This article deals with the social introspection approach of the Czech sociologist I. A. Bláha. Its aim is not only to introduce the method but also to explore the potentials and the limits of this ...approach in understanding social reality. The author looks at Wittgenstein's argument against a private language as a critique of the introspective method and briefly analyses the phenomenological approach in sociology to asses the boundaries of the introspective approach. Theoretical conclusions on the application of the introspection method in sociology are drawn at the end of the article, allowing the author to assess the applicability of Blaha's method.
The new post-modern theory of mass media as elaborated by Jean Baudrillard makes the provocative claim that the media representation of social reality is the very mode of its disappearance. In this ...essay, using Baudrillard's theory, the author analyses the production of news on the war in Bosnia by American TV networks and argues for a local rather than global representation of social reality. While the edited words and images on the television screen produce fake realities, there are specific practical conditions behind their production that can be described and analysed as a locally produced social reality. To prove this point, the author draws on two sets of data. The first contains two news reports by 'ABC News' (American Broadcasting Corporation) about the war in Bosnia, each of which uses the same image of a sniper: in the first report, he is identified as a Bosnian Muslim, in the second, as a Bosnian Serb. The fact that the same image may signify two mutually exclusive identities is an example of fake news created by means of specific editing practices. The second set of data consists of a television news broadcast in which the author appears as a translator for a Bosnian woman. The author compares the edited news footage with the event as he actually experienced it and argues that the falsification of this 'news' occurred, with his complicity, in response to a particular contingency of the moment.
Autorka tekstu napisanego w formie eseju recenzyjnego wyłania z treści kolejnych rozdziałów monografii pewne tropy, asumpty, metafory, figury retoryczne, symbole, kategorie, które uspójniają jej ...rozumienie jako całości. Tworzą one, tym samym, horyzont czytania tekstów kultury dla pedagogiki. Są nimi przykładowo: pogranicza, granice, podróż, droga, powroty, dzieciństwo, wyobraźnia czy ciało. Transgresyjny charakter kultury ubogaca człowieka, a pedagogika kultury jest metaforycznym wehikułem przebudzeń, które nasycają edukację czynnikiem nie-obojętności.
Two schools of freedom are considered and compared, 'the liberty school' and 'the real freedom school'. For the liberty school, freedom is freedom of choice. In the classical understanding, that is ...seen as a matter of rights. In the modern, revised understanding, it is seen as depending on rights, resources and arenas. For the real freedom school, freedom is a matter of being one's own master. This is viewed not as 'rational choice' but as being in control of both the ends and the means in shaping one's life. Freedom is now a function of liberty and reason. The challenge the real freedom school puts to us is the psychological problem of self-control. The second part of the article considers and defies 'reason'. Reaon is seen as a competence that must be learned. It consists of the application in life choices of values and norms. Values and norms are beliefs about what is good (or bad) and right (or wrong). Operational values and norms are grounded in evidence-based faith and are learnt in institutions, in particular in families, schools, and arenas of deliberation. The politics of freedom goes to the protection and nurturing of institutions. The method of analysis is individualistic, but the final conclusions social. It is argued that the real freedom school of freedom should be the preferred one for the advancement and protection of freedom in today's world.
This article discusses the topiè of national identification. The author's aim is to define the appropriate conceptual framework for describing nationality, while taking into account the pluralistic ...character of the nation and the related contextual and multi-levelled nature of national identification. In the autho s view, the concept of 'identification' more accurately applies to individual nationality than the category of identity does, owing to the latters undesirable subjectivism, methodological individualism, and its occasional references to an over-intellectualised concept of the individual. Scientists who use the second of these two terms tend, moreover, to conflate descríptions of individual and collective phenomena. In an effort to substantiate and elaboráte his arguments the author draws on the Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek and presents an analysis of the national identification of the novela multi-national protagonists. He demonstrates that national identification is multi-levelled and variable, depending on particular situations and institutional frameworks. The authors description shows that the best method of analysing individual nationality may be by examining the individual's set of sociál roles and institutions rather than describing individual identifications.
Society needs believable information about poverty for its self-understanding and for rational political exchange and social policy. It is an ambition of poverty research to provide society with that ...information. In spite of decades of effort and volumes of excellent research, sociologists and economists have had only limited - if any - success in achieving this aim. There is a view that for this purpose poverty research needs to seek a methodology for the measurement of poverty. Here, it is suggested that the object of measurement should be 'the problem of poverty'. Basic conventions in definition and measurement are re-examined, and eight recommendations for measurement are developed. The main results are the rejection of the very notion of a poverty line that divides the population into 'the poor' and 'the not-poor' as the commanding instrument for measuring the problem of poverty and the recommendation against the use of approaches in which poverty is established from relative information only. The alternative, it is suggested, is a social indicator approach, grounded in the principle of poverty as freedom denied, and encapsulating degrees of deprivation in the form of destitution, want, and risk.
As most philosophers regarded money with a certain distrust or even contempt, the question of the nature of money was not addressed from a philosophical perspective until G. Simmel wrote The ...Philosophy of Money (1900). Even 19th-century thinkers clung to the idea of money as a commodity, or, for Marx, as a "mask of value". This idea is rather misleading, as money, in comparison with commodities, always flows in the opposite direction, is not consumed but rather circulates, and can be represented by fewer and fewer material tokens, by fiduciary money, or even by invisible computer bytes. On the other hand, it appears to be a sort of institutionalised mutual trust, the validity of which is attested to daily by the willingness (or unwillingness) of citizens to accept it as payment. Though the monetary economy has a natural tendency to extend itself over as many commodities as possible, money itself must, paradoxically, be strictly excluded from free market competition: its production is monopolised or at least regulated. The same is true for the agents of social control: if to bribe a judge, mayor or police officer were to become an efficient alternative to buying, nobody could be expected to sell. Money seems to be almost a genial social invention, facilitating daily life, the division of labour, and collaboration, and promoting a kind of civic egality. Its only drawback is that its validity depends on the general level of mutual trust among citizens. Thus the views of Socrates and of Adam Smith, both of whom saw money as somehow related to the morals and trustworthiness of a society, may be confirmed, albeit on different bases.
PDF
![[rec.] Krzysztof Maliszewsk...](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/issn/XR4PS5YY4K/2081-2264/small "[rec.] Krzysztof Maliszewski (red.), Pedagogika kultury-wehikuł przebudzeń. O edukacji nie-obojętnej, Wydawnictwo Naukowe „Śląsk”, Instytut Myśli Polskiej im. W. Korfantego, Katowice 2021")
![[Recenzja]: Prawda i pamięć...](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/issn/XR4PS5YY4K/0518-3766_2545-3491/small "[Recenzja]: Prawda i pamięć. Wspomnienia, wstęp i oprac. Elżbieta Orzechowska, przedmowa ks. Zygmunt Zieliński, Wydawnictwo KUL, Lublin 2016, ilustracje, indeks osób i miejscowości, ss. 292")