Publications

Review of the book: Nichols T. (2017). The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford University Press. 272 p.

One of the fundamental challenges for sociology is the interpretation of its key

terms, which is determined by the fact that many words of everyday language and scientific

discourse are the same despite implying a much higher level of generalization as sociological

categories. Certainly, such challenges are more typical for the empirical research — when

sociologists turn their theoretical concepts into sets of empirical indicators which have to be clear

enough for the respondent to understand and answer the questionnaire and for the sociologist to

interpret these answers correctly. Nevertheless, the lack of generally recognized conceptual

definitions is no less important, because the general picture of social reality is necessarily made of

them (the society is described as either fair, consisting of trustworthy institutions that provide

opportunities for being happy, or in the opposite statements). The article presents a possible

reconstruction of the strategy that sociologists use in the search for conceptual definitions for such

complex concepts with varying connotations as love, happiness, trust and justice. This strategy

consists of two steps: focus on the macro-sociological dimension of the phenomena under study as

determining its various manifestations and everyday interpretations (the key step in the study of love

and happiness); and identification of objective and subjective indicators of the phenomenon under

study (the key step in the study of trust and justice). For instance, in the study of love and happiness,

there is the obvious micro-sociological perspective that implies personal responsibility for being

happy and loved, and the hidden macro-sociological perspective that implies social standards for

identifying and achieving love and happiness; trust is defined as a source of social order,

cooperation, institutional, organizational and everyday interactions, which reduces the level of

uncertainty; in the searches for the conceptual definition of justice, there are two main approaches —

the first approach considers justice as one of many grounds for developing some theoretical model;

the second approach reconstructs justice either as an ‘ideal’ political-philosophical model of social

order or as a ‘means’ of the comparative analysis of its practical implementations.

This paper critically looks at the ways in which ‘global sociology’ has been debated and conceived in the past decades. It provides an historical overview of various proposals and ideas and the institutional contexts within which they are put forward and criticized. Two different periods are distinguished. Until the early twenty-first century, on the one hand, criticism of the ‘ethnocentrism of the West’ was often supported by ideas and pleas for an ‘indigenization’ of sociological knowledge. A commitment to the unity of science and to its universalist aspirations remained strong, however. In the course of the twenty-first century, on the other hand, criticism of the ‘northern dominance’ in sociology has become much stronger. Instead of a ‘multicultural’ understanding of global sociology, a ‘critical’ sociology that contributes to ‘global justice’ is now often advocated. Based on this historical overview, it is suggested that global sociology might contribute to more self-reflexivity within the discipline. It helps us to see how different contexts reverberate into the ways in which sociology itself is imagined in this world and provides an analysis of the debates for a better understanding of the challenges which sociology currently faces

This book focuses on the interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that have proved influential over the past decades. Current readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology face an abundance of interpretive literature devoted to this difficult text and confront a plethora of different philosophical presuppositions, research strategies and hermeneutic efforts.To enable a better orientation within the interpretative landscape, the essays in this volume summarize, contextualize and critically comment on the issues and currents in contemporary Phenomenologyscholarship. There is a common set of three questions that each of the contributions seeks to answer: (1) What kind of text is The Phenomenology of Spirit? (2) What do the different strategies of interpretation conceptually bring to the text? (3) How do different interpreters justify their verdict on whether the Phenomenology is still a viable project?

This chapter discusses Henry Maldiney's critique of Hegel's approach to deixis which lies at the core of the analysis of sensuous certainty in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Specifically, it analyses Maldiney's claim that deixis should not be considered separately from common sensuous and affective experience of the shared world and therefore from communication. The first section studies Erwin Straus's influence on Maldiney concerning the communicative character of sense experience. The second section exposes the logical structure of Hegel's experiment with writing down the statement “now is the night”. This experiment is related to the question of whether the adverbs here and now, as well as the personal pronoun I, have a general linguistic function discovered by Husserl, Jakobson and Benveniste. It transpires that Maldiney's analysis is incomplete; missing links to fix his argument are supplied. The last section is devoted to Maldiney's treatment of deixis and his concept of subjectivity that emerges when deictic expressions are used. I show that deictic expressions have certain features of a performative speech act. It is the explosive power of deixis that makes a simple communication exceed the framework of information exchange and become an encounter in which a new subject and a new world are born.

The paper analyses interpretations of the Church Fathers by Jean-Luc Marion, a leading figure of the French Phenomenology. For Marion, the theological dis- course should function as an icon: the task of theology is to make God manifest as invisible and inaccessible. According to Marion, Areopagite’s theology is not, properly speaking, “apophatic” or “negative”, because the aim of the theological discourse is not to produce either positive or negative statements concerning God; indeed, such a discourse would remain a captive of onto-theology and would function as an idol. Areopagite does not only name God, he praises divine names in prayer. This allows Marion to interpret Areopagite's theology as a per- formative speech act where praise acts by transforming the speaker. This per- formativity, which is proper to the theological discourse, is inseparable from a particular kind of phenomenalisation of God, although the mode of this phe- nomenalisation differs from that of the apophantic discourse. Divine names do not describe God, but praise Him as the Requisite, making the speaker the one who requires. In later works, Marion interprets divine names as “saturated phenomena”. The theologian cannot be described as an agent of phenomenalisation of the Revelation, even though he remains a receiver and a medium of this phe- nomenalisation, thus acquiring the status of its witness, the status of a “gifted one” (l’adonné): receiving his very self from what is made manifest in this phenomenalisation. The divine name appeals to the speaker, who makes this calling manifest in his naming reply. The Revelation is revealed to the theologian, and hereby the Revelation reveals the theologian himself.

Review

In the collective monograph philosophical and legal foundations of relativism are investigated, mechanisms and limits of its influence are defined, attention is focused on relativization of legal orders and coexistence of parallel normative systems, assessment of Russian state-legal reality is given. The authors update semiotic approaches to relativism, value discourses, problems of truth and other phenomena that evolve in the context of relativism. The book is devoted to a little-studied area of philosophical and legal thought and is the first collective study of relativism in law in the post-Soviet space. The monograph is aimed at teachers, postgraduate students, students and all those interested in contemporary theoretical studies of law

Review

Recent Weberian scholarship has already noted the lack of serious interest on the part of theology in the essential propositions of Max Weber's sociology of religion. This statement could be considered paradoxical, taking into account the religious and theological context in which Weber's intellectual project of social theory for Western modernity took its shape. The first part of the article reconstructs friends and family religious constellation which largely determined classical sociologist's understanding of the existential significance of religious implications for certain groups of modern people. The author points out Weber's close ties with a number of leading German theologians of the late 19th - early 20th century, who had a noticeable substantive influence on his writings. In the second part of the paper, the focus of interest shifts to the complex figure of Friedrich Naumann, who, being a public intellectual, has significantly evolved from a Protestant reverend and a reactionary theologian to a spiritual and political leader of the German liberal left. The paper traces the initial ambivalence of the political and religious situation in the German Empire in the 1880s and 1890s when Naumann attempted his synthesis of Christianity and socialism. It gives a brief overview of the views of the young theologian and social activist, who gradually turned into a prominent figure in German journalism and politics. The third part of the article is devoted to the meeting of two thinkers - crucial for both Weber and Naumann. It highlights the radical turn in the worldview of the already famous religious theorist and practitioner, who, under the powerful influence of the great sociologist's personality and argumentation, not only abandoned many of his previous ideas, but also his reverend’s desk. In conclusion the paper draws some inferences on the paradigmatic character of Naumann's ideological and political evolution for a significant part of the German intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century. Naumann's Hegelian acceptance of the modern nation-state as the highest value, along with Weber, is interpreted as a self-fulfilling diagnosis for the age of the crisis of modernity in the run-up to the First World War disaster.

This article attempts to explore Carl Schmitt’s political theology with reference to the philosophical and literature heritage of Søren Kierkegaard. For most modern scholars, the presence of this ideological connection is no longer something unknown or to be doubted. In the key statements of political theology, the dialectic of exception and of the universal is found, appearing in the same way as it was formulated by Kierkegaard. More often, the exception is the one that attracts the attention of specialists. However, in addition to the exception, Kierkegaard also speculated on repetition; it was the Danish philosopher’s work of the same name that was the source of the quotation with which Schmitt illustrated the significance of the sovereign decision for the systematic doctrine of the state. This paper redefines Schmitt’s main ideas through the notion of repetition, and demonstrates the theoretical novelty and productivity of this approach to the study of the heritage of one of the key political thinkers of the twentieth century.