Language, Culture and Symbolic Forms

As Ernst Cassierer introduced in his “Philosophie der symbolischen Formen” in 1923, he specifically mentioned “language” as well as a way of symbolic forms. In 1991, the self declared “researcher on human sciences”, Norbert Elias, published his work called “The Symbol Theory” where he mainly writes about language as an application of symbolic forms and symbols. Elias does not make any reference to Cassirer at all, but states that languages are a part of a civilization process and part of cultur

Sao Paulo, the city of dreams, the city of smell, the city of what

Sao Paulo, also known as the New York of Latin America, is a conglomerate of concrete, asphalt, traffic, people, spiced with a little bit of green in between. But Sao Paulo is more than that, it can’t be reduced down to socio-demographic or statistical facts. It is the cultural centre of Brazil, home of the leading universities of Brazil, the economic hub of South America. The metropolitan region gives shelter to over 20 million inhabitants. This essay is a try to give a view on Sao Paulo through the eyes of an European

Immanuel Kant's Idea of Time vs. Norbert Elias’ Critique on his Conception

Abstract: In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes time as the formal condition on which all phenomena are based upon. He considers it as a one-dimensional subject, that is not an empirical perception, which is given a priori and nothing else but the form of an inner sense. Elias contradicts this, as he differentiates between a social time and a physical time. He demands an understanding for the relation between time in ’society' and in ’nature'. Elias states that languages (he specifically mentions German) often don't have a word that would be equivalent to the English term “timing". For Elias ’time' is part of the fifth dimension, the dimension of symbols, of experience, of awareness. Only this makes it possible to find out and know what time really is in a social context, a specific synthesis of occurrences, that has to be learned in higher developed societies that are based on the division of labour. Elias mentions ’time', but he states that it's only a synchronisation of positions in the seriatim of events

Vilem Flusser, the 21st Century and the Interactive Technologies

When Vilem Flusser developed his idea of the technical \ud images, he could not foresee how far the technical development of producing images would go. The technical image has become an important part of the perception of the public, eventhough it still remains purely virtual. In the media the technical image is omnipresent and is also used as to manipulate society and its members in favor of political \ud mainstreams or to create an atmosphere for or against something or somebody. A future ideal society, the telematic society, is created out of the generation of information by technical images