Around the Bloc: Around the Bloc - Mongolia, Russia, Balkans Spooked by Halloween
Ulaanbaatar bans celebrations in schools, while Russian parliamentarian warns that it can “draw children to mysticism, Satanism, and suicide.”
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Ulaanbaatar bans celebrations in schools, while Russian parliamentarian warns that it can “draw children to mysticism, Satanism, and suicide.”
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Record low river and groundwater levels persist, but drinking water supplies are sufficient for now.
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Population vulnerability to geomorphological hazards in Reghin Hills. Vulnerability assessment of population to the actual geomorphological processes are an essential tool in disaster management planning, assessment and loss estimation, and is an important aspect in geomorphological risk reduction to the safety of the population, settlements and human activities. In this paper we propose an analysis of Reghin Hills population vulnerability to the current geomorphological processesthrough physical,spatial and demographic indicators.
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Community, its perception and understanding constitutes one of the elements, or one of the aspects, of society formation. The foundation of the constitution of community as such is the process of establishing broadly understood security at its base. The limits of security, its scope and semantic content determine the boundaries of the community. Michael Foucault will treat the process of establishing security as an element of the structure of power and the mechanisms of its functioning, emphasizing the process of separation of such understood security from disciplinary mechanisms. Transformations in this sphere are a kind of semantic revolution the consequence of which is a change of understanding community as such.
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The industrial serious failure causes huge losses within the natural environment and the life of people and animals. The city of Starogard Gdański, in which the Pharmaceutical Plant Polpharma S.A. is located must put great emphasis on well-trained services of the city and the system of the crisis management. It is necessary because it is a plant classified as a high risk of a serious industrial failure and the production technology is mainly based on the use of dangerous substances. Therefore, it is worth considering the question of the extent the services and the crisis management system of the city of Starogard Gdański are prepared in serious accident in Polpharma S. A.
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The United Nations can be a proof of the integration capacity of humanity but at the same time a mirror of vertical and horizontal problems. It is a sensitive organization for the global collective security system, which is often subject to criticism. It results from the critics' failure to fulfill their universal destiny, especially in the existential issue of security. The reasons for the alleged UN indolence should be seen in the structural and functional aspects of its organization and procedure. An important issue implicating a certainUN condition is a kind of dualism of provenance of the organization's destiny, based on one hand on responsibility for the fate of the world, on the other hand the tendency to influence its fate by the main states of the so-called "five" of the UN Security Council. In the context of the above observations, the specifics of the presence of the Russian Federation as one of the playmakers will be analyzed.
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The article outlines the international system for the protection of cultural property set up by UNESCO, under which cultural property located in a war zone is subject to protection and due care by the belligerent parties. Moreover, three levels of protection of cultural property in armed conflicts are presented, two of which – special protection and enhanced protection – are not widely used by the signatories of the 1954 Hague Convention, as evidenced by a limited number of cultural objects that have been chosen to be covered under those protection levels. One of the reasons for the low effectiveness of legislation pertaining to the protection of cultural property has been the inclusion of the concept of military necessity to the text of the Hague Convention, which is often invoked by warring factions as the justification for the violations of their duty of protecting cultural heritage.
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This article aims to offer an interpretation of the work of Peter Wagner based on a genealogical reconstruction of his intellectual trajectory. It aims at opening routes for future mappings of his impressive work. Firstly, it addresses the main elements of his theory of modernity, which reached its definitive form during the work he carried out in the research programme Trajectories of modernity initiated in 2010. Secondly, an interpretation of his recent shift of focus from modernity to world-sociology is proposed. At the beginning of the 21st century, social theory faces the same kind of problems that at the beginning of 19th led to a particular way of investigating the social realm through the invention of the concept of ‘society’. The main difference between both situations is the extraordinary increase in the degrees of global interdependence, which situates the concept of ‘world’ in the same methodological position that the concept of ‘society’ had in the 19th century, once the contours that justified the methodological use of this concept were completely transformed by the events of the 20th century. Finally, how to interpret his more recent work on the notion of progress against the background of this shift of focus from modernity to world-sociology will be discussed. The task of reconstructing an idea of progress suitable for our times is analogous to his work on providing an interpretation why the ‘world’ has become the main structuring dimension of our social life.
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Review of Doncho Gradev's book "The Power of the Little Man"
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A key concept in Peter Wagner’s academic production is modernity, and the thought that modernity is experience and interpretation is central. Not the historical and social facts as such but the interpretation of them is the motor of modernity. The way Wagner understands history as interpretation and struggle for superiority of interpretation brings him close to the historical philosophy of Reinhart Koselleck, which is based on two fundamental conceptual couples: experiences and expectations, and critique and crisis. If interpretation constitutes the mode to approach modernity, the question remains of what the phenomenon we are approaching really is. What is modernity? Wagner’s answer is that the imaginary of being autonomous is the core of modernity. From this point of departure, the chapter discusses the distinction between individual and collective autonomy, highlighted by what since the 1830s has been referred to as the social question, under connection to the concepts of freedom and progress. The conclusion links up with Wagner’s recent emphasis on the dynamics between protest against and defence of domination.
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It seems evident that ‘progress’ is a necessary and unavoidable perspective for all those of us today who aim at revitalizing emancipatory action. How could it be possible to start to thinking about the first steps to take in enhancing our present situation without a rough idea of the direction those steps are supposed to follow; since all emancipation is meant to bring about some kind of improvement of the existing living-conditions or an increase in human freedom, it seems justified to say that at least a vague anticipation of what such ‘improvement’ or ‘increase’ would consist in is an inevitable requirement for engaging in such practices. Against this background, the article will discuss Peter Wagner’s notion of progress.
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The paper discusses some aspects of Peter Wagner’s argument in Progress: A Reconstruction, and relates them to the work of other authors, especially Hans Blumenberg and Marcel Gauchet. Blumenberg’s view on the Christian background to modern ideas of progress, as consisting in inherited questions rather than persisting beliefs in new guise, is accepted; it serves to contextualize the diverse and changing understandings of progress. They develop in interaction with the legacy of traditions, the unexpected and challenging results of growing knowledge, and the dynamics unfolding in different spheres of social life. The political sphere, where progress can be reinterpreted in terms of revolution and become a theme of political religions, is a particularly significant context. In that regard, the question of Communism and the need to examine its trajectory more closely is raised. This historical experience has a general bearing on the problematic of progress; it also concerns the particular turn taken after World War II, with the rise of Communist China, which had major implications for perspectives on progress. On a more general level, the issue of totalitarian regimes and their complicated links to the democratic imaginary should be included in a comprehensive discussion of progress and its paradoxes. Here Marcel Gauchet’s conception of democracy as a mixed regime proves to be helpful. The final conclusion is that present conditions suggest a more pessimistic view of progress than the one proposed by Wagner.
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The aim of this paper is to show that we are entitled to see in Schütz’s article “Equality and the Social Meaning Structure” the proposal for a formal analysis of group membership understood as a kind of We-experience irreducible to pure We-relationships (Wirbeziehung). First I argue that such an account defines the experience of group membership as a “situation definition process”. Then I show the relevance of this approach for the description of membership experiences and current debates on Collective Intentionality. Finally, I point to its unclarified conceptual presuppositions—such as the attribution of situations to groups—, and propose an interpretative solution by drawing on the notions of “social situation” and community of relevances from The Structures of the Life-World.
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Today’s fast-moving, (new) media lifeworld embodies many of the metaphors of its analog predecessors – including those of warfare and conflict. The metaphor of warfare is used to describe everything from corporate marketing strategies to political campaigns, often with harmful consequences. In one way of exploring the front lines of the resulting war on truth, we describe some lessons learned from the experience of military veterans who have actually endured the liminality of combat, and who emerge with what is increasingly termed moral injuries. We use their experience as an analogy for competing (ante)narratives in cyberspace, where objective standards of truth and facticity are apparent casualties, and where fake news is emerging as victorious. We then apply models of social construction, specifically the practical theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), and the metaphor of jazz improvisation in the context of Schutz’s lifeworld phenomenology as possibly useful, helpful, and hopeful ways of acting into the complexity of truth together.
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The article is referring to the sociology of culture and art, history of art. The source material was all sorts of studies and texts: historical development, scientific articles, an exhibition of paintings and albums, reviews, biographies. This article aims is to describe and analyze the functioning of the artists-women in the past and contemporary in the field of art as examples of the fine arts and literature. The text has a character of the sketch, which is about the relationship between art and feminism. A foremost important aspect that remains the issue of women’s socio-cultural role, especially in terms of autonomy, authority, obligations.
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In 2006, Marek Tokarz proposed a uniform pattern for the analysis of any language message. Such a message was named by him a situation. This allows the structure of statements in the form of the so-called situational form to be revealed, moreover it explains the natural limitations of the design of such a form, and also explains the activity of the listeners in filling in the sections of incomplete forms, if they come across them. On the basis of this theory, it is possible to explain both the mechanisms of inference captured in logical calculi as well as those that occur in common everyday reasoning. This does not mean however that Tokarz’s theory is in any sense closed. On the contrary, it is possible to indicate issues that require further clarification and additions; this is a promising area of research for people interested in analyzing reasonings carried out in natural language.
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Our research provides formal tools for analyses of reasoning involved in solutions to a specific class of abductive problems. We present two models of this reasoning. The first one is grounded in the logic of questions and employs a weak version of erotetic implication. The second one is construed in terms of relations of sifting and funneling. Definitions of these relations involve the logic of questions, situational semantics, and the concept of topic relevance. As we show on the basis of a Mind Maze gameplay case study, these models account well for empirical data.
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The aim of the article is to confirm the thesis of Chaim Perelman on the homogeneity of Aristotle’s results regarding the theoretical and practical syllogism by presenting the concept of enthymeme; the article presents a description of what the enthymeme is and what place it occupies in the theory of Aristotle’s rhetoric; the concept of enthymeme is confronted with the concept of syllogism, the structure of the argumentation through the enthymeme is outlined and the particular types of the enthymeme distinguished by Aristotle, namely the apparent enthymeme and the refutational enthymeme, are also discussed. An attempt to look at the analyzed types of enthymemes from the point of view of contemporary logic (especially nonmonotonic logic) is also undertaken.
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One of the main goals of critical thinking courses should be to provide students with tools helpful in making right choices in their daily lives. During such courses, much attention is usually paid to teaching the students how to assess arguments. In this paper, I try to answer the question – which method of assessing arguments is best suited for critical thinking courses? I think that such a method should be intuitive and “user-friendly” – it should be easy to learn and to use as well. These conditions seem to be necessary for the method to be actually used by those who have finished the course. In the paper, I describe the method of evaluating arguments which I think fulfills these conditions. It is based primarily on ideas taken from S.N. Thomas (1986) and M. Tokarz (2006). Some details of the method, as well as the way of presenting it to students, I worked out while teaching informal logic and critical thinking courses.
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