Translate the text about Immanuel Kant into Russian.

READING AND SUMMARIZING

Read the text about Kant’s philosophy and do the tasks that follow.

Kant's philosophy

(1) In Kant's essay " Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? " Kant defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to Know"). Kant maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century.

(2) Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of society and morality, Kant asserted, people are reasonably justified in believing in them, even though they could never know for sure whether they are real or not. He explained:

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“All the preparations of reason, therefore, in what may be called pure philosophy, are in reality directed to those three problems only [God, the soul, and freedom]. However, these three elements in themselves still hold independent, proportional, objective weight individually. Moreover, in a collective relational context; namely, to know what ought to be done: if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world. As this concerns our actions with reference to the highest aims of life, we see that the ultimate intention of nature in her wise provision was really, in the constitution of our reason, directed to moral interests only.”

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(3) The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that " If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. And if he succeeds in doing neither (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real." The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for " Morality, by itself, constitutes a system, but happiness does not, unless it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. This, however, is possible in an intelligible world only under a wise author and ruler. Reason compels us to admit such a ruler, together with life in such a world, which we must consider as future life, or else all moral laws are to be considered as idle dreams…. "

(4) The two interconnected foundations of what Kant called his "critical philosophy" were his epistemology of Transcendental Idealism and his moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason. These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. With regard to knowledge, Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science could never be accounted for merely by the fortuitous accumulation of sense perceptions. It was instead the product of the rule-based activity of "synthesis." This activity consisted of conceptual unification and integration carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time, which are not concepts, but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it are dependent upon the mind.

(5) These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his theses – that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles – have all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.

Tasks

1. Name the passage describing Kant’s philosophy.

2. Thoroughly read the two quotations and condense their content.

3. Compress passages 4 and 5 into statement using the phrases:

A careful account is given to...

The author claims that...

The main idea of Kant’s philosophy is...

4. Summarize the text.

SPEAKING

Problem of the research

Vocabulary to use

to be interested in

to arise from

to be the subject of special/ particular interest

to be studied comprehensively/ thoroughly/ extensively

to take up the problem

to work on the problem

to follow/ to stick to the theory/ hypothesis/ concept

to differ/ to be different from

to be only outlined

to be concerned with/ to be engaged in the problem

to deal with/ to consider the problem

to be of great/ no interest

a lot of/ no literature is available on the problem

the reason for the interest in the problem is …

Answer the questions:

1. What is your research problem?

2. What is the subject of your research?

3. Why are you interested in this problem?

4. Do you follow any hypothesis? What is it?

5. In what way does your research differ from other studies of the same problem?

6. Is there much literature available on your research problem?

7. Has the problem been studied comprehensively in literature?

8. What are the main aspects of the problem that have been considered?

Speak about your research problem.

Work in pairs: ask for and give information on your research problem.

GRAMMAR NOTES

Revision of tenses (continuation)

Read the sentences from sociological works, underline the verb forms and name the tense they are used in. Translate the sentences into Russian.

1. The basic goal of sociological research is to understand the social world in its many forms.

2. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1969) argued that people conduct themselves so as to generate impressions that maintain the identities, or ''faces,'' that they have in social situations.

3. Cross-cultural research among people speaking diverse languages in more than twenty-five nations around the world revealed that any person, behavior, object, setting, or property of persons evokes an affective response consisting of three components.

4. In recent years the number of black professional, technical, managerial, and administrative workers has increased significantly.

5. Why have African Americans been disproportionately concentrated in those jobs with lower status?

6. Studies have shown that housing segregation remains very high in U.S. metropolitan areas, North and South.

7. These field studies have revealed the everyday character of the racial barriers and the consequent pain faced by blacks at the hands of whites in employment, housing, education, and public accommodations.

8. The first annual report of the society indicated 408 members distributed throughout Great Britain.

9. Early members of the society included an interesting variety of promi­nent public and literary figures.

10.. Among these was the long-standing opposition to the creation of sociology as a university subject by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which were at the top of the educational establishment in Britain.

11. But, the most persistent obstacle was the hierarchical social structure of British society that prevented the effective interrogation of its social structures

12. Whose study was first?

13. Bendix initially observed that all industrial societies had to authoritatively coordinate productive activities.

14. He showed that national variation in ideologies of workplace dominance were related to differences in the social structures of the countries studied.

15. Wallerstein suggested that the economic interdependence of nation-states likely conditions their developmental trajectories.

16. Each of these influential studies combined theoretical concepts and nonexperimental research methods.

17. For the individual, the Web has become an important ''presentation of self,'' an opportunity for publishing personal and professional resumes and other information.

18. In the next few years the Web and its technologies will offer many new opportunities for conducting research.

19. The pace of these new developments will continue to challenge sociologists to not only to stay current with the new tools for research but to conduct research on the rapidly growing cultures of the Internet.

20. The question of convergent trends in industrial organization has remained the focus of active debate and much research.

21. The large research literature related on this question has produced mixed evidence with respect to convergence.

22. On the question of sectoral and occupational shifts, Gibbs and Browning found both similarities and differences.

23. Sociologists were initially involved in the use of cultural diffusion theory as a means of looking at cultural change.

24. All of the major sociological theorists considered the division of labor to be a fundamental concept in understanding the development of modern society.

25. Sociology later emerged as a scientific discipline.

26. His own sociological scheme was typical.

27.. Like Comte, these figures did not consider themselves only "sociologists".

28. Early theorists' approach to sociology, led by Comte, was to treat it in much the same manner as natural science.

29. Another outcome has been the formation of public sociology, which emphasizes the usefulness of sociological analysis to various social groups.

30. Consequently the totemic representations of the sort which we have just mentioned are rarer and less apparent in Australia than in America.

31. These different facts gave us an idea of the considerable place held by the totem in the social life of the primitives.

32. Up to the present, it has appeared to us as something relatively outside of the man, for it is only upon external things that we have seen it represented.

33. When did the clans unite to live a common life?

34. This explanation has resolved the question only by repeating it in slightly different terms.

35. They thought they had found the proof of their theory in the two following facts.

36. We have seen that there are strong reasons for believing it.

37. However, here also there were exceptions and tolerations.

38. In order to give a semblance of intelligibility to this duality they have invented myths.

UNIT 3

READING AND SPEAKING

Pre-reading task

1. Give your arguments for and against Charles McCabe’s quotation: “Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art”.

2. What do you know about Max Weber?

3. Have you ever read Weber’s famous “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”?

4. Read the text.

Max Weber

IF ONE ASKS SOCIOLOGISTS and economists who Max Weber was, the answer comes quickly: "a sociologist" (e.g. Parson's 1968, Blaug 1986). If one consults histories of economic thought and histories of sociological thought one basically gets the same answer, but with some details added. Sociologists are, for example, well aware that Weber during one stage of his life worked as a professor of economics and that he produced some work in this capacity. All of this, however, is typically treated as an episode in Weber's evolution to becoming a sociologist; and his writings as an economist are usually cast as some kind of pre-sociological works, mainly of interest for their emphasis on the social dimension of economic phenomena (e.g. Bendix 1960; Kasler 1988). When historians of economic thought mention Weber at all (which is not very often), it is clear that they are aware that he played a role in German economics around the turn of the century. It is, however, equally clear that they find his work in economic of little or no interest, especially when compared to the accomplishments of scholars such as Wilhelm Roscher and Gustav Schmoller. And when historians of economic thought do find Weber's work of interest, it is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism they have in mind as well as Weber's ideas on social science methodology, such as the notion of Verstehen and the role of objectivity in the social sciences.

Nevertheless it should be noted that Weber was not only a sociologist but also an economist, and that his efforts to work as a sociologist towards the end of his life does not mean that he stopped being an economist. Indeed, Weber always presented himself as an economist-from the mid-1890s, when his academic career began, until 1920, the year when he died.

But once the historical record has been set straight on this point, a number of other and more important issues need to be addressed. How did Weber, who had an expert's knowledge of economics as well as of sociology, view the relationship between these two sciences? Did he argue that economic phenomena should be analyzed only from the perspective of one social science (economics? sociology?) or from several? If the latter is true, did Weber see economics as superior to sociology, the opposite, or that the two were somehow of equal standing? All of these questions are relevant for our understanding of Weber, but they also have a generality which goes beyond Weber and makes them interesting for today's economists and sociologists

Answer the following questions

1. Why does the question “Who was Max Weber?” arises?

2. Does his work “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” belong to sociology or economics?

3. When did he begin his career?

4. What is interesting for today’s scientists?

5. Comment on the statement: “Science is a powerful engine by which the genius of the few is magnified by the talents of the many for the benefits of all.”

READING AND TRANSLATION

1. Read the text about one of the most influential European thinkers and answer the following questions:

1. In what tradition did Weber work?

2. What ideas made him famous?

3. Name his best-known works.

4. What definition did Max Weber give to the state?

5. What responsibilities ought the politician to have, according to Weber?

6. Speak about Weber’s attitude to Catholics and protestants.

7. When was the phrase work ethic adopted? What was the origin of this phrase?

Max Weber

(April 21, 1864 - June 14, 1920)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

He was born in Erfurt, Germany, the eldest of seven children of Max Weber and his wife Helene. He was, along with Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto and Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology. Whereas Pareto and Durkheim, following Comte, worked in the positivist tradition, Weber worked in the idealist or hermeneutic tradition. He is best-known methodologically for his development of the "ideal-type," and substantively for his work on the sociology of religion.

Of marked importance, Max Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This is a seminal essay on the differences between religions and the relative wealth of their followers. Weber bases many of his economic studies on early 20th-century Germany.

Significant, too, is Weber's essay Politics as a Vocation. Therein, Weber posits the definition of the state that has become so pivotal to Western social thought: that the state is that entity which possesses a monopoly upon the legitimate use of force, which it may nonetheless elect to delegate as it sees fit. Politics is to be understood as any activity in which the state might engage itself in order to influence the relative distribution of force. Politics thus comes to obtain to power-based concepts, to be understood as deriving of power. A politician must also not be a man of the "true Christian ethic" (understood by Weber as being the "Ethic of the Sermon of the Mount" - that is to say, the heeding of the injunction to turn the other cheek). An adherent of such an ethic ought to be understood to be a saint (for it is only a saint, by Weber, that should find such an ethic a rewarding one). The political realm is no realm for saints. A politician ought to marry the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility, and must possess both passion for his avocation and the capacity to distance himself from the subject of his exertions.

Pivotal in his analysis of the tenets of a faith is the reliance upon "magic" in sermons and faith. Briefly, Protestants become wealthy because they have no "magic wand" to get them into heaven, therefore Protestants have to work constantly and consistently to assure themselves a place in heaven. On the other hand, Catholicism involves much waving of hands, fixed 'magical' rituals, chanted incantations, a bit of water, and an abracadabra-like prayer: believers' souls become purified for their ascent to heaven.

The disparity in wealth between religions is still very prominent, though there are critics who suggest this disparity owes more to historical hangover from colonialism than from a particular creed. Critics also say that one could make a distinction between northern Europe and southern Europe yet, looking at Switzerland, Protestant Cantons tend to be wealthier than Catholic ones. However the continuing corruption and dysfunctional governments and economies of predominatly Catholic societies is of deep concern.

The phrase, work ethic used in contemporary commentary is a derivative of the protestant ethic discussed by Weber. It was adopted when the idea was generalized to apply to Japanese, Jews and other non-Christians.

He is also well-known for his study of bureaucratization of society.

Max Weber died of pneumonia in Munich, Germany on June 14, 1920.

2. Give Russian equivalents to the proper names:

Erfurt, Vilfredo Pareto, Emile Durkheim, Comte, Protestant Cantons, Jews, Munich.

3. Render Weber’s ideas into Russian:

ideal type; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Politics as a Vocation; Ethic of the Sermon of the Mount.

4. Translate the following words and phrases:

positivist tradition; the idealist (hermeneutic) tradition; a seminal essay; politician realm; avocation; exertions; disparity; historical hangover; dysfunctional governments; to be of deep concern; pneumonia.

5. Find the passages devoted to M. Weber’s attitude to religions and translate the words, related to religion.

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