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Due to their natural sociability, men have eventually gathered in a politically organized community. Once realized, this association is required to demonstrate its superiority and this thing can be established by means of its ability to perform the functions for which it was “invented.” Aristotle lays the basis for both the theory of good governance and the ways to achieve it. The purpose of a regime that is underlain by good governance should be the happiness of the members of the political community.
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The research of Aristotle’ categories represent a brave intellectual act, because it claims a metaphysical as well as logical approach,highlighting the complexity of “Stagirit” thinking.
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The present paper discusses the relevance of decision models developed in rational choice theory and game theory for rational decision. We try to analyze the way they can be used for assessing the rationality of decision and point out some difficulties in applying them. These difficulties are linked with specifying certain formal criteria (like completeness, reflexivity,transitivity, continuity), but mostly with the structure of the decision model as such. We outline an approach which balances the role of the formal criteria for assessing the rationality of decision with the role of norms. Norms are understood as requirements of rational adequacy which are open to adjustments. The application of these requirements to specific decision cases is not formalized, and their specification (even if incomplete and subject to further adjustments) can only be made within a specific decision context.
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The article analyzes the impact of the worldwide financial crisis on the growing markets, and especially on the new independent states, such as the Republic of Moldova, and their contributions to identifying the means of overcoming this critical period.
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The paper starts by describing the distinction between substantialist thought and functionalist thought. According to philosophical functionalism the object of the human knowledge is always a result of an inner construction, and not a passive reflection of the outer world. The Critique of Pure Reason was the first modern materialization of this new philosophical program. One of the most important results of the Kantian criticism was the reconstruction of the concept of ontology. The possibility of ontology, according to its new concept, was given by the idea of identity between the possibility of reality, pertaining to the human thinking and knowledge, and that what we call “reality”. The entire German Idealism took over this new concept of ontology. The specific of the Hegelian undertaking in the Phenomenology of Spirit was that this identity is not posited at the beginning, but is described in its development for consciousness. The study tries to show that this undertaking is a functionalistic one because here reality, as an object of consciousness, receives its specific configuration on the ground of the logical unity of the moments belonging to each form of consciousness and to their totality.
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It is amazing how two of the greatest thinkers of mankind, who also lived in different times, in distinct societies and cultures, shared similar moral views. Thus, fundamentally, morals is the outcome of a general experience, is the universal, transcendent and irreductible exigency. Starting from such premises, this article stresses the essential identity between Confucius’ morals and the Kantian deontological ethics.
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Scheler’s phenomenology of action begins with an inquiry into the nature of conation (Streben), and attempts to exhibit the process by which an initially undirected urge is first given content by values and representations,which condition the conscious formulation of purposes and eventual acts of will,in which action is undertaken to realize a specific value-content in a situation or thing. On this basis, Scheler argues that Kant’s limitation of the moral evaluation of acting persons to the content of their will renders invisible the many levels upon which action is in fact evaluated by both agents and observers.
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In this paper, I will try to highlight the correlations between certain aspects of religious belief and practice, on one hand, and the economic behavior of human agents involved in both kind of activities, on the other hand. The analysis starts with a presentation of Max Weber’s wiew of the role of protestant ethic in the birth of capitalism, and then deals with the last developments in the field of the study of religion and economics mutual dependence.
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This article brings the proof that the money supply in the economy is not a simple process but depends on a number of complex processes that reflect the mutual interaction between the central bank, commercial banks and non-monetary subjects. There was reflected the role of each subject that takes part into this process of money creation. It was also tried to be demonstrated the scenarios made for the situation of Republic of Moldova.
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The author researched the orientation of Romania’s foreign politics regarding the politico-military groups of the great powers, the Triple Aliance and the Triple Entente, during the period between the Treaty of Bucharest from 1913 and the crisis from July 1914, which prefaced the ignition of the First World War. The study represents a thorough treatise of the evolution of the relations between Romania and Austro-Hungarian Empire, which were mostly determinated by the politics of the Hungarian government towards the Romanians from Transylvania, but also by Wien’s and Berlin’s diplomatic efforts to maintain Romania in the political orbit of the Central Powers. The author emphasizes the main factors that contributed to Romania’s detachment from the Central Powers and to its external politics reorientation towards the Entente.
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the author tries to find out similarities between the rational theology argumentation about God existence proof, in Immanuel Kant` Critique of Pure Reason and some reasonings of four Fathers of the Church on the same topic.
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Although the expression “feminist epistemology” can be considered a contradiction in terms – as M. B. Hesse maintains – because epistemology, as well as the science to which it is related is, at least at the programmatic level, independent of any interest and conception of a certain social group (defined by relating itself to a certain race, gender or religious option), lately, in the context of the development of a postmodern cultural pattern, feminine contributions to the development of science and, implicitly, of the epistemology, became a phenomenon that must be studied with the greatest attention. This is the reason why arguments have been advanced supporting the idea of a subsequent alternative science which might include a series of “feminine virtues”; the arguments rely on real phenomena belonging to the development of sciences which is characterized by the exponential growth of sciences, the multiplication of the scientific fields and the appearance of new basic concepts.
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The brief considerations highlighted bellow emphasize the significance of the most important moments in the historic evolution of the concept of style. The Modern contributions (mainly Classical and Romantic), which led gradually to a more in depth understanding of the style as a modality of union and harmonization of the human creation, should be center staged. Nevertheless, we consider that style developments under the insignia of “cultural style” brought into focus the core issues of a modern philosophy of culture.
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A lot has been written about the 1882–1883 Tiszaeszlár-case, nevertheless the overview provided by modern historical studies appears to be rather scanty. The subject of the present study is not as much the trial in Nyíregyháza, but the society of Eszlár on the eve of the trial. Our approach could be defined as one of micro-level social history. As a first step, we shall describe the Jewry of Eszlár on the basis of their own sources and the findings of the investigation. We have established the socio-historical basis for the study using local sources (birth registers, terriers, electoral lists), using the documents of the investigation and the trial to supplement, detail or, if necessary, to animate these. Beside the composition of the population of the village Jewry, its position within the settlement structure of the Old and the New Village, its occupational structure, house and land properties and financial structure, we have also analyzed the internal relationships and conflicts within the branch parish. The sources show a recently settled and conflict-ridden community that had already become differentiated during its formation, where the forces of disintegration appear to be stronger than those of cohesion. The indictment presumed that the “murder” had been committed by vagrant, rather than local Jews, abetted by the Jews of Eszlár and Máramaros. The diachronic socio-historical analysis of the village shows that those Eszlár Jews whose were worse off, had less prestige, were less integrated within the social network and had many conflicts had a better chance of becoming defendants, rather than witnesses in the trial. This, however, does not imply that we intend to postulate a unidirectional causal relationship between society and politics.
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In 1944–1945, in 1951 and in 1956 the population of Budapest underwent waves of migration due to the violent intervention of political powers. The round-up of the capital’s Jewry in July 1944, the siege of the city, the 1951 deportations and the wave of emigration in 1956 were all movements of the population that led to the vacancy of masses of tenement flats and brought about the spatial and social restructuring of the population of Budapest’s rental zone. Replacing the rental flat market of the period between the two world wars, the framework for the forced movements between tenements flats during these three periods – that are easily discernible in the written sources due to their clear temporal limits - was the system of the distribution of flats overseen by the authorities and later centralized by the state. The system of the requisition and distribution of flats qualified as Jewish following March 19th 1944 was carried on in 1945 – for flats over a given size – to manage the mass homelessness caused by anti-Jewish measures and the siege, and became permanent as the party-state centralized it. Highlighting the waves of the movements of the population between the turn of the 1930’s-1940’s and 1960 due to the forced intervention of political powers, and viewing these in the context of the housing system allows us to examine the long-term changes in the composition of the population of the rental districts of Budapest. Examination of the long-term changes of the composition of society is possible in several temporal segments on the basis of quantifiable census data, electoral registers and the housing registers containing the occupation of the dwellers. Comparison of these segments makes it possible to identify the extent to which such occupational-social groups were affected by the movements, the changes in their proportion within the entire population, their disappearance or, on the contrary, their continuity. Reconstructing the changes in the tenants of a single building between 1941 and 1960 within Pest’s inner rental area, Nádor utca 5. in the Lipótváros district, tracing the movements of individuals and families between the flats on the micro-level brings to light the mechanisms underlying such movements. Behind the statistically measurable changes in the proportions of the various social-occupational groups, we are able to grasp the spatial structure of the movements between the flats and the personal – family, career, domestic – relationships organizing occupations and co-tenancies that underlie the practices of adaptation or resistance within the boundaries set by the political powers.
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Abstract. With some Serbs subscribing to liberal values in line with those of the European Union and others adhering to nationalist values, reaching consensus on how to tackle the challenges that Serbs face has been difficult. Nationalists’ calls to rehabilitate Axis collaborators distract Serbs from other issues on the political agenda. The dominant sectors of the media as well as the educational and legal systems have been replicating the nationalist syndrome, a process that has impeded the development of a broader civic culture. However, the formation of a coalition government dominated by the Democratic Party in July 2008 marked a partial break with dysfunctional nationalism and has opened a new chapter in Serbian political development.
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Abstract. This article examines associations between voting preferences and ethnic intolerance in Croatia roughly eight years after the end of the war and four years after the country’s abandonment of the strongly nationalistic and intolerant policies that were pursued in the early post-war period. Using data from a survey conducted in 2003/2004, we examine the level of ethnic intolerance among supporters of some of the major political parties. We particularly focus on the supporters of the Croatian Democratic Union. The results indicate that the HDZ supporters continue to be ethnically intolerant, and that the moderation and liberalization of HDZ policies since the reform of the party by Ivo Sanader have largely been top-down processes.
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Abstract. This article reports findings based on analyses of a large national panel study of attitudes towards ethnic relations and conflict in Macedonia from 2003 to 2005. Ethnic Macedonian and Albanian attitudes towards ethnic exclusionism and intolerance are shown in the context of such attitudes among other nationalities in the countries of the Western Balkans. The authors present a structural equation model of the determinants of a simple attitude scale measuring such attitudes in Macedonia, and the changes between 2003 and 2005. The data show marked improvement with regard to attitudes related to insecurity about ethnic violence, especially among Albanians. There was also evidence of improved attitudes about interethnic cooperation. The greatest change was among Albanians, who had very strongly exclusionist attitudes in 2003. At the same time, however, attitudes about ethnic intermarriage became even more negative.
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