News

Brill has published the edited volume on

Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions
Prospects for a Critical Sociology
(edited by Tamás Demeter)

This volume is devoted to the central themes in Iván Szelényi’s sociological oeuvre comprising of empirical explorations and their theoretical refinement in the last 50 years. The contributors have been asked to take interpretive and critical stances on his work, and to clarify the relevance of his insights. Iván Szelényi has been asked to write a concluding chapter, and respond to the present reflections on his work. The ensuing volume discusses Szelényi’s captivating scholarship as being grounded in a complex program for the political economy of socialisms and post-socialist capitalisms, and introduces him as a neoclassical sociologist whose research projects continue to investigate inequalities created by the interaction of markets and redistributive structures in various societies.

Table of contents:

Gil Eyal: Futures Present: On the Concepts of “Intellectuals” and “Intelligentsia” in Iván Szelényi’s Oeuvre

Michael D. Kennedy: Normative Frames and Systemic Imperatives: Gouldner, Szelényi and New Class Fracture

Tamás Demeter: New Class Theory as Sociology of Knowledge

Karmo Kroos: How to Become a Dominant or Even Iconic Central and East European Sociologist

Bruce Western: Inequality and Transitions: Human Frailty in a Sample of Prisoners

Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits: Neoclassical Sociology Meets Polanyian Political Economy

Victor Nee: Mechanisms of Institutional Change

Tamás Kolosi: Transitions and Structural Distortions

David Ost: The Ouvrierist Szelényi and the Missing Sociology of Labor

Iván Szelényi: Auto-critical Reflection on Intellectuals, Inequalities and Transitions

Krisztián Pete's review of Stefan Storrie's (ed.) Berkeley's Three Dialogues: New Essays has been published in Philosophy in Review.

The MTA BTK Lendület Morals and Science Research Group, Budapest,
the University of J. E. Purkyně, Ústí Nad Labem,
and the Institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague

will be hosting conferences on

Metaphilosophy in History

The first conference will take place in Prague between the 4th-5th of June, 2020.

The second conference will take place in Budapest, between the 29th-30th of October, 2020.

Organizers: Tamás Demeter, Catherine Dromelet, James Hill, Josef Moural

Call for Papers:

What is philosophy? How a philosopher proceeds and what goals he or she pursues, how he or she distinguishes between good and bad philosophy? Being interested in such questions is sometimes labeled as metaphilosophy, and while much of metaphilosophical work so far was concerned with 'systematic' issues, our aim is to turn our metaphilosophical gaze onto the history of philosophy.

We shall have two conferences, gathering people interested in the self-conception of philosophy up to the very recent past. The chronological dividing line between them will be roughly 1725, for we beleive that the emergence of successful Newtonian science was a serious blow to the preceding self-conception(s) of philosophy, and that philosophy had to reinvent itself afterwards.

Some of the questions we are interested in are: Did metaphilosophy play an important role in the past philosophers' agenda? If they held metaphilosophical views, did their philosophical practice follow them? Was there more agreement on the metaphilosophical level than in argumentative practice, or vice versa?

We are inviting submissions on individual philosophers and/or schools, as well as of a comparative kind (within the chronological limits of each conference).

Abstracts for the first conference of about 500 words should be sent to:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. until the 1st of March 2020.
(There will be a further call for the second conference.)

Our research group cordially invites you to its upcoming workshop on

Early Modern Theories of Society

Date of the event: 15th of November, 2019.
Venue of the event: 1097 Budapest, 4. Toth Kalman st., 7th floor

Programme

11:00 - 12:00: Alissa Macmillan: "'O visions ill forseen': Hobbes, Milton, and Cavendish on Knowledge of the Future"

12:00 - 13:00: Bartholomew Begley: "Rousseau, Ranciere, and the Science of Politics"

13:00 - 14:00: Lunch Break

14:00 - 15:00: Ted McCormick: "Relocating Political Arithmetic: Quantification, Transmutation, and the Making of Population, 1500-1800"

15:00 - 16:00: Akos Sivado: "A Hundred Years Too Early: William Petty and Statistical Reasoning about Society"

Adam Tamas Tuboly's review of Michael Turk's Otto Neurath and the History of Economics has been published in Review of Radical Political Economics.