Husserl's phenomenological reduction is aimed at disclosing, the potentialities of a transcendental ego as absolute ground of any possible knowledge. This absolute ground is impossible to attain in the natural attitude of the naive, non-reduced lifeworld. But the reduction is exposed to a difficulty of principle, since the language of the transcendental ego cannot be other than ordinary language. However, instead of dismissing the validity of the reduction, this problem reveals how much the transcendental ego's alienation in the natural world is part of its transcendental meaning.

In part lit will be analysed the genesis of the term "lifeworld" in context of E. Husserl’s philosophy. In the Crisis of European Science Husserl shows that the Doxa has a special significance compared to Episteme. This corresponds with Hussser's thesis that the world of science requires always the lifeworld. The lifeworld is the result of the anonymous cons- titution of the transcentental ego. This constitution should be demonstrated in Husserl’s "ontology of lifeworld".In part II it will be demonstrated the constitution of the lifeworld not in terms of the transcendental philosophy but in terms of the existencial philosophy. It appears that for the genesis of the lifeworld the experience of the confidence Has a constituent function, primary the confidence of the child in its mother. In this relationship the child improves the confidence. If this relationship will be broken so this has negative consequences for the following life.In Kafka’s story "Der Bau" will be demonstrated the situation in which the confidence is broken. The story shows that the lifeworld is the result of the individual experience.

Life-world as the world of our concrete experiences is permanently modified by science. All experimental actions even of pure science are just as much scientific practice as a form of life-wordly practice. Above alt it is the technological consequences of science that reorganize life-world, and in such a way that we lack more and more understanding of what they realty are. This paper wants to show that several discrepancies and paradoxes, rising from this fact, contribute to structural changes in our experiences of the world as well as of our own self.

At first I discuss the role of the term "presupposition" in philosophy and linguistics. After introductory considerations to the term of presupposition I will come to the problems correlating with this term (presuppositions - conversational implicatures, the communicative function of presuppositions, presuppositions and conditions of happiness), in a further step some propositions to definitions and classifications of presuppositions will be discussed. Aim ofthe considerations is to extend the term of presupposition. This offers the possibility to put this term into the global context of implicite knowledge and thereafter to reconstruct the background knowledge of Lebenswelt (lifeworld) in the frame of an analysis of presuppositions. In my investigations I concentrate on the question what it means that a sentence/an utterance presupposes a certain background knowledge (J R. Searle). A reconstruction and discussion of the term of presupposition in the "Diskurs"-theory (J. Habermas) marks the end of the investigations.

The term ’Lebenswelt’ appears as such only in Husserl’s later work, but is prepared in his early work: it represents a deepening and concretization of the ’Generalthesis der natürlichen Einstellungf (Ideen I) and is meant to contribute to the improvement of the transcendental reduction. The pretheoretical, elementary, and concretely practeced human world experience that is referred to by Lebenswelt, however; evades a stable fixation, as it always points to something seemingly beyond itself In connection with Husserl’s later cultural criticism and in relation to his manifold usage of the term ’Leben’ cultural-therapeutical expectations arise which can be instrumentauzea for politics, but overstrame Husserl’s concept of science. The widespread use of the word Lebenswelt ’ is certainly motivated by Husserl’s work, although the word appeared in single instances independently of him from 1908 until the 1920s.

In this paper; having somewhat arbitrarily adopted a general line of interpretation of Wittgenstein on forms of life in which the word ’life' is taken in a biological sense, I try to work out ways of being more specific than that, which (a) are philosophically interesting, (b) are consistent with Wittgenstein's uses of the expression form of life' and with other remarks of his that seem closely connected, and (c) that take seriously both his disavowal of THESES in philosophy and his (related) belief that the job of philosophy is not to devise better theories, but to show how the problem itself arises from a particular kind of misunderstanding of language. A number of ways in which the idea of a form of life could play that sort of part are explored, for example the question how we know from which direction a sound comes, which we might initially have supposed to be answerable by reference to a calculation of the time difference in the arrival of a sound wave at one ear and then the other is rejected in favour of a supposition that the waves affect the nervous system and thereby causes us to look in the correct direction. This is an important difference. A neurologist might spend half a lifetime tracking down the nerves that calculate the direction, ana fail because no such calculation is done. Misdirected questions about identifying and locating pains, and about mastery are investigated, and finally Wittgenstein is depicted as holding that the nervous system, together with membership in a community provides all the assurance we need of the general correctness of calculations.

Richard Rorty has drawn a distinction between three ways philosophers in the 20th Century have conceived of the enterprise of philosophy. There are those who see it as the guardian of the sciences, those who treat it as a kina of poetry, and those who view philosophy as a political exercise. In this paper, I try to show that Wittgenstein, despite certain popular conceptions of his project, belongs more in the third group than in the other two. The paper focuses on Wittgenstein's notes On Certainty in order to reveal the structure of Wittgenstein's notion of epistemological privilege and how it depends on communal agreement and behaviour. The system of conventions and commitments on which our vanouis practices are grounded is not justifiable. It is a matter of forms of life.

The notion of life-world is to be understood as a methodological concept which demands the grounding of scientific statements in the first order constructs of everyday experiences and actions. Whereas the methodological principles proposed by Schütz conceive of these experiences mainly from a subjectivistic point of view, the ’communicative turn' asksfor a reconceptualization of these principles. Taken together; the hermeneutics of the everyday life world, ethnomethodology and grounded theory methodology can account for the methodical and communicative production of scientific statements about everyday constructs and the respective degree of "derivatedness.

The debate about Habermas' use of the system and lifeworld distinction has not focused on the explanation of social pathologies that he offers, but rather only on conceptual problems with the theories that he uses. Twill argue that the explanation offered by his thesis that "systems colonize the lifeworld" fits the main criterion for adequacy for macro-micro explanation: because it establishes macro-micro linkage, it is at least potentially complete. Such an analysis fits the empirical approach to traditional debates between collectivists and individualists among macrosociologists. I shall apply this approach here in three steps. First, I shall use the controversy about functionalist explanation in the social sciences to develop the criterion of completeness for macrosociological explanations (1). Second, I shall generalize the conditions of adequacy for functionalist explanations to macrosociology as a whole and show that Habermas'explanation of the colonization of the lifeworld is at least potentially complete, as an explanation sketch that lacks empirical detail (2). Third, I shall show that this approach also requires that Habermas modify his overly Weberian claims about the effects of bureaucracy, since his stronger notion of reification is based on the incompletness in his explanation of this aspect of the micromacrolinkage (3). Moreover; a more complete account has clearer practical consequences for agency in the form of collective action.

Nationalism is an anthropological reality; nations in the German ethnic sense of homogeneous cultural wholes are not. 'Nation’ in this sense is not a 'natural-kind term'. Its defining properties do not co-vary. It does not even correspond to a classical ’ideal type'. Its properties do not tend unidirectionally to a coherent approximative realisation. For natural languages and cultures internal deviations from standard are as constitutive as conformity is. The idea of a homogeneous ’cultural nation' does not justice to the complexity of social diversification. Nationalism is less to be refuted because of its alleged incompatibility with an idealistic universalism than because of its much more painful incompatibility with an empirically adequate particularism. In conclusion: regionalism is a well-founded goal, nationalism is not.

This article critically examines some of the major assumptions of structuralevolutionary theory. This examination has accepted as valid one basic implication of this approach - namely the strong tendency, among human beings, to "expansion”, and has examined the different dimensions of such expansion.But contrary to the classical evolutionary perspective, our approach has emphasized that the different dimensions of such expansions - especially the symbolic and the structural differentiation, need not always go together.Of central importance in such a reappraisal is the distinction between, on the one hand, social division of labor which contains the core of structural differtation and on the other hand what has been called the basic elite functions - those functions or activities which are oriented to the problems generated by the very constitution of social division of labor, i.e. the constants of trust, regulation of power, construction of meaning and legitimation. The social activities oriented to these problems can be defined as elite functions and which are indeed distinct from those engendered by the social division of labor.This distinction has, however, not been fully recognized in the relevant literature and it is the examination of this distinction ana its implications for sociological analysis that constitutes the starting point, or the reappraisal, of structural-evolutionary perspective which is presented in this article and which is based above all on some of the research in comparative macro-sociology which I have undertaken in the last three decades — starting with the analysis of the Political Systems of Empires.This reappraisal has accordingly emphasized that it is indeed the different combination of these dimensions that gives rise to the dynamics of societies and civilization which indicate a much greater variability than has been proposed in classical and contemporary structural-evolutionary analysis.

What social scientists study is the evolution of historical systems. Evolution refers to the trajectory of processes inherent in the structure of the system. The structure of a system cannot explain either its genesis nor what happens to it following its inevitable structural crisis. The mechanisms of the evolution of the modern worldsystem, a system structured around the primum mobile of the endless accumulation of capital, is described.

This essay analyzes the principal approaches to culture which are available in the social sciences today and places these debates within the framework of broader theoretical controversies. On the one hand, it is a critical comparison. On the other hand, it has a systematic dimension that casts these arguments in a cumulative form. While the ambition of this essay is to prepare the way for a critical synthesis, such a task will not be attempted here. Far from being aimed at concluding judgments and summary evaluations, the purpose of this essay is to open up doors. In taking up general issues only as they are raised in the readings that follow, this essay will not lose sight of its introductory function.

This essay explicates a structural theory of the historical evolution of world-systems. Rather than using societies as the unit of analysis the authors use intersocietal interaction networks (world-systems). This enables them to take theoretical account of the systemic development processes that are regional and inter-regional in scope and to formulate a more powerful theory that explains how thousands of egalitarian small-scale world-systems evolved, expanded and merged to become the hierarchical and global world-system of today.

The beliefs and philosophical assumptions that comprise the cultural outlook known as "Postmodernism" are produced by the changing distribution of power within the international system. The collapse of general theory in the arts and humanities reflects the decline of American hegemony ana the rise of a world culture based on relativism, many voices, and no logocentrism. This reflects the plural international system in the period of post hegemony.

The negative phenomena accompanying modernization are often put down to the fact that modernization is incomplete ana follows the path of economic and scientific- technological rationalization. We then expect these negative sides to modernization to be eliminated as a result of its completion via moral and/or reflexive modernization and through the moral or reflexive regulation of economic or scientific-technological development. A sober look at a number of the negative manifestations of modernity reveals, however, that moral modernization itself plays a part in them. In the course of moral modernization, "moral respect" develops as a medium of communication that has on the one hand a global range but on the other destabilizes particularistic moral communities and draws them into a moral community which is global in principle but highly unstable. In this way, moral modernization has unintended consequences which can be termed "irrational" if viewed from the standpoint of rationality in its broadest sense.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union invites re-examination of Parsons' view of democracy as an evolutionary universal. This is done here in three steps. First, it is shown that his central propositions are in line with contemporary evolutionary thought which, problems of measurement notwithstanding, can be subjected to empirical test with indirect evidence. Secondly, and mindful of his commitment to the leading role of ideas in sociocultural evolution, his main argument for democracy as an evolutionary universal is summarized. Lastly, the most pertinent evidence of quantitative work to date is used to test his proposition. Contrary to his reasoning, it is found that hitherto authoritarian regimes have proved as adaptive to internal and external social change as democratic ones.