Max Weber's methodology: an ideal-type

Weber dealt-in contrast to the textbook image of his method-with rational and nonempathetic explanatory interpretation. His ideal-type for social action emerged in a very formative period, as a mediation between history and theory and can be characterized as releasing what was inherent in a historicist tradition in crisis. Theoretical elements from Austrian marginalism provided Weber with the prototype for developing contrafactual schemes into ideal-types. Weber as a scholar at the crossroads resolved the problem of uncontrolled value-intrusion in a way that provided rational evidence and limited objectivity, in the form of instrumental means-end analysis. His methodology was coherent over time but gradually emerged when contemporary polemics called for his voice to be heard.     

The Structure of Max Weber's Ethic of Responsibility

Max Weber's distinction in Politics as a Vocation between the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility is best understood as a distinction between mutually exclusive ethical worldviews. Interpretations that correlate the two ethics with Weber's distinction between value-rational social action and instrumental-rational social action are misleading since Weber assumes that both types of rational social action are present in both ethics. The ethic of conviction recognizes a given hierarchy of values as the context for moral endeavor. The ethic of responsibility acknowledges value obligations, but assumes the absence of any given hierarchy of values and the inevitability of value conflict as the context for moral endeavor. When interpreted in the context of his multilayered understanding of value conflict, Weber's ethic of responsibility emerges as a coherent ethical perspective.     

Max Weber's The Religion of China: An interpretation

The Religion of China is an overlooked but pivotal key to understanding Weber's life work. A careful reading of this work shows that Weber's analysis of the rise of rational capitalism in the West and its absence in China is intrinsically contradictory. While Weber's official position is that the ultimate cause of the absence of capitalism in China (and inversely, its presence in the Occident) was to be found in religion, his political analysis indicates that the politico-legal conditions alone were sufficient to prevent the rise of rational capitalism in China. Moreover, he finds that the Chinese religion, which was unfavorable to the rise of rational capitalism, was to a significant extent the product of Chinese political conditions. This contradiction reflects the tension, never resolved, between Weber's institutional and religious explanations of the Occidental development.     

Max Weber's remarks on Islam: The Protestant Ethic among Muslim puritans

This article takes a look at Max Weber's remarks on Islam compared with Calvinism with reference to the doctrine of predestination, the quest for salvation, inner-worldly asceticism and the concept of rationalization. The comparison shows that Weber regarded Islam as the polar opposite of the Protestant ethic, particularly in its Calvinist variant. The article then shifts its focus to Indonesian Islam in order to demonstrate that ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ are not univocal but multivocal. Indeed, Indonesian Islam contrasts sharply with Weber's portrait of Islam in the Middle East. Finally, the article examines the extent to which the rise of Muslim puritans within the early Islamic reformist movement in the Muhammadiyah of Indonesia resembles ascetic Protestantism, particularly Calvinism.     

论韦伯的经济伦理概念及其对中国经济伦理研究的影响

本文通过辨析韦伯经济伦理概念的含义、韦伯对经济伦理的研究方法、"韦伯命题"等,说明中国经济伦理学界对韦伯经济伦理概念的理解是有欠缺的,其原因主要有二:其一,对相关文本的理解思路不恰当;其二,我们自身问题意识的错位与类比的错位.这些理解上的欠缺,对中国经济伦理研究产生了不良影响:由于对经济伦理概念的理解不当,导致研究方式的偏颇,从而未能抓住当代经济伦理研究的重心.     

The primacy of the noematic. On the methodological relevance of art for phenomenology

Continental Philosophy Review - As Husserl already noticed, artworks themselves have a phenomenological character. This means, however, that to experience artworks as phenomena no...     

Intelligibility and conflict resolution in the lifeworld

This paper examines the role of Habermas's concept of the lifeworld in processes of reaching mutual understanding. This concept is shown to be ultimately too amorphous to bear the theoretical weight Habermas places on it. He conceives the lifeworld both as diffuse and holistic, yet also as structured; as a set of taken-for-granted and counterfactual presuppositions, yet also as a kind of knowledge. In the end, he presupposes what the lifeworld is supposed to explain: mutual intelligibility of subjects in interaction. These conceptual tensions affect the explanatory power of the lifeworld and the usefulness of the theory of communicative action for conflict resolution. Where conflict resolution is aimed at mediating radical disagreements with minimal concord between parties, presuming consensus may not be possible or optimal. The present analysis argues for the need to develop other means of establishing a sufficient level of background consensus against which communicative action can take place.     

Longing for tomorrow: phenomenology,cognitive psychology,and the methodological bases of exploring time experience in depression

The subjective experience of time in depression has been described to be altered in complex ways, with sensations of particular slowness, delay or stillness being the most often named articulations. However, the attempts to provide empirical evidence to the phenomenon of “time slowing down in depression” have resulted in inconsistent findings. In consequence, the overall claim that depressive time somehow differs from ordinary time has often been discarded as unfounded. The article argues against such conclusion, contending that the described ambiguity might be caused by the methods employed to assess the phenomenon under observation. In the first part of the article, a reconceptualization of the experience of time in depression is proposed on the grounds of classic and contemporary phenomenological psychiatry. This leads to identify the essential features of depressive time as described both in clinical and philosophical contexts. In the second part, a critique of the existing methods of time perception assessment is conducted, with a specific focus on duration estimation and time passage perception tasks. The above-mentioned core features serve as guidelines in discussing to what degree such methods fit the phenomenon at stake. Finally, an alternative and innovative method is put forward, that might not only help to explore the scope of existing methods but might itself present an alternative to such: the micro-phenomenological interview.     

Surrender-and-catch and phenomenology

Revision of a lecture given on November 10, 1982, in the course of a faculty seminar at Memorial University of Newfoundland. The present version owes much to the participants in the rational, undistorted discussion which followed, as well as to written comments by Erazim Kohák, his book, Idea and Experience: Edmund Husserl's Project of Phenomenology in IDEAS I (1978), discussions with Mildred Bakan, Helmut R. Wagner's response to a related paper, and a critical reading by George Psathas. I am deeply grateful.