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The incomplete paper by Max Weber, Georg Simmel as Sociologist is published for the first time in Italian. The author of the introduction treats this publication - that he edited and whose translation from German he supervised - as an occasion to underline the importance of the relationship between Weber and Simmel and to briefly summarize the complex debate emerged from the studies- now numerous-on this topic. Moreover he poses some interrogative about the interpretation proposed in 1972 by D.N. Levine regarding Weber's ideas on the issue of «objectivity» in Simmel, at the time of the publication of the same paper on the American journal «Social Research». [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines and theorises sociability–'the play-form of association'–in diplomatic settings. I highlight the workings of sociable interaction in diplomacy and I explain how we can better discern its broader role in bureaucratic processes. Empirically, I use virtual diplomacy during the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the difference that in-person sociability makes in diplomatic practice. The second half of the paper title references a comment by Michael Clauss, Germany's ambassador to the European Union. Asked about virtual diplomacy, Clauss said that Zoom diplomacy is '20% as effective' as the in-person kind. Conceptually, I use contemporary political geography and international relations as well as two thinkers of earlier decades–sociologists Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman–to theorise sociability. Methodologically, I advocate a more playful approach to sources in our study of professional practice. My objective is to prompt further study of sociability in bureaucratic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Among the founders of sociology, it was Georg Simmel who provided the most thorough analysis and theory of space. This paper aims to reconstruct Simmel's spatial theory and his observations of spatial relations. The German sociologist engaged with spatiality in a threefold way. First, he tried to provide a systematic social theory of space; second, analyzing spatial relations was important for his diagnosis of modernity; third, he dealt with the subjective constitutions of space in his shorter, essayistic writings. This paper argues that the importance of the third strand for a sociological understanding of space has seldom been recognized in sociology. In addition, it also shows that despite the diversity in perspectives, there is an underlying coherence to Simmel's theory of space. As a result, it becomes evident that Simmel was not only ground-breaking in conceptualizing space from a sociological point of view, but that his theory of space continues to be inspirational and relevant to this day for interpreting the entanglement of social and spatial relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Human biobanks are an essential resource for contemporary medical research, crucial in treating and preventing human diseases and improving health. Public trust in human biobanks is a vital social prerequisite for their continued operation and related research. Methods: Drawing on the "leap of faith" theory proposed by Georg Simmel and Guido Möllering, this paper first examines the relationship between public trust and human biobanks and the process through which such trust is established. Subsequently, based on the results of this analysis, targeted policy recommendations are put forward to consolidate or enhance public trust in human biobanks. Results: Public trust in human biobanks stems from certain "good reasons," through which uncertainty and vulnerability are "suspended" by faith, leading to a leap toward the "land of expectations." In this progress, the critical factors in building and enhancing public trust in human biobanks are the public's propensity to trust, the inherent trustworthiness of human biobanks, and the security and interactivity of the trust environment. Conclusion: Public trust in human biobanks cannot be determined by any universal formula, as it is influenced by many factors, including intangible elements such as faith that defy empirical understanding. Nonetheless, public trust in human biobanks can be enhanced through measures such as fostering the public's propensity to trust, enhancing the inherent trustworthiness of human biobanks, establishing structural safeguards for the trust environment through ethical norms, systems, and supervision, and promoting public participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We live in times of increasing polarization in which the margins of the political spectrum begin to dominate our social imagination again. While the neoliberal iteration of the capitalist project suggests extreme individualism as the normative default position, the devastating impact of the globalized economy on many has reignited the pursuit of socialist alternatives. In this constellation, Simmel's social theory of modernity can be a useful resource to undercut the return of the old battle between opposite economic systems. This paper argues that two kinds of pluralism can be derived from his conceptualization of the social effects of the money economy. In contrast to one-size-fits-all concepts of freedom, Simmel embraces a social pluralism which acknowledges a plurality of cultural spheres as relevant for the self-actualization of modern individuals, attributing different combinations of independence and embeddedness to them. Moreover, he rejects the social extremes of socialism and individualism since they fail to properly integrate individual freedom into the social whole without undermining it. Instead, Simmel gives us the vision of a pluralist economy in which democratic worker's cooperatives are combined with an overall liberal market to satisfy both the longing for community and the endeavour for individual distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time plays an integral role in understanding how the social is possible. However, most discussions of sociological classical thinkers—such as Georg Simmel—remain starkly underexplored in terms of their theories' temporal presuppositions. While most responses to Simmel's work credit him for his major contributions to the sociology of space, in this paper I aim to systematically reconstruct his explicit and implicit temporal assumptions and explore how these inform some of his social-theoretical writings and his sharp temporal diagnosis of modernity. For this purpose, I re-evaluate some of his central works using a theory distinction between social-theory, which aims to answer what constitutes the social, versus theory-of-society, where the key focus is what form or forms human societies have taken so far, and especially what form modern society takes. By offering a new reading of Simmel's philosophical and sociological writings, I formulate a comprehensive social theory of time, in which time is both located within individual consciousness and reciprocally mediated by a culturally fixed and supra-individual timeframe, thus highlighting the temporal tensions between individual flexibility and social standardization and coordination. Simmel's diagnosis of modernity reveals a conceptualization of time in spatialized terms, a monetization of time, and an acceleration of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Recent sociological conceptualizations of competition emphasize its discursive or institutional aspects, such as rankings. Although macro- and meso-sociological takes on competition are more or less well established, micro-sociological approaches are less so. What does it mean to be in competition from the perspective of everyday social relationships and interactions? A possible answer is provided by the concept of rivalry. In this paper, I examine the evolution of the concept of rivalry and its development in the sociological tradition in the early to mid-twentieth century, especially in the work of Georg Simmel, Leopold von Wiese, Karl Mannheim, but also, later, Erving Goffman. I argue that a micro-sociological focus on rivalrous social relationships and interactions is able to address at least some of the issues concerning a micro-sociology of competition. Grounded in an examination of this tradition, I discuss how rivalry relates to sociological notions such as social knowledge, action, worth, and evaluation. I distinguish two intersecting logics of competition, namely, the logic of action and the logic of observation. I argue that a typology of rivalries cutting across various domains of social life can be worked out according to this intersection. A micro-sociology of rivalries can make a genuine contribution to the sociological investigation of competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper questions the adequacy of Georg Simmel's answer to the question, how is society possible? Treating his essay on the question as a contribution to his overall sociology, it argues that the "a prioris" he identifies add little to the general understanding of social forms, are neither necessary nor sufficient to make society possible as a coherent mental construct, and play at best a modest role in Simmel's own analysis of forms. Taking a step beyond Simmel's essay, the paper briefly suggests that, if a Simmelian "epistemological" grounding is to remain relevant to the broader interactionist tradition, conditions for the possibility of society as interaction order should include schemas pertaining to social Wechselwirkung. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by tracing the sensory turn in the human sciences--most notably, history and anthropology--which, in turn, gave rise to the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. The latter field is articulated around the concept of the sensorium (defined as the entire sensory apparatus, including the extension of the senses via diverse media, as an operational complex) and the notion of qualia (defined as those aspects of the material world, such as color and sound, that are contingent on the human perceptual apparatus--in contrast to the inherent or elementary properties of materials, such as number or form, which are not). Sense-based research in the human sciences is tied to sensing and making sense together with others. Its methodology of choice is sensory ethnography, or "participant sensation." This method departs from the emphasis on observation in conventional qualitative research, as well as the latter's reliance on such verbocentric methods as the questionnaire or focus group. Sensory ethnography highlights the primacy of the quali(a)tative dimensions of our being together in society. It extrapolates on Georg Simmel's point: "That we get involved in interactions at all depends on the fact that we have a sensory effect upon one another" (as cited in Howes 2013). In part II of this paper, a critique is presented of the diminution of the quali(a)tative in the context of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the cognitive revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and the scientization of the senses in the Sensory Evaluation Research Laboratory. These revolutions are problematized for their lopsidedness: the privileging of the infrasensible over the sensible and elemental (or atomistic) over the phenomenal in the case of the Scientific Revolution; the neuronal over the sensual and social in the case of the cognitive revolution; and, the unimodal (or one-sensation- and one-sense-at-a-time) over the multimodal, as well as the reduction of "significance" to the statistical, in the case of the research protocols of the sensory science laboratory. The paper concludes by presenting the results of a series of case studies in sensory ethnography that push the bounds of sense by leading with the senses and bringing the quali(a)tative back in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With his text "Philosophy of Landscape" (German original: "Philosophie der Landschaft"), the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel laid a foundation for landscape research that is still significant today. In the text, he equates the creation and perception of landscape with the creation of a painting. In doing so, he provided an essential foundation for landscape research with a constructivist orientation. In order to be able to grasp the differentiated nature of landscape analytically and to apply it to Simmel's understanding of landscape, we resort to the approach of the three landscapes, which was developed from Karl Popper's theory of the three worlds. The pictorial metaphor of Simmel's understanding of landscapes, however, had the effect of limiting landscape to the visual, and often to what he described as 'natural'. It did not address the power-bound nature of landscape. These aspects, however, are of great importance in current discussions about landscape. Aspects of power, multisensuality, and the incorporation of non-natural elements gain additional currency through the creation of augmented and virtual landscapes. This concerns, on the one hand, the creation of these landscapes, on the other hand, their individual internal consciousness, as well as their social construction. These show, not least, the contingency of landscape construction. They offer possibilities for the investigation of landscape stereotypes, and how innovations can be fed into the social construction of landscape to engage other senses beyond the sense of sight. The aim of our paper is to use conceptual critique to reflect on the conceptual development of social and cultural studies in landscape research since Simmel and to present its potential for framing research on AR and VR landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Using illustrative passages and comparisons with previous partial translations, this paper reports some problems of accuracy and tone in the complete English translation of Georg Simmel's sociological magnum opus, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms. Placing these problems in the context of broader discussions of translation projects, it urges caution on the part of anglophone readers and suggests that some older translations remain valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contribution of Rose Laub Coser to sociological theory in the structural tradition. Laub Coser was one of the most successful women sociologists of her generation. She was born in Berlin in 1916 but left with her family in 1924 for Antwerp in Belgium, and went into exile in 1939 in New York. Thus, Laub Coser was familiar with many cultural worlds and languages. Although she primarily lived in the United States, the transnational influence of the metropolis of Berlin is manifest in her sociological work in several ways. Conceptually, this is relevant for Laub Coser's reception of Georg Simmel's Soziologie. In particular, her theory of the complexity of social roles as a seedbed of individual autonomy is founded on Simmel's theory of the importance of conflict and ambivalence for individualization. Her multiple experiences of emigration and exile influenced Laub Coser's work, including Women of Courage, an analysis of the social lives of Eastern European and Italian migrants in the metropolis of New York, and her internationally comparative studies on the family and women's rise in the labor market. Laub Coser investigated the social consequences of having multiple group affiliations and the conditions for such individuals in the cultural and social structure of modernity. In her transnationally comparative work of migrant cultures, she demonstrated the scope of her theory of role complexity. Contrary to images of migration bare of gender and culture, Laub Coser interprets the individuals she studied in Women of Courage as active agents of migration and provides insights on the influence that cultural definitions of situations have had toward creating the social structure of modern society. Starting from Robert K. Merton's role-set theory and integrating Simmel's analysis of forms of social differentiation, Laub Coser analyzed the conditions and consequences of multiple group affiliations, their observability, and the ambivalences in "cross-cutting social circles" (Simmel), which create conditions for developing individuality and individualism. The cultural mandate for women to be socialized toward the "greedy institution" of the family offers only restricted role-sets and opportunities for articulating social roles, constraining their social competencies as autonomous individuals. Despite the alienating and anomic consequences of role complexity, Laub Coser valued its liberating potential. Possibly this theoretical orientation was also influenced by her own experience as an immigrant, sociologist, and political activist in the socialist women's movement. The posthumously published study Women of Courage is based on a research project that began in the 1980s, comprising hundreds of qualitative interviews with women who had migrated to New York in the early 1920s, and who were at least 13 years old when they immigrated. The histories of these women demonstrate their role in enabling the social mobility of their families in the receiving society. They provided insights into how cultures change and how women migrants understood their lives in the New World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great number of theories have been offered as to the root of the difference between modern and premodern mentalities. One neglected account comes from Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money, which argues that the rise of the mass money economy in the early modern era encouraged calculative modes of thought, and took over the coordinating functions of a number of previously important institutions such as kin and religious networks, thus "freeing" the latter to evolve without strong material feedback. This paper considers monetary exchange and kin/religious networks as alternative strategies for coordinating the division of labor, and shows how the widespread availability of the former can alter the cultural-evolutionary constraints on the latter. This dynamic explains a number of salient differences between modern and premodern moral life such as money's profaning character, as well as the sociological significance of modern moral phenomena like individualism, rationalism, and fundamentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together two of the key theoretical concepts attributed to Georg Simmel -- the notion of the 'stranger' (the person who is not indigenous to a social context and perpetually seen as possibly not belonging) and 'love' as socially constructed which has the potential to turn an individual love into a notion of 'super individual couplehood' unifying two individuals and transforming them in the process. Based on indepth qualitative interviews with 35 people in 'mixed' couples, this paper examines how loving the stranger is constructed, maintained and challenged across cultures, languages, races, and nationalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses the attention on Simmel's selected writings on women, love and gender relations. This paper is structured as follows. The first section focuses on the image of woman presented by Simmel. Although his arguments sound "old fashioned", he gives a positive evaluation of woman. The second section is devoted to the analysis of the gender relations that has led to woman subordination. The third section analyses Simmel's idea of male-female relationships based on the domination/subordination paradigm. The last section shows how Simmel's work devoted to this topic can drive our researches today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an inaugural study of the relationship of researcher Georg Simmel's philosophy of history to phenomenology. Three research papers in the April 2003 issue of the journal "Human Studies," are related to Simmel's philosophy. In his philosophical anthropology Simmel strives to ground a fundamental a priori basis for human feelings, images, and narratives. His panoramic compilation of human studies range through the descriptive study of adventure to the nature of the bridge, through ancient ruins to modern coquetry, and through the development of money to the need for tact. His work arrives at the parameters of phenomenology through discovery, that is, by concrete applications, rather than through a highly self-reflective stance of the principles of phenomenology prior to its practice. The first of the papers that follows, by Gary Backhaus and Richard Owsley, presents a discussion of four components constitutive of Simmel's philosophy of history. The second paper, by Backhaus, takes up the problem of evidence on the philosophy of history. The third paper, by John Jalbert, addresses Simmel's philosophy of life.

This paper uses the secret society to pose questions about the politics, epistemology and ontology of organizing. Against assumptions of transparency, or the possibility of hermeneutic understanding, I suggest that much organizing is actually invisible and opaque. The paper begins with a consideration of the characteristics of historical and contemporary organizational conspiracies, and then moves on to elaborate what sort of ‘facts’ need to be claimed about a secret society to bring it into existence. After a section on the politics of contemporary organizational conspiracies, the paper concludes with some speculations on what the example of the secret society can tell us about the paranoia required by contemporary organizational researchers, as well as the ontology of organizations. After all, we have still never seen an organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to realize a contribution of social theory, with a focus on the relationships between experience, emotions and knowledge in the context of the metropolis and the media. It proposes an inquiry of the detective and the mediological reflection as a problematic constellation through the following conceptual steps: a) the reciprocal relationship between phenomenon, shock and images; b) the relationship between fragment and organic constellation of thought; c) the central value assumed by detail and circumstances; d) the interdependence between the sphere of feeling, immersion and states of consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Erving Goffman's written legacy bears on sociology as a whole, or so he argued in his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association (Goffman, 1983). However, while being celebrated as important to the discipline, his work is also interpreted in inconsistent ways, often downplayed or marginalized, and even neglected. This paper claims that Goffman's "well known aversion to self-disclosure" (Shalin, 2013) does not justify overlooking his trajectory, from the unknown "margins" of a Canadian small town to the elusive "center" of American sociology—and much less does it justify still circulating assessments of his personality, crafted while overlooking his life experiences—and, especially, his writings. Anecdotal evidence of his "enigmatic" personality (Lemert, 2003), or "bad-boy outrageousness" (Berger, 1986), works as a derailing tactic, leading to unwarranted appraisals of Goffman's personality—and, more importantly, to the neglect of crucial aspects of his work. From a theoretical standpoint, Simmel's treatment of "the stranger" as a social relationship, and Merton's concept of "moral alchemy", are used here to try to make some sense of the mixture of celebration and neglect still surrounding "Goffman". Historical data was gathered in part from the "Erving Goffman Archives'' (Shalin, 2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The place of Georg Simmel in the thought of Talcott Parsons has come under increasing scrutiny, a concern fuelled by a "Simmel Renaissance" on the one hand, and by a resurgence of interest in Parsons's early writings on the other. This paper raises some question, about Parsons's interpretation of Simmel in light of the discovery of a second manuscript on Simmel that Parsons wrote in 1939. This document (which was unknown until quite recently) may best be seen as an elaboration and reworking of the fragment on Simmel that had been left out of The Structure of Social Action (1937). After summarizing and comparing the two documents, the paper demonstrates that Parsons blurred them in his recollections. This means that interpretations of his engagement with Simmel--which have often drawn on Parsons's later testimony (19681979)--need to be reconsidered. The discovery of the second manuscript also underscores the importance of examining how Simmel fit into Parsons's evolving thought, rather than narrowly focusing on why he left Simmel out of the convergence in European social thought that he traced in Structure. Taking the former approach as a point of reference, the paper outlines some interpretive issues that arise from the discovery of Parsons's second Simmel document. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of contradiction and dialogue are crucial to Hermann Goldschmidt's Contradiction Set Free. In this paper, I place Goldschmidt into dialogue with two social thinkers for whom similar ideas were equally crucial: Georg Simmel and Donald Levine. In the case of Simmel, I highlight his theory of conflict specifically, but more generally his commitment to duality and ambiguity. In the case of Levine, I feature his attempt to articulate what he calls a "dialogic" narrative of the sociological tradition. I seek to evaluate Goldschmidt's own thinking by his own criteria, by asking whether the sociological and the philosophical approaches to these questions are parallel, in opposition, or an instance of a contradiction in Goldschmidt's sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconstructs Simmel's arguments on coquetry in light of his Philosophy of Money. There are remarkable similarities between money and flirtation as Simmel understood them. Both are characterized by a paradoxical form of desire for which satisfaction is synonymous with dissatisfaction. Moreover, both are the locus of a specific type of power (i.e., power as pure possibility) and a corresponding kind of submission (experienced as adventure). Yet, unlike money, coquetry can become play for play's sake. It thus symbolizes life in a different way. Located between economy and art, flirtation permits reconciling opposites that in money appear in maximum tension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some sociologists contributing to the foundations of relational sociology on the international stage have been recently remarking a kind of affinity between both notions of social relation and social life: they particularly refer to the pioneering views of Georg Simmel, who is largely mentioned and concerned in the following paper. The interaction among social subjects generates unexpected and emergent forms which sociologist must detect and inquiry: the interactive feature of any relation refers to the "content" of the social relation itself. Form and content stand for social life. This paper aims at addressing and deepening relational perspective, as regarded by Pierpaolo Donati, towards a Lebenssoziologie: in short, it hints to concern sensu strictissimo social relations as forms of social life. This lucky locution (i.e. Lebenssoziologie), adopted by Scott Lash more than ten years ago into a new interpretation of Simmel's social theory, concerns social life in terms of stream which fits with analysis on such themes as media and ICT. In this contribution, Donati's relational sociology is challenged and thematised in relation of a critical and relational Lebenssoziologie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst loneliness may be receiving greater media and political attention, the tendency to present the issue as a discrete individual problem separable from wider social concerns has led to some frustration amongst the sociologically minded. The purpose of this paper is to provide a sociological account of loneliness which is not as susceptible to individualist interpretations as other works in the genre have been. As such the paper focuses on how the structure of a society, rather than its culture, might lead to loneliness. To this end, the paper makes original use of the works of Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Specifically, Simmel's account of how we come to know other people through synthetic construction is applied to his better‐known theory of intersecting social circles. The author claims that when taken together these two aspects of Simmel's thought suggest that social structure can create a form of social isolation in which people find it very difficult to get to know one another, due to a lack of multiple‐context interactions with the same people during their day‐to‐day behavioural patterns. This clustering of interactions within narrow interlocuter‐contexts is hypothesised to account for a portion of the variability in loneliness across individuals, societies and historical time, and is provisionally named as structural loneliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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As of February 2020, all access to the research field has taken place online out of necessity and, as a consequence of this, it seems that there are many questions which must be tackled by methodological research. The paper will discuss some of these, starting from a focus group experience: what elements of the interview situation change? What comes into play in the dynamics of the relationship that is established? Do the typical dynamics of a focus group also develop, even among people who look at each other from a screen, who only see each other's faces or little more, and who have never met before? What must the facilitator of the discursive production take into account? The reference is to two important authors, Edith Stein and Georg Simmel. The hypothesis discussed concerns the reduction of the possibility for empathy in the interaction and the affirmation of sociability, which almost seems to fill the space left by empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This working paper arises from the conviction that it is possible to propose a temporally oriented sociology with Georg Simmel. From his idea of the extension of the present, which belongs to his philosophy of history as to his sociology and philosophy of life, this paper looks forward to contributing to discussions related to historical experience, as well as collective and cultural memory, and social imagination. Framed within an ongoing research experience on future imaginaries of former guerrilla fighters in process of re-incorporation to the civilian life in the city of Medellin (Colombia), and resorting to other authors with problematizations on the present as a particular mediator between past and future, we state that an extended present in which a fundamentally traumatic past is constantly stalking and conditioned to the expectancies concerning the fiction of the new beginning characteristic of the post-conflictual imaginary is a particular feature of the Colombian temporal regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author explores the legacy of the late sociologist David Frisby and his contribution to sociology. The author highlighted Frisby's translation of "Philosophy of Money," by Georg Simmel. The author describes Frisby's generosity and thoughtfulness. An overview of the papers included in the February 2013 issue of the "Journal of Classical Sociology," as a tribute to Frisby is provided.

In the past decade, UK government policy and academic research have inserted faith based organisations (FBOs) within the discourse of community cohesion and regeneration. This has been articulated primarily within a social capital framework which understands FBOs as 'repositories' of resources to tap into (Home Office 2004). The present paper outlines a critique of social capital as framework for the understanding of FBOs, and of the emerging concept of spiritual capital as the 'social capital of faith organisations' (Stark and Finke 2000). The paper will also sketch an alternative theoretical framework inspired by the work of Georg Simmel on religion. Robert Putnam's version of social capital has been spectacularly successful; yet it has been shown to be utopian and fraught with inconsistencies. This paper argues that social capital has become a highly moralised notion and, as such, it cannot be applied productively. Further, I shall maintain that the economic analogy, made by the terminology of capital, is particularly ill-suited to faith organisations, and that the resulting concept of 'spiritual capital' leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of what is distinctive of faith. Drawing on Georg Simmel's sociology of religion, the paper will provide an initial sketch of an alternative conceptualisation of faith for a deeper understanding of individual religiosity and the relationship between the individual and the community. Simmel's insights on the relational nature of religiosity shed light onto the distinctiveness of religiosity offering better grounding for researching faith communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the practices of stereoscopic photography throughout the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century can be interpreted as technological answers to many of the questions raised by the theories of art regarding the landscape genre, such as immersion, volume, scale, and subjectivity. However, it was not a direct influence, since stereoscopic photography was perceived as part of popular culture and, thus, excluded from the artistic field. Stereoscopy's middlebrow reputation is largely due to the perception that photography's automated character and its mass diffusion as a visual commodity would prevent it from gaining any artistic value. To assert the possibility of a filiation in landscape theories, I focus on two essays by Georg Simmel, 'The Alps' (1911) and 'The Philosophy of Landscape' (1913), which are representative of these modern debates. I argue that the exclusion of photography from Simmel's essays does not prevent us from a cultural reading, clarifying both that exclusion and the possibility of relating stereoscopic images to the pictorial challenges of the time. This is to state that visuality, although moulded by institutions and power, also spreads across many different social fields. I take as an example the alpine stereo photographs by the Portuguese amateur Manuel Alvarez, a tourist and photographer in the Swiss Alps at the same period of Simmel's essays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a philosophical reflection of the Other within the context of space "cosmisation". The topological methodology suggests the analysis of semantic structures in spatial relation of subjects and their environment. It also assigns the cartography of differentiation relationships inside the humankind and in humankind's search of its own place in the space universe. There have been found algorithms for the topology of relations with the Other in anthropological and cultural aspects. The authors have highlighted the importance of searching for algorithms of communicative and diplomatic protocols of the interaction of the humankind with the principally Other (animal, artificial, space worlds). An analytical instrument for distinguishing the specific forms of interaction became an abstract Alien by Georg Simmel. The Other articulates the relations of distance: it does not go ahead, but it does not fully overpower the freedom of coming and going. The paper proves the necessity of marginality of the Other for activating and renewing the relationships inside the homeworld and relationships between different worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines Georg Simmel's essay "The Adventure" in relation to more recent translations of his later philosophy. Using the foundational framework supplied to us by Simmel, the paper attempts to unpack adventures as moments in our life-course which are timeless in their influence on the self. This transcending of time manifests in the present as emotions attached to the experiences of adventures shape our consideration of the "ought". Borrowing ideas from the Romantic Wordsworth and incoporating examples from C.S. Lewis and the author's own life, the article reconsiders the adventure as not simply something experienced and over time forgotten, but as a powerful tool in the reflexive process of understanding relations between "actuality" and "ought" in life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following section presents several papers focused on Talcott Parsons and Georg Simmel. The first is the fragment on Simmel of Ch. XVIII, Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Toennies. This chapter has been the subject of scholarly discussion since Parsons revealed in 1968 that he had drafted it for his early major work, The Structure of Social Action (1937), but had ultimately decided not to include it. The second, Simmel and the Methodological Problems of Formal Sociology, is a previously unpublished manuscript by Parsons--apparently written in 1939--that continues his engagement with Simmel's approach. The third is a commentary on the second Simmel manuscript that Edward Shils sent Parsons, in response to the latter's request. Finally, there is William Buxton's paper, From the Missing Fragment to the Lost Manuscript: Reflections on Parsons' Engagement with Simmel, which compares the two Parsons manuscripts and reflects on their significance. In addition, Simmel's second manuscript is also published for the first time along with ore famous missing fragment on Simmel, thereby facilitating scholarly analysis and comparison. Buxton's careful and searching analysis identifies as series of issues that merit further examination.

The question of divisive affect and national cohesion has been placed at the center of debates in the United States over curricula dealing with race, but the problem is not a new one. Several European thinkers of the late-nineteenth through early-twentieth century theorized affect in the context of social cohesion, including Richard Wagner, Ernest Renan, and Georg Simmel. W. E. B. Du Bois, the author argues, lays bare the power dynamics of these intersecting views in his short story, "The Coming of John" in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois recognizes and critiques a specific strategy that he finds most clearly crystallized in Wagner, who advocates building and transmitting national allegiance by suppressing historical knowledge, fostering affective attachment to the nation, and excluding dissenters. Philologist Ernest Renan and sociologist Georg Simmel elaborate on the temporal dimensions of these mechanisms. In conversation with these theories, Du Bois illustrates in "The Coming of John" a stickiness of time—reiteration rather than reconciliation—arising from the reciprocally reinforcing functions of loyalty and ignorance of the past. While Du Bois here also employs methods for re-engaging historical time, the difficulty of moving beyond past social structures reemerges in his later works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of Robert K. Merton's appropriation of Georg Simmel's term übersehbar, or "surveyable." Merton has revealed that the purpose of his mid-1950s reexamination of Simmel's "Soziologie" was to assist his own thinking on a number of problems to be identified in these pages. It has been argued that an understanding of this theoretical development must proceed on at least two planes of analysis. First, it was argued that Merton's development of Simmel's term was influenced by the perceived need to demarcate the boundaries between "proper" and "improper" uses of the classical sociologists. Moreover, the paper identified that Merton's definition of "proper" and "improper" approaches corresponded, respectively, with Functionalist and Chicago School versions of sociology. Second, it was a contention of this paper that Merton's development of Simmel's term was shaped by the perceived need to resolve a problem of post-World War II society; the threats to democracy posed by the social structure of bureaucracy.

Territoriality has primarily been seen as a spatial rather than temporal phenomenon. In this paper, we want to investigate how time functions in territorialising processes. In particular, we are attracted by the multi-temporality that is co-present in each process of territorialisation (i.e. processes in which time and space are used as means of measure, control and expression). The article is divided into two main parts. In the first part, we draw inspiration from Gilles Deleuze's book Logic of Sense, as well as from authors such as Simmel, Whitehead, Benjamin and Jesi, in order to articulate three different types of the present (Aion, Kronos and Chronos). In the second part, we move to a short case study of the collector John Soane and the establishment of his house-museum. The case is used to exemplify how these three presents can be used to discuss and temporal aspects of territorialisation in general, and the production of a specific sort of territory – the house-museum as a new building type in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores Simmel's writings explicitly dedicated to the war and uses them as sources for investigating the underlying social and cultural context with which Simmel interacted. In particular, it takes into account possible links between Simmel's considerations on the relationship between war and the crises of modern culture and the multifaceted life-reform movements developed in pre-war Germany. The latter movements, which arose in the last decades of the 19th century, expressed a critical reaction to the negative characteristics of modern German society and a search for alternative lifestyles. The paper also investigates the sense of a few inconsistencies found when comparing specific passages that Simmel wrote on the same topics during the war. In the second part, the author considers how the development of Simmel's narrative on the war affects several key elements of his thought such as qualitative individualism, subjective culture, identity and/or the issue of a new order of values. The author suggests that all these elements become part of an intertwined tissue of arguments which delineate Simmel's attempt, as an individual, to react to a widespread cultural and spiritual distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper puts forward the hypothesis that in recent decades, pupils of schools in the western world have been given a new form of individuality. This construction has been nourished by both the demand for emancipation as it was expressed in the critical sociology of education (and pedagogy) and by the neoliberal turn in education policy. It unfolds consequences of such an alliance between romantic and neoliberal individualism, and argues that some of Simmel's concepts might fruitfully be engaged to grasp important aspects of today's educational culture. Against this backdrop, the paper discusses the construction of the new individuality in regard to educational changes in control and discipline, individually adapted education and assessment and finally academic knowledge. Primarily by using examples from the Norwegian case, the paper analyses how recent opinions on these issues can be viewed as different expressions of an educational culture promoting alienation as emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]