Humanities & Social Sciences

Die Schweiz hat sich von einem christlich geprägten in ein religiös plurales Land verwandelt. Neben etablierten christlichen Kirchen stehen heute Moscheen, Synagogen, buddhistische Zentren und Andachtsplätze vieler weiterer Religionen. Evangelikalismus, Esoterik und spirituelle Therapien boomen und die Glaubenswelten der Menschen werden immer individueller. Eine solche Situation birgt Chancen - aber auch Gefahren - in Erziehung, Medizin, Rechtsprechung, Politik und Medien. Dieses wissenschaftlich fundierte Buch informiert umfassend und leicht verständlich über die Entstehung und die Auswirkungen der neuen religiösen und spirituellen Vielfalt der Schweiz von 1950 bis zur Gegenwart.

Empires are theoretically limitless, given the difficulty in determining the nature, or even the existence, of their frontiers. This paper discusses some general issues on the perception, role, and function of imperial boundaries, using examples from the Carolingian Empire and from other imperial formations through history.

What holds Indonesia together? In The Making of Middle Indonesia, Gerry van Klinken develops an innovative historical explanation that looks beyond national elites to middle classes in provincial towns. Readership: The book should be of interest to students of Asian history, in particular those reading about state formation, democratization, political integration and urbanization (political geography, urban anthropology, historical sociology).

"The book provides deep insight into theoretical and empirical evidence on information and communication technologies (ICT) as an important factor affecting financial markets. It is focused on the impact of ICT on stock markets, bond markets, and other categories of financial markets, with the additional focus on the linked FinTech services and financial institutions. Financial markets shaped by the adoption of the new technologies are labelled ‘digital financial markets’. With a wide-ranging perspective at both the local and global levels from countries at varying degrees of economic development, this book addresses an important gap in the extant literature concerning the role of ICT on the financial markets. The consequences of these processes had until now rarely been considered in a broader economic and social context, particularly when the impact of FinTech services on financial markets is taken into account. The book’s theoretical discussions, empirical evidence and compilation of different views and perspectives make it a valuable and complex reference work. Information Classification: General The principal audience of the book will be scholars in the fields of finance and economics. The book also targets professionals in the financial industry who are directly or indirectly linked to the new technologies on the financial markets, in particular various types of FinTech services."

Trade unions have repeatedly been challenged by neoliberal programmes implemented within Member States of the European Union (EU) and at the European level. The twentyseven country chapters at the core of this book chart the features of the neoliberal challenge in the EU Member States and the measures implemented by unions in their attempts to adapt to changed circumstances since 2000. It is clear that union activity, either independently or in conjunction with allies, will be at the centre of revitalization campaigns if the pieces left from the neoliberal challenges are to be picked up and wielded into a coherent response. This book offers a comprehensive comparative overview of the development, structure, and policies of national trade union movements in the EU. It presents an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing these organizations and their strategic and policy responses from 2000 to 2020.

Throughout much of the history of linguistics, grammaticality judgments – intuitions about the well-formedness of sentences – have constituted most of the empirical base against which theoretical hypothesis have been tested. Although such judgments often rest on subtle intuitions, there is no systematic methodology for eliciting them, and their apparent instability and unreliability have led many to conclude that they should be abandoned as a source of data.

Two processes have affected cities in the last twenty years: an increase of the 'mobile' population and the digital explosion, with particular attention to digital social networks. The debate, both academic and public has immediately highlighted the risky potentialities inherent in these changes, as they could be responsible for greater individualism and lack of interest in caring for their own neighbourhood. Yet, forms of urban aggregation continue to appear, even in rather innovative and spontaneous ways. It is the case of Social Streets, groups of previously unconnected neighbours, who get to know each other through Facebook and become active by promoting conviviality in the neighbourhood. This book reconstructs trough sociological lenses, the spread of the Social Street phenomenon in the three cities with the largest number of these experiences. It investigates why the spread is not homogeneous within cities. It analyses opinions and feelings of activists, understanding if and how this phenomenon produces effects on those who participate and on neighbourhoods that host them. It explores forms of mobilisation that Social Street promote for the care and sociability of their streets and neighbourhoods and how this phenomenon detaches from more traditional associative realities. Particular attention is given to the comparative approach, to understand differences between those who participate in Social Streets and those who do not, showing how urban conviviality is possible, but facilitated by some factors and hindered by others.

The introduction explains the main purpose of the project Philosophical Review in German Territories (1668-1799). It shows why philosophical reviews are not only mere intellectual modes of communication or cultural media, but as an intellectual work with their own philosophical dignity. It shows the importance of the methodology of history of knowledge in order to achieve the major objectives of the projects and the relevance of five transversal and interdisciplinary vectors of study: 1. knowledge management; 2. philosophical transfers; 3. authorities and monopolies; 4. anonymity and authorship; 5. professionalization.

Why did human beings first begin to write history? Lisa Irene Hau argues that a driving force among Greek historians was the desire to use the past to teach lessons about the present and for the future. She uncovers the moral messages of the ancient Greek writers of history and the techniques they used to bring them across. Hau also shows how moral didacticism was an integral part of the writing of history from its inception in the 5th century BC, how it developed over the next 500 years in parallel with the development of historiography as a genre and how the moral messages on display remained surprisingly stable across this period. For the ancient Greek historiographers, moral didacticism was a way of making sense of the past and making it relevant to the present; but this does not mean that they falsified events: truth and morality were compatible and synergistic ends.

After a remarkable career in higher education, Sidonie Smith offers Manifesto for the Humanities as a reflective contribution to the current academic conversation over the place of the Humanities in the 21st century. Her focus is on doctoral education and opportunities she sees for its reform. Grounding this manifesto in background factors contributing to current “crises” in the humanities, Smith advocates for a 21st century doctoral education responsive to the changing ecology of humanistic scholarship and teaching. She elaborates a more expansive conceptualization of coursework and dissertation, a more robust, engaged public humanities, and a more diverse, collaborative, and networked sociality.

This is the first English translation of Herbert Witzenmann’s seminal work,Strukturphänomenologie, which departs from the traditional phenomenological methods of Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty to introduce a fresh approach to the nexus of consciousness and reality. In Structure Phenomenology, published open access, Witzenmann argues for the active mental, yet mostly pre-reflective, participation of humans in the emergence of individual consciousness of all kinds and the basic structure that determines it. While Witzenmann ascribes a derivative or memorative status to habitual states of phenomenal consciousness, even if they seem to refer to present objectivity, he proposes that the underlying formative processes be unveiled and explored through systematic first-person observation. Through his logically grounded and experience-based approach, he contends that it is not neural processes that produce consciousness, but rather one’s own preconscious rootedness in reality which can be made conscious. Influenced by the writings of Rudolf Steiner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Witzenmann’s innovative approach casts new light on a number of philosophical, psychological, and scientific issues: from being and becoming to temporality and presence, and from remembering to mind and body. Even freedom takes on a new meaning when reality is not pre-given to human consciousness, but is rather a result of human participation in the basic process. This annotated translation makes Witzenmann’s text accessible to an English audience for the first time and, with a comprehensive editorial introduction by Johannes Wagemann, situates his ground-breaking insights within the development of phenomenology, as well as in current philosophical and psychological debates. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Laboratory animals play an important role in biomedical research and advances. Expanded, updated, and now published in full color to provide greater clarity to the techniques and concepts discussed, this guide presents basic information and common procedures in detail to provide a quick reference for investigators, technicians, and caretakers in the laboratory setting. It includes additional information on the research uses of the guinea pig along with updated medical care information.

Europa ist in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem dominierenden Thema geworden. Verantwortlich dafür ist vor allem der Prozess der europäischen Einigung, der zunächst wirtschaftlich, zunehmend aber auch politisch gesehen wurde. Ein kulturell fundiertes Europa-Verständnis hingegen wird zwar rhetorisch immer wieder ins Spiel gebracht, bleibt aber eigenartig unscharf. Dieser Band bringt politische, historische und kulturelle Aspekte des modernen Europas zusammen und trägt so zu einem ganzheitlicheren Bild bei. Sein Titel spielt bewusst mit der Mehrdeutigkeit des Begriffspaars "Fiktion" und "Realität": Auf der einen Seite kann literarische Fiktion eng mit politischer Realität bzw. Realitätsdarstellung verbunden sein, andererseits ist "Realpolitik" oft mit "Fiktion" - Mythen, Stereotypen, Traditionen - durchsetzt.

This Open Access volume aims to methodologically improve our understanding of biodiversity by linking disciplines that incorporate remote sensing, and uniting data and perspectives in the fields of biology, landscape ecology, and geography. The book provides a framework for how biodiversity can be detected and evaluated—focusing particularly on plants—using proximal and remotely sensed hyperspectral data and other tools such as LiDAR. The volume, whose chapters bring together a large cross-section of the biodiversity community engaged in these methods, attempts to establish a common language across disciplines for understanding and implementing remote sensing of biodiversity across scales. The first part of the book offers a potential basis for remote detection of biodiversity. An overview of the nature of biodiversity is described, along with ways for determining traits of plant biodiversity through spectral analyses across spatial scales and linking spectral data to the tree of life. The second part details what can be detected spectrally and remotely. Specific instrumentation and technologies are described, as well as the technical challenges of detection and data synthesis, collection and processing. The third part discusses spatial resolution and integration across scales and ends with a vision for developing a global biodiversity monitoring system. Topics include spectral and functional variation across habitats and biomes, biodiversity variables for global scale assessment, and the prospects and pitfalls in remote sensing of biodiversity at the global scale.