ZusammenfassungEine Analyse empirisch ausgerichteter Beiträge zu sportsoziologischen Themen und Fragestellungen in der vorliegenden Zeitschrift zeigt, dass gängige sozialwissenschaftliche Erklärungsmodelle bzw. Erklärungsansätze selten zum Einsatz gelangen. Es dominiert meist eine beschreibende und verstehende Methodologie. Dies führt u. a. zu einem Defizit von Erklärungswissen und in Folge wohl auch zu einer verlangsamten Theoriefundierung innerhalb der Sportsoziologie. Um die „erklärende Soziologie“ zu forcieren, werden die aktuell in der Soziologie detailreich und auch kontrovers diskutierten methodischen Erklärungsmodelle und Ansätze einschließlich ihrer Voraussetzungsbedingungen skizzierend dargestellt. Dies (...) geschieht in der Hoffnung, die methodologische Anwendungslücke zu minimieren, da eine auf Erkenntniszuwächse ausgerichtete Sportsoziologie nicht auf eine kriterienorientierte Methodologie verzichten sollte. (shrink)

Critical phenomenology and the study of politics -- Beyond possessive individualism -- Political philosophy today -- Habermas and rationality -- Rethinking the political: some Heideggerian contributions -- Cross-cultural theory -- Beyond monologue: for a comparative political theory -- Conversation across boundaries: e pluribus unum? -- Modes of cross-cultural encounter: reflections on 1492 -- Political self-rule: Gandhi and the future of democracy -- Global governance and cultural diversity: toward a cosmopolitan democracy -- Cosmopolitanism: in search of cosmos -- Mindfulness and cosmopolis: (...) why cross-cultural studies now? -- An interview with Fred Dallmayr (questions from Farah Godrej). (shrink)

Fred Dallmayr explores the benefits of mindfulness in respect to philosophy and theory, practical conduct, language use, art works, historical understanding, and cosmopolitanism. Students of continental, social, and political philosophy will benefit from Dallmayr’s engagement with, among others, Heidegger, Panikkar, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida.

What follows shall provide an introduction to a predominantly philosophical and polemical, but historically revealing, paper on the foundations of the theory of probability. The leading Russian probabilist Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin wrote the paper in the late 1930s, commenting on a slightly older, but still competing approach to probability theory by Richard von Mises. Together with the even more influential Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov, who was nine years his junior, Khinchin had revolutionized probability theory around 1930 by introducing the modern measure-theoretic (...) approach, which is still standard today and which allowed for a sufficiently general treatment of important new notions such as “stochastic processes.” This development had its first culmination in Kolmogorov's booklet, Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, written in German in 1933, which has exerted an enormous influence world wide. (shrink)

This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. Aimed at linguists, computer scientists, and logicians with an interest in the computation of meaning, this book focuses on two main topics in recent research in computational semantics. The first topic is the definition and use of underspecified semantic representations, i.e. formal structures that represent part of the meaning of a linguistic object while leaving other parts unspecified. The (...) second topic discussed is semantic annotation. Annotated corpora have become an indispensable resource both for linguists and for developers of language and speech technology, especially when used in combination with machine learning methods. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy. This book discusses the development and application of such methodologies. (shrink)

The semantics of anaphoric pronouns or _relativa grammaticalia_ played an important role in the treatises of both grammarians and logicians in the middle ages. However only very recently has the theme again received comparable attention in transformational grammar and the analytic school of linguistic philosophy under the influence of Geach. Here philosophers of language take particular interest in the question of how far these expressions can be seen as colloquial counterparts of the bound variables known from predicate logic. This work (...) shows that scholastic theories of _suppositio relativorum_ underwent a development in the 14th century and that the theories which gradually emerged anticipated in important ways the insights of recent linguistic philosophy. This thesis is illustrated by editions of selected texts of the logicians of the new continental universities of Vienna and Prague of the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries and make it clear that the often asserted decline of scholasticism had not yet set in in the period after Ockham and Buridan. (shrink)

_Heidegger's Hidden Sources_ documents for the first time Heidegger's remarkable debt to East Asian philosophy. In this groundbreaking study, Reinhard May shows conclusively that Martin Heidegger borrowed some of the major ideas of his philosophy - on occasion almost word for word - from German translations of Chinese Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics. The discovery of this astonishing appropriation of non-Western sources will have important consequences for future interpretations of Heidegger's work. Moreover, it shows Heidegger as a pioneer of (...) comparative philosophy and transcultural thinking. (shrink)

Sustainable development (SD) – that is, “Development that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs and aspirations” – can be pursued in many different ways. Stakeholder relations management (SRM) is one such way, through which corporations are confronted with economic, social, and environmental stakeholder claims. This paper lays the groundwork for an empirical analysis of the question of how far SD can be achieved through SRM. It describes the so-called SD–SRM (...) perspective as a distinctive research approach and shows how it relates to the wider body of stakeholder theory. Next, the concept of SD is operationalized for the microeconomic level with reference to important documents. Based on the ensuing SD framework, it is shown how SD and SRM relate to each other, and how the two concepts relate to other popular concepts such as Corporate Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility. The paper concludes that the significance of societal guiding models such as SD and of management approaches like CSR is strongly dependent on their footing in society. (shrink)

Democracy purged of all its Disadvantages. « Encoded at the level of its lexicology and logical constructedness, the republican discourse of the enlightenment and revolution is marked by two conceptualizations which contradict and mutually exclude each other. Contemporary observers of the revolution or those close to its events speak about an opposition between an order of egotism and an order of equality, between a principle of utility and a principle of ascetism, between an ethics based on personal interest and an (...) ethics based on the national interest, between a kind of individualism and a kind of socialism, etc. Because it has excluded physiocratic thinking from its domain, the traditional historio-graphy of political ideas has obstructed an unbiased view to the context which engenders conceptualizations of an alternative Republicanism vis-a-vis that of Rousseau, while at the same time utilizing Rousseaus formulas ». (shrink)

Force, Fate, and Freedom serves as an introduction to historical sociology, as well as a critical analysis of the belief in economic and political progress through social knowledge. Reinhard Bendix offers a development of the historicist approach to social change first championed by Max Weber, and presents an overview of the foundations of political authority in Japan, Russia, Germany, France, and England.

The Studiengruppe für Systemforschung was dissolved in 1974. Several members of the group moved to the Research Centre Karlsruhe. There, despite their new institutional surroundings, they remained faithful to the Studiengruppe’s conceptual foundations, and developed a new Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis. This has since become the leading technology assessment group in Germany.

Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge stands at the threshold of his last major philosophical phase, the period from his retirement from the London School of Economics in 1969 until his death in 1994. The two great books that he wrote before he came to London, Logik der Forschung and The Open Society and Its Enemies, contain much more than the innovations in the theory of scientific method and the theory of democracy for which they are famous. Logik der Forschung, translated into (...) English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, is by no means just a tract, even a revolutionary one, on the methods of science, since about one third of the text is devoted to searchingly original treatments of the frequency theory of probability and of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, whilst the unpublished manuscript on which the book was based, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, at whose content it often hints, presents a wealth of significant material on the psychology of human learning and its biological context. Popper had, after all, been a student of Karl B¨uhler, and had absorbed the theories of problem solving developed within the W¨urzburg School. The Open Society and Its Enemies, for its part, is not so much a book defending democratic liberalism as a defence of democratic liberalism nestling within a book that discusses every other topic under the sun. It offers profound and provocative studies of the thought of Plato and Marx, an abundance of scholarly, if often controversial, historical interpretations of the work of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Wittgenstein, Mannheim, and others, the elements of a new theory of rationality, and many elucidations of the workings of science that go beyond what is explicit in Logik der Forschung. One insight worth mentioning, since it is little known, is the clear recognition in section II of Chapter 11 that most important advances in science are revolutionary, not cumulative; a commonplace today perhaps, but one that many philosophers attribute to Kuhn. Another insight, also often forgotten, is the emphasis in Chapter 23 on the social character of science, which acts as the main custodian of its claim to objectivity. (shrink)

This paper embeds the core part of Discourse Representation Theory in the classical theory of types plus a few simple axioms that allow the theory to express key facts about variables and assignments on the object level of the logic. It is shown how the embedding can be used to combine core analyses of natural language phenomena in Discourse Representation Theory with analyses that can be obtained in Montague Semantics.

This paper develops a semantics for a fragment of English that is based on the idea of `impossible possible worlds'. This idea has earlier been formulated by authors such as Montague, Cresswell, Hintikka, and Rantala, but the present set-up shows how it can be formalized in a completely unproblematic logic---the ordinary classical theory of types. The theory is put to use in an account of propositional attitudes that is `hyperfine-grained', i.e. that does not suffer from the well-known problems involved with (...) replacing expressions by logical equivalents. (shrink)