivity. Besides the connection to linguistics, argumentation has for a long time been a topic in Artificial Intelligence, where the focus is on devising adequate representations and reasoning formalisms that capture the properties of argumentative exchange. It is generally very difficult to connect the two realms of reasoning and text analysis, but we are convinced that it should be attempted in the long term, and therefore we also touch upon some fundamentals of reasoning approaches. Then the book turns to its focus, the computational side of mining argumentation in text. We first introduce a number of annotated corpora that have been used in the research. From the NLP perspective, argumentation mining shares subtasks with research fields such as subjectivity and sentiment analysis, semantic relation extraction, and discourse parsing. Therefore, many technical approaches are being borrowed from those (and other) fields. We break argumentation mining into a series of subtasks, starting with the preparatory steps of classifying text as argumentative (or not) and segmenting it into elementary units. Then, central steps are the automatic identification of claims, and finding statements that support or oppose the claim. For certain applications, it is also of interest to compute a full structure of an argumentative constellation of statements. Next, we discuss a few steps that try to 'dig deeper': to infer the underlying reasoning pattern for a textual argument, to reconstruct unstated premises (so-called 'enthymemes'), and to evaluate the quality of the argumentation. We also take a brief look at 'the other side' of mining, i.e., the generation or synthesis of argumentative text. The book finishes with a summary of the argumentation mining tasks, a sketch of potential applications, and a—necessarily subjective—outlook for the field. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Argumentative Language / Modeling Arguments / Corpus Annotation / Finding Claims / Finding Supporting and Objecting Statements / Deriving the Structure of Argumentation / Assessing Argumentation / Generating Argumentative Text / Summary and Perspectives / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index. (shrink)

Entre las tesis características del Postscriptum de Kierkegaard se encuentra la distinción entre el conocimiento objetivo y el subjetivo, y en concreto la afirmación de que el conocimiento ético y el ético-religioso son subjetivos. El presente artículo busca ofrecer una interpretación de esta posición que salvaguarde el elemento cognitivo de la tesis en cuestión, notando el paralelo entre la distinción kierkegaardiana entre conocimiento objetivo y subjetivo y la aristotélica entre conocimiento teórico y práctico.

Telemedicine is a complex field including various applications and target groups. Especially telehealthcare is seen by many as a means to revolutionize medicine. It gives patients the opportunity to take charge of their own health by using self-tracking devices and allows health professionals to treat patients from a distance. To some, this means an empowerment of patient autonomy as well as an improvement in the quality of care. Others state the dangers of depersonalization of medicine and the pathologization of daily (...) life. This paper examines the ethical implications of telehealthcare, focusing on patient autonomy and quality of care by analyzing metareviews, randomized controlled trials and narrative ethical analyses on the topic. As a result, we conclude that the technically enhanced encounter between patients and health professionals may mean an empowerment of patient autonomy when it goes along with a personal relationship based on trust, assistance and support. When it comes to the quality of care, telehealthcare may lead to an improvement as long it is adopted to the patient’s individual needs. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to connect the current debate on relative truth to the discussions of theories of truth in general, in which the so-called platitudes about truth have recently played a prominent role. Truth-relativists propose adding to the standard truth predicate an argument-place for an extra parameter over and above a possible world and they presume that the predicate that results from this relativization is a truth predicate. Yet this relativization arguably isn't just an innocuous extrapolation of (...) the Lewis-Kaplan line in semantics that naturally conserves the predicate's status as a truth predicate. This status has to be specifically established. I'll discuss arguments to the effect that truth-relativists fail on that score since relative truth doesn't satisfy certain basic platitudes about truth, in particular the Equivalence Schema and the normativity of truth. This suggests that a relativized truth predicate cannot play the role required of a truth predicate. I shall discuss the relativist's defensive strategies in detail, the most promising of which is to claim that it is legitimate to deny the Equivalence Schema by arguing that relativism introduces a revisionary concept of truth and so fundamentally revises semantics. However, I'll point out that solely invoking semantic revision doesn't suffice to justify a denial of the Equivalence Schema and that any further justification of such a denial is ad hoc or question begging. Moreover, I suggest that with respect to the normativity of truth the prospects of truth-relativism are equally dim. (shrink)

People everywhere search for answers by using the resources of their traditions. They wish to do so in a legitimate way, and so they consult official institutions, specialists, and skilled individuals for their opinions; regardless of religious or cultural contexts, the common aim of these experts is to produce security, unity, and trust. Therefore, the norm-finding processes in Islamic and Western contexts share fundamental similarities: the problem of finding a final ground for judgment, the strategies of constructing coherence and of (...) organizing consensus, and the difficulties of obtaining legitimacy. What makes one debate "Islamic" and the other one "Western" is the different semantic materials, the different authorities, the different languages, and the different juridical frameworks. In my comparison of Muslim and Western discourses and practices, I conclude that Muslim and non-Muslim scholars tend to overemphasize the uniqueness of Muslim legal and practical responses to bioethical challenges, because they restrict their purview to legal opinions, ignoring larger dynamics of legitimization. (shrink)