Joseph J. Pilotta - Böcker

German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) was perhaps the most prominent European sociologist of his time, as well as the author of a prolific list of publications.Luhmann was influenced by his teacher, Talcott Parsons, of functional sociology fame, and by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Although functional sociology and phenomenology are seemingly incompatible, Luhmann was able to provide a new twist to the Parsonian legacy, stressing meaning as the driver of the social system.Temporal selectivity is based on the passive-active method. This dimension was borrowed by Husserl’s work on passive syntheses. Luhmann was able to achieve a theoretical orientation which was nonhierarchical for 21st-century society. His work is far reaching in its conceptual and comprehensive grasp of accounting for technological modernity and postmodernity within modernity.The essays address the logic in Luhmann’s work through concrete investigations of system, environment, and world. These investigations in law, organization, gender, the world of technology, structuration, and race demonstrate some of the breadth of Luhmann’s work.

This volume details the philosophical propositions of technology, illustrates its impact on various facets of social life, and demonstrates how the disruptive effects of technology can be reduced by providing it with a new philosophical base. Philosophical principles that will help to foster the responsible use of technology are developed. The contributors deal specifically with the ways in which technology shapes a person's view of politics, capital punishment, education, health and illness, work, communications, and the human body. They argue that technology tends to deanimate these aspects of life, thereby purging society of its creativity and spontaneity. Collectively, they suggest ways in which this trend can be reversed by the creation of a socially responsible technology.

The objective of this book is to provide a methodology and a theoretical paradigm based on Marx’s sensuous universal and Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal intentionality. It will serve the humanities and social sciences as a means for founding inquiry on concrete experience. Readers will find that the book is not a repackaging of Marx and phenomenology, but rather, it bears an internal critique of the enterprise. The authors’ contribution is to ground the sensuous universal as the science of experience that is required by the Marxian project, as well as by the new phenomenology of world theorising.

German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) was perhaps the most prominent European sociologist of his time, as well as the author of a prolific list of publications.Luhmann was influenced by his teacher, Talcott Parsons, of functional sociology fame, and by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Although functional sociology and phenomenology are seemingly incompatible, Luhmann was able to provide a new twist to the Parsonian legacy, stressing meaning as the driver of the social system.Temporal selectivity is based on the passive-active method. This dimension was borrowed by Husserl’s work on passive syntheses. Luhmann was able to achieve a theoretical orientation which was nonhierarchical for 21st-century society. His work is far reaching in its conceptual and comprehensive grasp of accounting for technological modernity and postmodernity within modernity.The essays address the logic in Luhmann’s work through concrete investigations of system, environment, and world. These investigations in law, organization, gender, the world of technology, structuration, and race demonstrate some of the breadth of Luhmann’s work.

This book is a condensation of critical essays in contemporary culture within the context of European phenomenology, employing its own self-critiques in order to demonstrate the methodological and experiential dimensions of the logic of culture.The essays are neither a part of foundationalism or foundation-less. Rather the experience of the space-time movement—logic of permanence/flux, stasis/flux, and the permutation of enhancement/reclamation and of permanence/flux and permanent/permanence—are critical for opening cultural studies to civilization and cosmological (world) investigations. The contemporary world of globalization, with boundaries becoming rather insignificant and the intermixing of global expressions, requires broader and more-encompassing observations.This book will be of interest in the social sciences and in comparative studies in the humanities, for programs in cultural studies, and in courses emphasizing cultural systems such as physical anthropology.