The idea of only one way leading to a modern society seems to be hardly tenable. But even if we agree to this, our theories and terms describing modernization are gained on our own Western history. So social science has to reconsider its basic terms to describe China’s modernization, and maybe even the understanding of modernization itself. The second of two volumes on China’s modernization collects articles by leading Chinese and Western scientists focusing on the main conflicts and diffe...

The contributions to the "Thirty Years Volume" represented in this volume reflect the historical focus of the ProtoSociology project. Colleagues are represented who contributed to the focus. This is also true thematically, as contributions on language theory, the philosophy of the mental, and the sociology of contemporary societies are represented. The contributions to the "Thirty Years Volume" are definitely evidence that they address central research problems of ProtoSociology, regardles...

The Joint Commitment Account: Critical Essays on the Philosophy of Sociality of Margaret Gilbert with Her Comments

“Concept” in a historic and systematic perspective In his paper “What Happened to the Sense of a Concept-Word?”, Carlo Penco deals with the boundary between semantics and pragmatics and discusses some misunderstandings in the shift from the sense/reference distinction in Frege to the intension/extension distinction in semantics. Building on Fodor, Margolis and Laurence Jacob Beck defends in “Sense, Mentalese, and Ontology” the latter Fregean view on concepts by arguing that the mind-indepe...

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 b...

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 cogn...

The study of meaning in language embraces a diverse range of problems and methods. Philosophers think through the relationship between language and the world; linguists document speakers' knowledge of meaning; psychologists investigate the mechanisms of understanding and production. Up through the early 2000s, these investigations were generally compartmentalized: indeed, researchers often regarded both the subject-matter and the methods of other disciplines with skepticism. Since then, ho...

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 e...

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 onto...

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 posi...

The Freud Wars offers a comprehensive introduction to the crucial question of the justification of psychoanalysis.Part I examines three powerful critiques of psychoanalysis in the context of a recent controversy about its nature and legitimacy: is it a bankrupt science, an innovative science, or not a science at all but a system of interpretation? The discussion makes sense of the entrenched disagreement about the validity of psychoanalysis, and demonstrates how the disagr...

Vygotsky Philosophy and Education reassesses the works of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky work by arguing that his central ideas about the nature of rationality and knowledge were informed by the philosophic tradition of Spinoza and Hegel.Presents a reassessment of the works of Lev Vygotsky in light of the tradition of Spinoza and Hegel informing his workReveals Vygotsky’s connection with the work of contemporary philosophers such as Brandom and McDowell