本书概述了身体研究领域的最新进展，提出创新框架来分析具身体现，融贯了有关该主题的古典探讨与当代研究，力主将身体解读为社会之构成过程中的多维中介；并在此基础上铺陈一系列具体分析，从经济、文化、社交、工作到运动、音乐、技术，将身体与多个领域联系到一起，为研究者聚焦主题，引初学者进入殿堂。

Dieses Buch soll anders sein. Es führt in den soziologischen Blick und in die wichtigsten soziologischen Grundbegriffe ein, ohne aber in lexikalischerGenauigkeit, definitorischer Schärfe und simulierter Neutralität soziologische Sätze in Stein zu meißeln. Eher von leichter Hand wird versucht, der Soziologie und der Erarbeitung ihres spezifischen Blicks über die Schulter zu schauen. Das Buch erzählt eine Geschichte, die Geschichte von Herrn A, einem Banker, der in Liebesdingen und in seinem Beruf Einiges erlebt. An dieser Geschichte wird der soziologische Blick praktisch, gewissermaßen empirisch, eher kurzweilig eingeübt. Das Buch richtet sich nicht nur an Studierende der Soziologie, sondern auch an all jene, die einen Blick in ein Labor soziologischen Denkens wagen wollen.

Die Arbeiten Günthers haben mit der Frage, wie sowohl der Dialektik eine operationsfähige Gestalt gegeben als auch die exakten Wissenschaften zu einer dialektischen Theorie ausgebaut werden können, zugleich die Möglichkeit eröffnet, die bedeutenden philosophisch-wissenschaftstheoretischen Kontroversen des 20. Jahrhunderts auf ihre tieferen reflexionstheoretischen Hintergründe neu zu befragen. Wegen der Vielfalt der Ansatzpunkte, von denen aus die Grundlagen der neuen Konzeption einer »operationsfähigen Dialektik« entwickelt werden, können Günthers erregende Analysen aus einer Vielzahl von Blickwinkeln erschlossen und verstanden werden. Die Sammlung ersetzt den geplanten 2. Band des Hauptwerks »Idee und Grundriss einer nicht-Aristotelischen Logik« (1959), von dem ein Nachdruck mit einem kommentierenden Nachwort von Rudolf Kaehr gleichzeitig vorgelegt wird.

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers.

"This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."—D. W. Harding, New York Review of Books

"[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive. . . .This is a book we should all read and ponder."—Roger Keesing, American Anthropologist

In this definitive historical investigation of the formation of liberalism from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, Domenico Losurdo overturns complacent and self-congratulatory accounts by showing that, from its very origins, liberalism and its main thinkers-Locke,Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, Sieyes and others-have been bound up with the defense of the thoroughly illiberal policies of slavery,colonialism, genocide, racism and elitism. Losurdo probes the inner contradictions of liberalism, also focusing on minority currents that moved to more radical positions, and provides an authoritative account of the relationship between the domestic and colonial spheres in the constitution of a liberal order.

This collection of five essays by Germany's most prominent and influential social thinker both links Luhmann's social theory to the question "What is modern about modernity?" and shows the origins and context of his theory. In the introductory essay, "Modernity in Contemporary Society," Luhmann develops the thesis that the modern epistemological situation can be seen as the consequence of a radical change in social macrostructures that he calls "social differentiation," thereby designating the juxtaposition of and interaction between a growing number of social subsystems without any hierarchical structure. "European Rationality" defines rationality as the capacity to see the difference between systems and their environment as a unity. Luhmann argues that, in a world characterized by contingency, rationality tends to become coextensive with imagination, a view that challenges their classical binary opposition and opens up the possibility of seeing modern rationality as a paradox. In the third essay, "Contingency as Modern Society's Defining Attribute," Luhmann develops a further and probably even more important paradox: that the generalization of contingency or cognitive uncertainty is precisely what provides stability within modern societies. In the process, he argues that medieval and early modern theology can be seen as a "preadaptive advance" through which Western thinking prepared itself for the modern epistemological situation. In "Describing the Future," Luhmann claims that neither the traditional hope of learning from history nor the complementary hope of cognitively anticipating the future can be maintained, and that the classical concept of the future should be replaced by the notion of risk, defined as juxtaposing the expectation of realizing certain projects and the awareness that such projects might fail. The book concludes with "The Ecology of Ignorance," in which Luhmann outlines prospective research areas "for sponsors who have yet to be identified."

Sir Alfred Ayer caused a furore with the publication of his LANGUAGE, TRUTH & LOGIC in 1936, when he was only 24. From 1959 until 1978 he was Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He died in 1989. Ben Rogers is the author of A. J.AYER: A LIFE (Chatto & Windus 1999, Vintage 2000). --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Classic introduction to objectives and methods of schools of empiricism and linguistic analysis, especially of the logical positivism derived from the Vienna Circle. Topics: elimination of metaphysics, function of philosophy, nature of philosophical analysis, the a priori, truth and probability, critique of ethics and theology, self and the common world, more. "A delightful book...I should like to have written it myself."—Bertrand Russell.