The role of biomarkers in predicting pathological findings in the frontotemporal dementia clinical spectrum disorders is still being explored. We present comprehensive, prospective longitudinal data for a 66 year old, right-handed female who met current criteria for the nonfluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia. She first presented with a 3-year history of progressive speech and language impairment mainly characterized by severe apraxia of speech. Neuropsychological and general motor functions remained relatively spared throughout the clinical course. Voxel-based morphometry showed selective cortical (...) atrophy of the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus and underlying insula that worsened over time, extending along the left premotor strip. Five years after her first evaluation, she developed mild memory impairment and underwent PET-FDG and PiB scans that showed left frontal hypometabolism and cortical amyloidosis. Three years later, post-mortem histopathological evaluation revealed Pick's disease, with severe degeneration of left IFG, mid-insula, and precentral gyrus. Alzheimer's disease was also detected. This patient demonstrates that biomarkers indicating brain amyloidosis should not be considered conclusive evidence that AD pathology accounts for a typical FTD clinical/anatomical syndrome. © 2013 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved. (shrink)

What is space? And why are questions of space important to social theory? Society, Action and Space is the first English translation of a book which has been widely recognized in Europe as a major contribution to the interface between geography and social theory. Benno Werlen focuses on the issues which are at the heart of the most important debates in human and social geography today. One of the most significant recent developments in social analysis has been the increasing (...) interchange among geographers, sociologists, anthropologists and social philosophers concerning "the spatial." This debate involves the work of Giddens, Foucault, Bourdieu, Lefebvre, Harvey, Gregory, Soja, and many others. From these new developments a whole series of new forms and empirical work, as well as theoretical innovations, have come into being. Spatial considerations are no longer confined to the realm of geography, but are now seen as fundamental to all forms of social theorizing, especially under conditions of late modernity and globalization. Society, Action and Space links discussions in the philosophy of social science with theories of action which have direct relevance to concepts of space. Benno Werlen provides a discussion of Popper's critical rationalism, and connects it to ideas drawn from phenomenology. This epistemological debate is linked with the sociological action theories of Pareto, Weber, Parsons, and Schutz. The book closes with an evaluation of how "the spatial" can be systematically integrated into action theory. Ambitious, original, and persuasive in its arguments, it raises exciting new implications for the study of space and social theory. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive theory of invisibility as a critical sociological concept, addressing the relationship between social suffering and invisibilization. Herzog draws on social theory and a variety of empirical examples to analyze social grammar and unveil various mechanisms of social suffering. Presenting an original theory of silencing and suffering, this book outlines a substantive theory and methodology of invisibilization as an instrument of authority. This systemic analysis of visibility as both a liberating and dominating mechanism will be a (...) major contribution to the field of critical theory, offering an original framework to help improve the situation of excluded groups and individuals. Invisibilization of Suffering will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars across sociology, social philosophy, social work, political sciences, criminology, linguistics and education, with a focus on justice theory, marginalization, discrimination and exclusion. (shrink)

If critique does not want to be more than just a ‘passion of the head’ it has to engage in dialogue with the worst-off in society. However, there are several mechanisms that hinder the excluded from giving words to their suffering. Furthermore, there are processes of invisibilization that impede even the perception of the excluded and their critique in the public space. The aim of this article is to conceptually explore the mechanisms of formulating critique by the excluded and of (...) understanding critique in the public space. Therefore, I first provide a brief overview on the meaning of critique before then presenting suffering as a language of critique. In a third step, I explore the multiple mechanisms that hinder suffering from becoming visible and end up discussing some (fragmented) solutions for overcoming these invisibilities. Although the excluded is hindered in formulating public critique in linguistic form, the suffering of the excluded can be understood as the ground for a powerful form of social critique. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la potencia analítica que la teoría del reconocimiento elaborada por Axel Honneth puede ofrecer al discurso contemporáneo sobre la justicia global. Para ello, se analiza si la teoría del reconocimiento puede ser comprendida como una teoría de la justicia (I), se sacan a la luz los elementos para una teoría de la justicia global ya presentes en el modelo de Honneth (II) y se exponen algunas razones sistémicas que dificultan la comprensión de su (...) obra en tales términos (III). Por último, se proponen elementos no explorados por el autor que pueden contribuir a una teoría de la justicia global en términos de teoría de la lucha por el reconocimiento (IV). (shrink)

Excluded and/or marginalized social groups frequently face problems involving representation in the public sphere. Moreover, the very notion of exclusion typically refers to communicatively or discursively produced mechanisms of being considered irrelevant in public processes of communication. Exclusion and marginalization, understood as processes of silencing or invisibilizing social groups, are particularly serious in cases involving social suffering, i.e. socially produced suffering and/or suffering that can be eliminated or alleviated socially. Making silence heard, giving voice to the silenced and bringing the (...) invisibilized back into the public domain are therefore fundamental tasks of solidarity in reaching a higher degree of social integration. The main aim of this article is to reveal how it is possible to disclose and understand the social grammar of the normative claims of silenced and invisibilized social groups. Therefore, grounded in Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition, I first develop a theoretic model of criticism that elucidates silent and invisible suffering as universal normative language. Next, I develop a typology of silencing and invisibilizing that allows research attention to be directed towards specific fields of normative claims with different validity claims. Finally, I offer some general advice with regard to performing empirical research aimed at normative social criticism that considers the grammar of the silenced and invisible language of suffering. (shrink)

_English summary:_ The freedom potential of modern societies, above all the justification of political authority, is today linked to a democratically constituted order. What is meant by the idea of being democratic seems, however, to be anything but clear. Is it only a question of representing the people through elections, ballots, and political parties, or does it include institutional culture, the division of powers, and the legal regime within a community? A "philosophy of the republic", as developed in this volume's (...) contributions, shows that the current "dominance of the democratic" falls short of accounting for the independent significance to the republican self-organisation of state and society._ German description:_ Das Freiheitspotential moderner Gesellschaften, vor allem die Rechtfertigung politischer Herrschaft, wird heute mit einer demokratisch verfassten Ordnung verknupft. Was eine demokratische Ordnung ausmacht, was also die Idee des Demokratischen meint, scheint aber alles andere als klar zu sein. Soll es nur um Fragen der Reprasentation des Volkes durch Wahlen, Abstimmungen und Parteien oder daruber hinaus auch um die institutionelle Kultur, die Gewaltenteilung und das Rechtsregime innerhalb eines Gemeinwesens gehen? Eine "Philosophie der Republik", wie sie in den Beitragen dieses Bandes entwickelt wird, kann zeigen, dass die aktuelle "Dominanz des Demokratischen" keine eigenstandige Bedeutung der republikanischen Selbstorganisation von Staat und Gesellschaft beimisst. Mit Beitragen von: David Abraham, Andreas Anter, Susanne Beck, Jochen Bung, Daniela Demko, Horst Dreier, Andrea Marlen Esser, Helmut Goerlich, Bernd Grzeszick, Klaus Gunther, Matthias Kaufmann, Jean-Francois Kervegan, Thomas Khurana, Stephan Kirste, Oliver Lembcke, Rochus Leonhardt, Georg Lohmann, Wolfgang Schild, Christian Schmidt, Thomas Schmidt-Lux, Kurt Seelmann, Hannes Siegrist, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Trevor Wedman, Marc Andre Wiegand, Benno Zabel, Sabrina Zucca-Soest. (shrink)

The Dark Triad traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy—have been found to be associated with intra- or interpersonal deception production frequency. This cross-sectional study ( N = 207) investigated if the Dark Triad traits are also associated with deception detection accuracy, as implicated by the recent conception of a deception-general ability. To investigate associations between maladaptive personality space and deception, the PID-5 maladaptive personality traits were included to investigate if besides Machiavellianism, Detachment is negatively associated with response bias. Finally, associations between the (...) Dark Triad traits, Antagonism, Negative Affectivity and confidence judgments were investigated. Participants watched videos of lying vs. truth-telling senders and judged the truthfulness of the statements. None of the Dark Triad traits was found to be associated with the ability to detect deception. Detachment was negatively associated with response bias. Psychopathy was associated with global confidence judgments. The results provide additional support that dark and maladaptive personality traits are associated with judgmental biases but not with accuracy in deception detection. The internal consistencies of 4 of the 8 subscales of the used personality short scales were only low and nearly sufficient (αs =0.65–0.69). (shrink)

Carl Schmitt’s conceptual history of war is routinely invoked to comprehend the contemporary mutations in the concept and practice of war. This literature has passively relied on Schmitt’s interpretation of the nomos of the Ius Publicum Europaeum, which traced the transition from early modern ‘non-discriminatory war’ to the US–American promotion of discriminatory warfare as a new category in liberal international law. This chapter provides a critical reconstruction of Schmitt’s antiliberal narrative of war and argues that his polemical mode of concept (...) formation led to a defective and, ultimately, ideological counterhistory of absolutist warfare, designed to denigrate liberalism’s wars as total while remaining silent on Nazi Germany’s de facto total wars. The historical critique is supplemented by an interrogation of his theoretical presuppositions: decisionism, the concept of the political, and concrete order thinking. It shows that Schmitt’s history of warfare is not only empirically defective but also theoretically unsecured by a succession of arbitrarily deployed and hyperabstract theoretical registers. At the center of Schmitt’s work yawns a huge lacuna: the absence of social relations as a category of analysis for the history of war and international relations. (shrink)

This Elibron Classics title is a reprint of the original edition published by Leopold Voss in Leipzig, 1878.

The present cross-sectional study (N = 205) tested the hypothesis that the Dark Triad traits – narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy – and the PID-5 maladaptive personality traits – Negative Affectivity, Detachment, Antagonism, Disinhibition and Psychoticism – are associated with specific deception-related perceptions: perceived cue-based deception detectability, perceived deception production, and deception detection ability. Participants completed personality and deception measures in an online setting. All three Dark Triad traits and Antagonism were associated with perceived deception production ability, but not (substantially) with (...) perceived deception detection ability and cue-based deception detectability. The results provide a more fine-grained picture of biases associated with the Dark Triad traits in the context of deception and further support the relevance of Antagonism and Detachment as deception relevant personality traits. (shrink)

Hace tiempo se avisó de la existencia de antisemitismo también en círculos progresistas. Se trata de grupos sociales más sensibles por el carácter estructural de la discriminación y con alta simpatía para poblaciones vulnerables y que siguen la lógica posestructuralista de la crítica al poder. No obstante, en vez de incluir la comprensión del carácter estructural de la discriminación antisemita dentro de las actividades progresistas, parece existir una resistencia específica frente a la autocrítica respecto al tema del antisemitismo que defiere (...) fundamentalmente del trato de otras formas de discriminación. El presente artículo tiene como objetivo explorar las razones por las que la comprensión del antisemitismo como discriminación estructural no ha podido penetrar en debates académicos y sociales —tal como han penetrado en estos debates la comprensión del carácter estructural del sexismo o del racismo— más allá de los círculos de los estudiosos del antisemitismo. Para ello presentaré en la primera parte algunos elementos de la lógica estructural discursiva del antisemitismo. Exploraré en la segunda parte condiciones sociales estructurales que favorecen la percepción de la realidad según una cosmovisión antisemita. En la tercera parte hablaré de los efectos estructurales materiales y prácticos del antisemitismo para finalmente presentar mecanismos de rechazo de culpa específicas del antisemitismo. Se muestra cómo la propia lógica antisemita proporciona formas de neutralización y negación específicas, diferentes y adicionales a las demás formas conocidas de rechazo de culpa. (shrink)

In two pre-registered online studies during the COVID-19 pandemic and the early 2020 lockdown (one of which with a UK representative sample) we elicit risk-tolerance for 1,254 UK residents using four of the most widely applied risk-taking tasks in behavioral economics and psychology. Specifically, participants completed the incentive-compatible Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART) and the Binswanger-Eckel-Grossman (BEG) multiple lotteries task, as well as the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking Task (DOSPERT) and the self-reported questions for risk-taking used in the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) (...) study. In addition, participants in the UK representative sample answered a range of questions about COVID-19-related risky behaviors selected from the UCL COVID-19 Social Survey and the ICL-YouGov survey on COVID-19 behaviors. Consistently with pre-COVID-19 times, we find that risk tolerance during the UK lockdown (i) was higher in men than in women and (ii) decreased with age. Undocumented in pre-COVID-19 times, we find some evidence for healthier participants displaying significantly higher risk-tolerance for self-reported risk measures. We find no systematic nor robust patterns of association between the COVID-19 risky behaviors and the four risk-taking tasks in our study. Moreover, we find no evidence in support of the so-called “risk compensation” hypothesis. If anything, it appears that participants who took greater risk in real-life COVID-19-relevant risky behaviors (e.g., isolating or taking precautions) also exhibited higher risk-tolerance in our experimental and self-reported risk-taking measures. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to bring order to the messy phenomenology of the visibility and invisibility of social suffering.First, the processes of invisibilization will be conceptualized. Due to the contingency of the social and the need to reduce complexity, there is always an inevitable invisibilization. Similar to Michel Foucault’s “order of discourse,” the order of the visible will be presented, especially with regard to social suffering. Second, a critical theory of invisibilization and perception will be developed, and the (...) possibility that visibility itself can produce suffering will be discussed. Visibility can be a mechanism of oppression, and regimes of visibility can be part of mechanisms that only govern misery instead of attempting to overcome it. (shrink)

In this chapter, it will be asked how the struggle between visibilization and invisibilization engages in a struggle against social suffering.Several insights taken from critical theory will be applied. First and foremost, we must understand the research on invisibilization as consequently dialectical. This is not only true on an ontological level, where visibilization and invisibilization, underlying structure and appearance are always related. It is also true on an epistemological level, where we can always make visible only some aspects. Attempts to (...) show the full picture must necessarily fail. We can only aim for related fragments that illuminate formerly dark spots in the landscape of our knowledge. Dialectics as “the consistent sense of nonidentity” also must be the guiding principle for the methodological approach. (shrink)

Bd. 1. Zur Ontologie von Gesellschaft und Raum -- Bd. 2. Globalisierung, Region und Regionalisierung -- Bd. 3. Ausgangspunkte und Befunde empirischer Forschung.

This article discusses the role of communication research in the Cold War, moving from a US-centered to a comparative-transnational point of view. It examines research on prop-aganda and mass communication in the United States and the Soviet Union, focusing not only on the similarities and differences, but also on mutual perceptions and transnational entanglements. In both countries, communication scientists conducted their research with its benefits for propaganda practitioners and waging the Cold War in mind. It has been suggested that after (...) an initial period of close cooperation between politics and communication science, early expectations of the potential of systematic research for controlling the hearts and minds of people through propaganda started to fade. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, communication research eventually became a ‘normal’ scholarly discipline. (shrink)

Der Beitrag skizziert das Konzept und die Umsetzungsbedingungen von verantwortungsbewusster Künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) im industriellen Internet der Dinge und beschreibt spezifische Merkmale industrieller KI-Anwendungen. Dabei werden auf technische, regulatorische sowie risiko-ethische Aspekte der Anwendung von Künstlicher Intelligenz im industriellen Kontext eingegangen. Zudem wird anhand von drei Beispielfällen die Umsetzung verantwortungsbewusster Künstlicher Intelligenz veranschaulicht. Die vorgestellten Beispielanwendungen machen deutlich, wie stark differenziert die Diskussion über vertrauenswürdige KI und deren Kontextbedingungen zu führen ist. Zudem zeigen sie das große gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Potenzial (...) eines verantwortungsbewussten Einsatzes Künstlicher Intelligenz in der Industrie. (shrink)

In the foreground stands the idea to decipher law as starting point of continuous emancipation and alientation processes. Emancipation and alienation refer to an ethos of specific societies including forms of rational knowledge and inherited convention as much as individual needs and techniques securing domination. Insofar, law is no postulated „fact“ only to be discovered or (de-)constructed. We rather should understand it as dense texture of interests and convictions, theories and practices. The meaning of this can be illustrated with the (...) example of today’s dominating individuality paradigm. Securing status and political governing of the individuum can be regarded as consequence of an interdependence in which legally bound practice and normative dynamics of the law are referring to one another. Taking this logic seriously, one cannot only sketch the crossing of emancipation and alientation processes in the individuum. One can also see the whole dilemma of modern law: wanting to be the promise of autonomy and having to establish the culture of order securing power. (shrink)

In this first chapter, I would like to start with what moves the whole book—and perhaps all sociological inquiry. It is not a mere intellectual passion for studying theories on societies or for reflecting on research per se that motivates thousands of social researchers all over the world; rather, this book—as is the case with many of my colleagues—is motivated by the profound feeling that action must be taken against suffering. Suffering is central to society and central to research on (...) society. However, it is a term that is difficult to grasp, as it includes so many aspects at the same time. Therefore, I start by conceptualizing suffering, as a key concept of modernity, as social suffering; I conceptualize suffering, as a normative concept representing disrespect, as a source of critique and as a universal language. (shrink)

The article discusses installation art and its potential contribution to a transdisciplinary research practice, in which not only artistic, but also aesthetic theoretical approaches could play a central role. However, as the article shows, this firstly requires a change in perspective concerning the way we approach art. Secondly, it entails changes to a common understanding of aesthetic theory and, thereby, philosophy. A term of central significance in this context is the notion of aisthesis. The article will illustrate these thoughts through (...) the examples of Bruce Nauman, Ilya Kabakov, and Arnold Berleant. (shrink)

This paper explores recent tendencies in the area of tax fraud. The paper stresses the importance of social norms and institutions and highlights the relevance of extending the standard theories of tax fraud which is based on a narrow deterrence concept. The paper also refers to underexplored topics that require further investigation such as the relevance of rewards, social interactions, and tax complexity stressing also the importance of moving more strongly into business tax fraud, exploring also the interactions within a (...) firm. In addition, further work is also needed at the empirical level to better understand the causes and consequences of tax fraud. The review also shows the usefulness of applying a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary approach. (shrink)