Johannes Feichtinger – författare

Multiculturalism has long been linked to calls for tolerance of cultural diversity, but today many observers are subjecting the concept to close scrutiny. After the political upheavals of 1968, the commitment to multiculturalism was perceived as a liberal manifesto, but in the post-9/11 era, it is under attack for its relativizing, particularist, and essentializing implications. The essays in this collection offer a nuanced analysis of the multifaceted cultural experience of Central Europe under the late Habsburg monarchy and beyond. The authors examine how culturally coded social spaces can be described and understood historically without adopting categories formerly employed to justify the definition and separation of groups into nations, ethnicities, or homogeneous cultures. As we consider the issues of multiculturalism today, this volume offers new approaches to understanding multiculturalism in Central Europe freed of the effects of politically exploited concepts of social spaces.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays provides a critical and comprehensive understanding of how knowledge has been made, moved and used, by whom and for what purpose. To explain how new knowledge emerges, this volume offers a two-fold conceptual move: challenging both the premise of insurmountable differences between confined, autarkic cultures and the linear, nation-centered approach to the spread of immutable stocks of knowledge. Rather, the conceptual focus of the book is on the circulation, amalgamation and reconfiguration of locally shaped bodies of knowledge on a broader, global scale. The authors emphasize that  the histories of interaction have been made less transparent through the study of cultural representations thus distorting the view of how knowledge is actually produced.

Leading scholars from a range of fields, including history, philosophy, social anthropology and comparative culture research, have contributed chapters which cover the period from the early modern age to the present day and investigate settings in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Their particular focus is on areas that have largely been neglected until now. In this work, readers from many disciplines will find new approaches to writing the global history of knowledge-making, especially historians, scholars of the history and philosophy of science, and those in culture studies.

Dieses Buch rückt die Wissenschaftsgeschichte Österreichs in ein neues Licht. Ausgehend vom Spannungsfeld »Wissenschaft versus Politik« stellt es die zentralen Akteure, Strukturen und Diskurse in den Mittelpunkt. Die Analyse eines Jahrhunderts Wissenschaftsgeschichte konzentriert sich auf die Herausbildung eines relativ autonomen Wissenschaftshandelns unter den plurikulturellen Verhältnissen Zentraleuropas sowie auf seine Wegbereiter (Bolzano, Mach und Riegl) und wichtigsten Verfechter (Freud, Wittgenstein, Neurath, Kelsen). Johannes Feichtinger zeigt, wie jenseits von Hetero- und Autonomie und abseits des methodologischen Nationalismus Identitätsmodelle entstanden sind, die noch für das Globaleuropa des 21. Jahrhunderts relevant sein können.