The city as a construction site — a visual record of a multisensory experience

In this article, I consider the reception of images that are present in a city space. I focus on the juxtaposition of computer‑generated images covering fences surrounding construction sites and the real spaces which they screen from view. I postulate that a visual experience is dependent on input from the other human senses. While looking at objects, we are not only standing in front of them but are being influenced by them. Seeing does not leave a physical trace on the object; instead the interference is more subtle — it influences the way in which we perceive space. Following in the footsteps of Sarah Pink, Michael Taussig and William J. T. Mitchell, I show that seeing (to paraphrase the title of an article by the last of the above mentioned scholars) is a cultural practice. The last part of the article presents a visual essay as a method that can contribute to cultural urban studies. I give as an example of such a method a photo‑essay about chosen construction sites in Poznań, which I photographed between December 2014 and June 2015

Challenging the Sustainable Social Progress

The Presentation held at the ceremony for granting the title of Doctor Honoris Causa of The West University in Timisoara is based on a paper which presents a synthetic view on some economic and financial issues of our times, considering especially the crisis of the last period, and mentioning a few remarkable ideas about the mentality of humankind. The author takes into consideration in a large view, regarding economy, some aspects of physics and of other fields of modern science, such as philosophy, including irreversibility of time, suitable for our full of uncertainty and complex reality, wishing to achieve goals related to solving the economic issues and to social progress.

The Forest and the Trees in Constitutional Law

The pride of selecting a good catchy title, before you haveactually sketched out the lecture, is a pride that goeth before afall. My earliest discovered difficulty - and I imagine you willagree that it is enough difficulty for one effort - has been thatwhile I can see how over-long, over-loving attention to the treesone-by-one might narrow and confine one\u27s view of the forest, Ihave been unable, after some considerable trial, to see how youcan look at the forest without looking at the trees. Some prettybig mistakes, in writing and talking about law, have come fromtrying to describe the forest without bothering too much aboutthe trees. Have we here to do with a tragic predicament, one ofthe innumerable facets of original sin? Maybe, but since we haveto go on living, despite original sin, I shall live as best I can withthis title; I have buttered my bread, now let me lie in it. I hopemy title may at least have some of the thing called heuristicvalue - that last refuge of inept titles as of inapt hypotheses

The Third Way on Objective Probability: A Skeptic's Guide to Objective Chance

The goal of this paper is to sketch and defend a new interpretation or theory of objective chance, one that lets us be sure such chances exist and shows how they can play the roles we traditionally grant them. The subtitle obviously emulates the title of Lewis seminal 1980 paper A Subjectivist s Guide to Objective Chance while indicating an important difference in perspective. The view developed below shares two major tenets with Lewis last (1994) account of objective chance: (1) The Principal Principle tells us most of what we know about objective chance; (2) Objective chances are not primitive modal facts, propensities, or powers, but rather facts entailed by the overall pattern of events and processes in the actual world. But it differs from Lewis’ account in most other respects. Another subtitle I considered was A Humean Guide ... But while the account of chance below is compatible with any stripe of Humeanism (Lewis , Hume s, and others ), it presupposes no general Humean philosophy. Only a skeptical attitude about probability itself is presupposed (as in point (2) above); what we should say about causality, laws, modality and so on is left a separate question. Still, I will label the account to be developed “Humean objective chance”

Europeanisation, Bosman and the Financial ‘Crisis’ in English Professional Football: Some Sociological Comments

[From the introduction]. During the last two decades there has been growing concern over what has been described as the financial ‘crisis’ in English football. This is not just a media-inspired view, but one that has emanated increasingly from within the football authorities in England, government ministers and others within the professional game following the formation of the Premier League in 1992. It is also a view that has come to be expressed – particularly in light of the financial management of clubs before and after the introduction of the Bosman ruling in 1995 – about the financial position of football clubs elsewhere in Europe, such as Italy, Spain and Germany. Lago, Simmons and Szymanski (2006: 5), for example, have suggested that ‘the imbalance between income and expenditures, and … evidence of rising debt’ serve to ‘demonstrate the possibility of a crisis’ in European professional football. Similarly, the former Chief Executive of UEFA, Lars-Christer Olsson suggests ‘you have clubs now where the turnover is €200m-€300m (£140m-£205m) and they still make a loss. This is very unhealthy, and stupid’. In addition, he argues ‘The growing wealth gap between clubs, and the resulting predictability of the league title race in so many European countries, is a key issue. If left unchecked it will kill off a lot of the interest in football, which depends on unpredictability of outcome to keep fans’ (Olsson, 2006: 16). Set in this context, the objective of this paper is to offer the beginnings of a sociological explanation which highlights the extent to which Europeanisation processes, among others, have helped to make a central, though largely unplanned and unforeseen, contribution to the increasingly unequal concentration of financial resources among only a handful of clubs in English professional football. More specifically, by drawing upon aspects of figurational sociology and focusing, in particular, upon the differential interdependencies or relational networks in which football clubs are located, we shall argue that these processes can be explained in terms of the outcomes of the complex combination of intended and unintended consequences of dynamic networks of human relations which are lengthening and becoming more complex on both a European and global scale before analysing the correlative emergence of the Europeanisation process and some of the consequences this has had for professional football in England

What is a particle?

Theoretical developments related to the gravitational interaction have questioned the notion of particle in quantum field theory (QFT). For instance, uniquely-defined particle states do not exist in general, in QFT on a curved spacetime. More in general, particle states are difficult to define in a background-independent quantum theory of gravity. These difficulties have lead some to suggest that in general QFT should not be interpreted in terms of particle states, but rather in terms of eigenstates of local operators. Still, it is not obvious how to reconcile this view with the empirically-observed ubiquitous particle-like behavior of quantum fields, apparent for instance in experimental high-energy physics, or "particle"-physics. Here we offer an element of clarification by observing that already in flat space there exist --strictly speaking-- two distinct notions of particles: globally defined $n$-particle Fock-states and *local particle states*. The last describe the physical objects detected by finite-size particle detectors and are eigenstates of local field operators. In the limit in which the particle detectors are appropriately large, global and local particle states converge in a weak topology (but not in norm). This observation has little relevance for flat-space theories --it amounts to a reminder that there are boundary effects in realistic detectors--; but is relevant for gravity. It reconciles the two points of view mentioned above. More importantly, it provides a definition of local particle state that remains well-defined even when the conventional global particle states are not defined. This definition plays an important role in quantum gravity.Comment: 19 pages, no figures. Revised version, with a new title, of the 2004 paper "Global particles, local particles