Lars P. Syll

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Leave the city, go out to our summer residence in the Karlskrona archipelago, open the doors to the terrace, sink into the recliner with a cup of coffee, and just enjoy these wonderful tones flowing from my old Thorens record player… [embedded content]

Judith Butler — the art of branding fashionable mumbo jumbo .[embedded content] Judith Butler’s theory of identity rests on the idea that there is nothing between the Scylla of the metaphysical ‘modernist’ subject and the Charybdis of the totally deconstructed identity where the subject becomes nothing but a fictitious fantasy. But this can’t be right. The social constructivist anti-essentialism is unsatisfactory and ends up in an idealist ‘slippery slope.’...

Die Wokeness-Bewegung — eine Kritik .[embedded content] Die Verteidigung der Aufklärung und die Kritik am Wokeness von Susan Neiman ist sowohl kraftvoll als auch überzeugend. Die Ideen der Aufklärung sind trotz der zahlreichen Kritiken, die gegen sie erhoben wurden, immer noch relevant. Die Aufklärung war gekennzeichnet von einem Geist der Erkundung, der zu neuen Entdeckungen sowohl in der Wissenschaft als auch in der Kultur führte. Anstatt eine enge...

Throughout European history the idea of the human being has been expressed in contradistinction to the animal. The latter’s lack of reason is the proof of human dignity. So insistently and unanimously has this antithesis been recited … that few other ideas are so fundamental to Western anthropology. The antithesis is acknowledged even today. The behaviorists only appear to have forgotten it. That they apply to human beings the same formulae and results which they wring...

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Deaton on labour shortages and wages ZEIT: Today, the debate focuses on the labor shortages facing many industrialized countries. Angus Deaton: I am always cautious when people talk about a scarcity of labor but don’t talk about wages. The argument always is: Americans don’t want to do these jobs, Germans don’t want to do these jobs. So we have to have migrants. But in many cases, it is not that Germans or Americans don’t want to do these jobs, but that...

Does free trade — really — benefit everyone? .[embedded content] Two hundred years ago, on 19 April 1817, David Ricardo’s Principles was published. In it, he presented a theory that was meant to explain why countries trade and, based on the concept of opportunity cost, how the pattern of export and import is ruled by countries exporting goods in which they have a comparative advantage and importing goods in which they have a comparative disadvantage....

Links und rechts — passt das Schema noch? Heute scheint unklarer als je zuvor, was das politisch überhaupt genau bedeutet, links und rechts. Die Unterscheidung hat zwar eine lange Tradition, die auf die Sitzordnung der verfassungsgebenden Versammlung in Frankreich im Jahr 1789 zurückgeht, wo die Royalisten rechts vom König Platz nahmen, die revolutionseifrigen Jakobiner hingegen links. Doch mit dieser Klarheit ist es lange vorbei. Und zwar auch deshalb,...