Many of the things we do, we do together with other people. Think of carpooling and playing tennis. In the past two or three decades it has become increasingly popular to analyze such collective actions in terms of collective intentions. This volume brings together ten new philosophical essays that address issues such as how individuals succeed in maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action, whether groups can actually believe propositions or whether they merely accept them, and what kind of evidence, if any, disciplines such as cognitive science and semantics provide in support of irreducibly collective states. The theories of the Big Four of collective intentionality - Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela, John Searle, and Margaret Gilbert - and the Big Five of Social Ontology - which in addition to the Big Four includes Philip Pettit - play a central role in almost all of these essays. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including dynamical systems theory, economics, and psychology, the contributors develop existing theories, criticize them, or provide alternatives to them. Several essays challenge the idea that there is a straightforward dichotomy between individual and collective level rationality, and explore the interplay between these levels in order to shed new light on the alleged discontinuities between them. These contributions make abundantly clear that it is no longer an option simply to juxtapose analyses of individual and collective level phenomena and maintain that there is a discrepancy. Some go as far as arguing that on closer inspection the alleged discontinuities dissolve

This volume breaks new grounds by bringing together a great variety of innovative contributions on triangulation, epistemology, and mind. The notion of "triangulation", developed by Donald Davidson (1917-2003) during the last two decades of his life, has changed our understanding of the relationship between subjective, intersubjective, and objective, and shed new light on concepts such as externalism, internalism, communication, interpretation, and language. At the same time, however, it has been strongly criticized for several aspects. The papers collected in this volume-written by established contributors-aim to provide new insights into the contemporary debate on triangulation. The upshot is not only a deeper understanding of Davidson's ideas but also a new appreciation of some central problems of epistemology and the philosophy of mind with regard to adjoining disciplines such as, for instance, cognitive sciences and the philosophy of language.

In epistemology and in philosophy of language there is fierce debate about the role of context in knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Many contemporary epistemologists take seriously the thesis that epistemic vocabulary is context-sensitive. This thesis is of course a semantic claim, so it
has brought epistemologists into contact with work on context in semantics by philosophers of language. This volume brings together the debates, in a set of twelve specially written essays representing the latest work by leading figures in the two fields. All future work on contextualism will start
here.
Contributors:
Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Andy Egan, Michael Glanzberg, John Hawthorne, Ernest Lepore, Peter Ludlow, Peter Pagin, Georg Peter, Paul M. Pietroski, Gerhard Preyer, Jonathan Schaffer, Jason Stanley, Brian Weatherson, Timothy Williamson

Issues of subjectivity and consciousness are dealt with in very different ways in the analytic tradition and in the idealistic-phenomenological tradition central to continental philosophy. This book brings together analytically inspired philosophers working on the continent with English-speaking philosophers to address specific issues regarding subjectivity and consciousness. The issues range from acquaintance and immediacy in perception and apperception, to the role of agency in bodily 'mine-ness', to self-determination (Selbstbestimmung) through (free) action. Thus involving philosophers of different traditions should yield a deeper vision of consciousness and subjectivity; one relating the mind not only to nature, or to first-person authority in linguistic creatures-questions which, in the analytic tradition, are sometimes treated as exhausting the topic-but also to many other aspects of mind's understanding of itself in ways which disrupt classic inner/outer boundaries.

One main interest of philosophy is to become clear about the assumptions, premisses and inconsistencies of our thoughts and theories. And even for a formal language like mathematics it is controversial if consistency is acheivable or necessary like the articles in the firt part of the publication show. Also the role of formal derivations, the role of the concept of apriority, and the intuitions of mathematical principles and properties need to be discussed. The second part is a contribution on nominalistic and platonistic views in mathematics, like the "indispensability argument" of W. v. O. Quine H. Putnam and the "makes no difference argument" of A. Baker. Not only in retrospect, the third part shows the problems of Mill, Frege's and the unity of mathematics and Descartes's contradictional conception of mathematical essences. Together, these articles give us a hint into the relationship between mathematics and world, that is, one of the central problems in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science.

Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind delves into the relationship between the current analytical debates on consciousness and the debates that took place within continental philosophy in the twentieth century and in particular around the time of Sartre and within his seminal works. Examining the return of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy of mind and the idea that phenomenal consciousness could not be reduced to functional or cognitive properties, this volume includes twenty-two unique contributions from leading scholars in the field. Asking questions such as: Why we should think that self-consciousness is non-reflective? Is subjectivity first-personal? Does consciousness necessitate self-awareness? Do we need pre-reflective self-consciousness? Are ego-disorders in psychosis a dysfunction of pre-reflective self-awareness? How does the Cartesian duality between body and mind fit into Sartre's conceptions of consciousness?

The analysis of the connections between truth, meaning, thought, and action poses a major philosophical challenge--one that Donald Davidson addressed by establishing a unified theory of language and mind. This volume offers a reappraisal of Davidson's intellectual legacy. Twelve specially written essays by leading philosophers in the field illuminate a range of enduring philosophical problems, and engage in particular with Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig's interpretation of Davidson's philosophy. The collection affirms Davidson's continuing influence on the study of language, mind, and action, and offers a variety of new perspectives on his work.

Terrorism, ethnocentrism, religious tension, competition over limited resources, war - these are just a few of the problems and challenges that have emerged in today's global economy. Globalization both implies and requires economic interdependence; and this should bring with it a heightened sense of the interconnectedness of the participating societies. But unfortunately, as recent events indicate, rather than our having formed a global community, today's society is more fragmented than ever. In light of this, education faces some formidable new challenges. How do we prepare future citizens for the world they will live in? How do we teach future generations to embrace the paradox of accepting the value of multiculturalism despite the conflicts it has produced? How do we instill religious tolerance in a time when fundamentalism has become inextricably tied with terrorism? How do we promote economic growth in the face of overpopulation and its depletion of resources? The authors of this collection of essays explore these and related challenges, and they suggest some novel ways of dealing with them.

Terrorism, ethnocentrism, religious tension, competition over limited resources, war - these are just a few of the problems and challenges that have emerged in today's global economy. Globalization both implies and requires economic interdependence; and this should bring with it a heightened sense of the interconnectedness of the participating societies. But unfortunately, as recent events indicate, rather than our having formed a global community, today's society is more fragmented than ever. In light of this, education faces some formidable new challenges. How do we prepare future citizens for the world they will live in? How do we teach future generations to embrace the paradox of accepting the value of multiculturalism despite the conflicts it has produced? How do we instill religious tolerance in a time when fundamentalism has become inextricably tied with terrorism? How do we promote economic growth in the face of overpopulation and its depletion of resources? The authors of this collection of essays explore these and related challenges, and they suggest some novel ways of dealing with them.

Der Band versammelt wichtige Texte von Eisenstadt zum Thema "Soziologische Theorie und Moderne", die das gesamte Spektrum der umfassenden Forschungen von Eisenstadt repräsentieren.

Fifteen specially written papers examine the ways in which the content of what we say is dependent on the context in which we say it. At the centre of the current debate on this subject is Cappelen and Lepore's claim that context-sensitivity in language is best captured by a combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism. Using this theory as their starting point, the contributors to this volume develop a variety of different views about the role of context in communication, and reveal its wide-ranging implications for all issues in the philosophy of language and linguistics.

This innovative volume provides insight into the vast changes in societies now and in the near future, and highlights the need for a new sociological approach to analyse these changes. It particularly reviews and critiques existing theories of globalization and analyses how global changes affect all subsystems of social membership systems: the scientific, academic, legal and political systems. The authors propose a new theoretical paradigm in sociology to analyse this “next society�. The book studies emergent communication structures between these systems and looks at the concept of membership as a new research area in the study of the next society. In this context, it particularly assesses the problems of further modernization of Chinese society, and the directions of this modernization. This book is of interest to researchers and students of social theory, globalization studies, theory of evolution, and those studying modern Chinese society. 

This volume features a critical evaluation of the recent work of the philosopher, Prof. Raimo Tuomela and it also offers it offers new approaches to the collectivism-versus-individualism debate. It specifically looks at Tuomela's book Social Ontology and its accounts of collective intentionality and related topics. The book contains eight essays written by expert contributors that present different perspectives on Tuomela's investigation into the philosophy of sociality, social ontology, theory of action, and (philosophical) decision and game theory. In addition, Tuomela himself gives a comprehensive response to each essay and defends his theory in terms of the new arguments presented here. Overall, readers will gain a deeper insight into group reasoning and the "we-mode" approach, which is used to account for collective intention and action, cooperation, group attitudes, social practices, and institutions as well as group solidarity. This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers and graduate students and researchers interested in contemporary philosophy of sociality, sociological theory, social ontology as well as the philosophy of mind, decision and game theory, and cognitive science. Tuomela's book stands as a model of excellence in social ontology, an especially intractable field of philosophical inquiry that benefits conspicuously from the devotion of Tuomela's keen philosophical mind. His book is must reading in social ontology. J. Angelo Corlett, Julia Lyons Strobel

If asked what Humeanism could mean today, there is no other philosopher to turn to whose work covers such a wide range of topics from a unified Humean perspective as that of David Lewis. The core of Lewis's many contributions to philosophy, including his work in philosophical ontology, intensional logic and semantics, probability and decision theory, topics within philosophy of science as well as a distinguished philosophy of mind, can be understood as the development of philosophical position that is centered around his conception of Humean supervenience. If we accept the thesis that it is physical science and not philosophical reasoning that will eventually arrive at the basic constituents of all matter pertaining to our world, then Humean supervenience is the assumption that all truths about our world will supervene on the class of physical truths in the following sense: There are no truths in any compartment of our world that cannot be accounted for in terms of differences and similarities among those properties and external space-time relations that are fundamental to our world according to physical science.

This volume features a critical evaluation of the recent work of the philosopher, Prof. Raimo Tuomela and it also offers it offers new approaches to the collectivism-versus-individualism debate. It specifically looks at Tuomela's book Social Ontology and its accounts of collective intentionality and related topics. The book contains eight essays written by expert contributors that present different perspectives on Tuomela's investigation into the philosophy of sociality, social ontology, theory of action, and (philosophical) decision and game theory. In addition, Tuomela himself gives a comprehensive response to each essay and defends his theory in terms of the new arguments presented here. Overall, readers will gain a deeper insight into group reasoning and the "we-mode" approach, which is used to account for collective intention and action, cooperation, group attitudes, social practices, and institutions as well as group solidarity. This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers and graduate students and researchers interested in contemporary philosophy of sociality, sociological theory, social ontology as well as the philosophy of mind, decision and game theory, and cognitive science. Tuomela's book stands as a model of excellence in social ontology, an especially intractable field of philosophical inquiry that benefits conspicuously from the devotion of Tuomela's keen philosophical mind. His book is must reading in social ontology. J. Angelo Corlett, Julia Lyons Strobel

Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind delves into the relationship between the current analytical debates on consciousness and the debates that took place within continental philosophy in the twentieth century and in particular around the time of Sartre and within his seminal works. Examining the return of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy of mind and the idea that phenomenal consciousness could not be reduced to functional or cognitive properties, this volume includes twenty-two unique contributions from leading scholars in the field. Asking questions such as: Why we should think that self-consciousness is non-reflective? Is subjectivity first-personal? Does consciousness necessitate self-awareness? Do we need pre-reflective self-consciousness? Are ego-disorders in psychosis a dysfunction of pre-reflective self-awareness? How does the Cartesian duality between body and mind fit into Sartre's conceptions of consciousness?

Das Buch bietet einen hervorragenden Einstieg in die Theorie von Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. Es werden die zentralen Theorieannahmen dargestellt und die Bedeutung fur die Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften der Gegenwart aufgezeigt.

Die Soziologie der Nachsten Gesellschaft soll dazu verhelfen, ihre veranderte Grundsituation der Selbstbeschreibung der gesellschaftlichen Kommunikation und ihrer Sozialstruktur in den Blick zu nehmen. Sie sollte sich der Einsicht nicht entziehen, dass gesellschaftliche Kommunikation nicht zu perfektionieren ist. Insofern befinden wir uns jenseits der kulturellen Programme der Moderne und ihrer Paradoxien. Diese Situation ist als eine neue "Sattelzeit" (Koselleck) einzustufen. Ihre evolutionaren Folgen kennen wir nicht. Die Globalisierungsforschung ist mittlerweile breit aufgestellt. Die Mitgliedschaftssoziologie ist gegenuber den vorliegenden Ansatzen ein neues Forschungsprogramm, das Einsichten der vorliegenden Forschungen und der Forschergruppe des Forschungsprogramms der Multiple Modernities seit den 1990er Jahren integriert.

Gerhard Preyer und Reuss-Markus Krausse geben einen Einblick in die chinesische Modernisierung und ihren selbstreferenziellen kulturellen Hintergrund seit den 1990er Jahren. Ihr essential skizziert einen Ausblick auf die Probleme ihrer anstehenden Fortfuhrung. Gegenuber verbreiteten Einschatzungen der Rolle Chinas als einer zukunftigen Weltmacht wird dahin gehend argumentiert, dass China aufgrund seiner veranderten Sozialstruktur eine ohnmachtige Weltmacht sein wird. Das fuhrt zu der grundlegenden Fragestellung, welche nicht-westlichen Problemloesungen nach dem chinesischen Wirtschaftswunder zu erwarten sind. Das betrifft auch ihre Auswirkung auf die chinesische Aussenpolitik. Das essential gibt eine Hilfestellung fur die Einschatzung der Folgeprobleme der weiteren Modernisierung der chinesischen Gesellschaft und fur ihre Beobachtung.

Gerhard Preyer rekonstruiert in diesem essential den harten Kern von Shmuel N. Eisenstadts allgemeiner Soziologie, wie Eisenstadt sie in der Untersuchung der Beziehung zwischen Handeln (Kreativitat) und Struktur sowie zwischen Kultur und Sozialstruktur durchgefuhrt hat. Preyer ordnet seine Untersuchung in dem von ihm sogenannten "semantischen Map" als eine evolutionare Universalie des "konstitutiven basalen Bezugsrahmens" der Erforschung der sozio-strukturellen Evolution an. Aus Eisenstadts Sicht legen die grundlegenden semantischen Maps das zentrale Problem der menschlichen und der sozialen Existenz, die Spezifikation ihrer Loesungen und die Beziehung zu den grundlegenden Annahmen uber die soziale Ordnung fest. Das Semantic Map und der Kampf um die Verteilung von Ressourcen ist der forschungsprogrammatische Bezugsrahmen seiner Reformulierung der Modernisierungstheorie, der Kritik an der klassischen Modernisierungstheorie als einer Konvergenztheorie und seiner Fassung des Problems der sozialen Ordnung. Die Studie wird mit einer Modifikation von Eisenstadts Ansatz einer mitgliedschaftstheoretischen Reinterpretation abgeschlossen.

Der vorliegende Band stellt einen neuen Zugang fur das Verstandnis der Modernisierung Chinas seit den 1990er Jahren vor. Die Umstellung von der Plan- zur Marktwirtschaft verstehen wir nur dann angemessen, wenn wir die sozial-strukturellen Veranderungen der chinesischen Gesellschaft erfassen. Mit diesem Buch erhalten China-Interessierte aus Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Politik einen Einblick in die Modernisierung Chinas, ihrer besonderen Eigenart und ihrer zu erwartenden zukunftigen Veranderungen. Die LeserInnen bekommen ein Verstandnis des Hintergrunds der chinesischen Gesellschaft, das es ihnen erlaubt, gesellschaftliche Zusammenhange der chinesischen Modernisierung zu erkennen.

Die Untersuchung enthalt daruber hinaus einen Leitfaden fur Entscheider, der ihnen fur die Gestaltung ihrer Kommunikation mit Chinesen hilfreich ist. "

Die Soziologie der Mitgliedschaft legt einen besonderen Anschnitt bei der Untersuchung der klassischen soziologischen Grundbegriffe Rolle, Status, Erwartungen und soziale Gruppe. Er besteht darin, dass sie im Hinblick auf die Strukturbestandteile sozialer Systeme zu untersuchen sind. Der Band fuhrt in zentrale Grundbegriffe der Soziologie ein, die dem Soziologiestudenten eine Orientierung fur die Beobachtung von Kommunikation und Mitgliedschaft bereitstellen. Er wertet soziologisches Wissen aus und fuhrt die Kommunikation mit der Tradition des Faches fort."

Wer auf dem chinesichen Markt erfolgreich sein mochte, braucht ein gewisses Verstandnis der chinesischen Kultur und Gesellschaft und ihrer Kommunikationsformen. Dieser praktische Leitfaden macht deutlich, warum wir Chinesen oft missverstehen, und zeigt, wie es gelingt, westlich-chinesische Kulturunterschiede zu erkennen, in ihrem Ausmass zu gewichten, sie zu uberbrucken und die Kommunikation mit chinesischen Geschaftspartnern erfolgreich zu gestalten. Eine klar strukturierte Anleitung, fundiert, kompakt und anschaulich mit vielen Beispielen."

Die Soziologie der Gegenwartsgesellschaft erkennt zunehmend die Bedeutung der kollektiven Identitaten und korrigiert die klassische Modernisierungstheorie. Sie erkennt, dass Moral wenig zu regeln vermag, da sie auf Konflikt angelegt ist. Die soziologische Forschung fuhrt uns immer mehr vor Augen, dass wir den kollektiven Gefuhlen nicht entgehen koennen. Sie belegt zudem die Klugheit der Selbststeuerung sozialer Systeme gegenuber ihrer staatlichen UEbersteuerung. Soziologische Aufklarung tragt zu der Einsicht bei, dass sich auch der genoptimierte Neue Mensch den elementaren Prozessen des sozialen Lebens und den kollektiven Identitaten nicht entziehen koennte. Die Beitrage werfen auch ein Licht auf die Grenzen der Kommunikation, die durch die Kommunikationsgesellschaft selbst hervorgebracht werden. Der Band ist dem Gedenken an Karl Otto Hondrich (1937-2007) gewidmet, dessen Soziologie uns dafur sensibilisiert, im Zeitalter der Globalisierung und Hybridisierung die Dominanz der lokalen, regionalen und ethnischen Herkunftswelten nicht zu ubersehen.