Annika Nigul
Way of life in Estonia
The article differentiates between the notions of way of life (elulaad) and lifestyle (elustiil) and provides an overview of their empirical study in Estonia and the different types of way of life.

Several authors (Bourdieu, Chaney) find that the socially classifying sign system is lifestyle. Lifestyle expresses the similarity between individuals, and at the same time, individuals differentiate themselves from the others through their lifestyles. Swedish sociologists (Rosengren, Reimer, Johansson and Miegel) have given a broader treatment of the concept of lifestyle; in their opinion, lifestyle includes people's individual qualities (values, attitudes, interests, tastes, etc.) as well as their behaviour and everyday life. In this sense, in Soviet Estonia the term "way of life" was used, which in its broader meaning was understood as a system of relations between living conditions, forms of activity, ideas and orientations (Vihalemm).

Although way of life and lifestyle are rather similar concepts linguistically, and English-language literature usually does not differentiate between them, I still consider it essential to make a difference between them in analysis in social sciences. By lifestyle, I understand individuals' subjective preferences revealed in their behaviour. By way of life, however, I understand the trend in activity of human groups that is determined by social circumstances.

The current analysis is based on the extensive poll Media and Elections conducted among Estonians aged 18-74 years by the Institute of Journalism and Communication at the University of Tartu in 2007. When creating the typology, I considered different orientations in leisure-time activities. My classification was based on cluster analysis according to the k-means method, which yielded seven clear-cut groups which can be seen as the typology of Estonians' ways of life and characterized by the variety of different actions.

Comparison of the way of life types revealed in our study with studies conducted by the Department of Journalism at the University of Tartu from 1979-1984 shows that, beside way of life types that characterize Estonians nowadays, some of types have preserved from the Soviet period, although their essence and meaning have changed. The relation between work and consumption of culture as dominants in way of life has changed essentially. The forms of society-centred way of life have disappeared and have supposedly been replaced by orientation to work. The traditional home-centred way of life is basically more passive today than in the Soviet period and clearly oriented towards the home. Along with that, considerably more active family-centred way of life has spread and is centred on spending time with family and children as well as socializing and sport. The most characteristic way of life at present, however, is oriented towards the new media and club life, being characteristic mainly of young people. The centre of their interests is the computer, the video, the internet, etc. and it is clearly oriented towards communication outside the home.


Walther Ludwig
Humanist academies as a transitional form between a circle of friends and an institution
The word academia, with a wide range of meanings, came into use around 1425 in the region between Naples and Venice. Its meaning depended on the context where it was used and included that of a schola founded on the relation between the teacher and the students or a scholarly circle of friends (sodalitas).

Like humanism in its broader sense, this usage of the word academia reached Germany somewhat belatedly in the sixteenth century, and until the eighteenth century it was used almost without exception about universities. At the same time in Italy, where the common names for universities were Studio or Università di studi, the other main modern meaning of the word academia spread, namely that of sodalitas or societas eruditorum. Innumerable academies sprang up next to universities and even in many towns with no universities. Italian academies were partly oriented towards literature and research in general; partly they were specialized on certain research tasks; their standards ranged from dilettantish to professional.

In Germany, foundation of learned societies began as late as in the seventeenth century. All of them, using either German or Latin as their working language, were influenced by Italy to a greater or lesser extent, but they did not adopt the name of academy, which in Germany was strictly related to universities.

New use of the word academy was introduced in Germany only by King Frederick II in 1743-1746. Following the French model, he changed the Berlin Scientific Society (Societas Scientiarum, Sozietät der Wissenschaften, founded in 1700) to an academy and renamed it Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres. In Göttingen, however, still a Society of Sciences and Humanities (Sozietät der Wissenschaften) was founded as late as 1751. The following private scholarly associations (Erfurt Academy, 1754; Churbayerische Akademie in Munich and Churpfälzische Akademie in Mannheim, 1763) that the reigning princes founded or granted privileges already used the name academy that Germans had hitherto avoided in the names of societies.


Bernard Williams
Philosophy as a humanistic discipline
In speaking of philosophy as a "humanistic" enterprise, the author is not making the point that philosophy belongs with the humanities or arts subjects. The question is: what models, ideals, or analogies we should look to in thinking about the ways in which philosophy should be done? It is an application of a more general and traditional question, which is notoriously itself a philosophical question: how should philosophy understand itself? A similar problem concerns the other term in the phrase. It is not just a question of a discipline, as a field or area of enquiry. "Discipline" is supposed to imply discipline. Williams emphasizes that in philosophy there had better be something that counts as getting it right, or doing it right, and he believes that this must be associated with the aims of philosophy of offering arguments and expressing oneself clearly, aims that have been particularly emphasized by analytic philosophy, though sometimes in a perverse and one-sided manner.

In conclusion, Williams argues that philosophy should get rid of scientistic illusions, that it should not try to behave like an extension of the natural sciences (except in some special cases). It should think of itself as part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and of our activities, and that in order to answer many of its questions it needs to attend to other parts of that enterprise, in particular to history.

Arthur C. Danto
Philosophy as/and/of literature. I
Philosophy seems to be a singular crossbreed of art and science, but still the trend to view philosophy as seemingly surprising and somewhat alarming. It is greatly due to the vastly widened conception of the text, which enables us to apply the strategies of hermeneutical interpretation even to bus tickets – why not to meditations, examinations and critiques?

On the other hand, the opposition between philosophy as literature and philosophy as truth provides an occasion to reflect on how philosophical truth has been regarded if we approach philosophy for a moment as though it were a genre of literature.

For a period roughly coeval with that in which philosophy attained professionalism, the canonical literary format has been the professional philosophy paper. The author emphasizes that the concept of philosophical truth and the form of philosophical expression are internally related closely enough so that when we turn to other forms we may also be turning to other conceptions of philosophical truth. So addressing philosophy as literature is not meant to stultify the aspiration to philosophical truth so much as to propose a caveat against a reduced concept of reading, just because we realize that more is involved even in contemporary, even analytical philosophy than merely stating the truth: to get at that kind of truth involves some kind of transformation of the audience, and the acquiescence in a certain form of initiation and life.

Pretty much the only way in which literature of the non-philosophical kind has impinged upon philosophical awareness has been from the perspective of truth or falsity, which, in its turn, raises the question of fictive reference. And philosophy's way of relating literature to reality may make philosophy-as-literature one with philosophy-as-truth.

The author reaches the concept of intertextuality, through which literary theoreticians emphasize the self-containedness of literary works. The author, however, provides examples where, together with references to other art, where there are such references, work together with reference to world, to make a complex representation. (to be continued)


Pascal Boyer, Brian Bergstrom
Evolutionary perspectives on religion
Evolutionary accounts of religious concepts and behaviours stand in contrast to other traditions in the study of religion. First, the varieties of evolutionary-cognitive framework outlined here are clearly reductionist. Their aim is not to describe what it feels like to entertain religious thoughts, or in what way these thoughts could make sense, but to explain their occurrence and their contents. Second, this account suggests that religious processes are not sui generis. They do not require that we assume a specific religious organ or religious mode of function in the mind. Third, even though there is a strong social demand for explaining religion in terms of a unique "origin", evolutionary and cognitive models suggest that this project makes little sense. Religion denotes a variety of behaviours and cognitive processes likely with different evolutionary backgrounds.

As far as religion is concerned, one can distinguish between models that tend to present religion (or some part thereof) as an adaptation (like the capacity to learn a natural language) and models couched in terms of by-products (like the capacity to read and write). Before we can say anything about the adaptive function of religious thoughts or behaviours, we must analyse what makes them possible, which is the substantial contribution of the models reviewed here.

The authors persuade us that religion may be a particularly apposite test case for the evolutionary cognitive approach. The domain is a priori unconstrained – people might let their imaginations run freely when it comes to representing a non-physical agency. But we do find an impressive set of recurrent features, for which classical anthropological theory has no coherent, predictive, independently based explanatory hypotheses. By contrast, the models reviewed in the article show that evolutionary perspectives can help us make sense of specifically human, and otherwise puzzling, cultural phenomena. Religion is only one among various domains in which very different socially transmitted input results in highly similar, recurrent cultural traits. Notions of the non-physical agency, their powers, and their connections to human beings are so widespread that explanations couched purely in terms of local knowledge are missing the point. What is needed is a more detailed investigation into an evolved psychology shaped by natural selection.


Mihhail Lotman
Semiotics of fear and typology of Russian culture. IV. Fear and its cognitive models: Estonian fear against the background of German and Russian models
The study consists of five parts: 1. Semiotics of culture and phenomenology of fear. 2. Space of fear in Russian culture. 3. Glossophobia in Russian culture. 4. Fear and its cognitive models (fear and threat in Estonian and Russian). 5. Borders of fear. Some fragments of the study, mostly concerning the first three parts, have been published earlier in Russian as well as in English; the whole of it is published in Akadeemia for the first time.

The first part defines the specific semiotic features of fear, relying on the traditions of both Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. In the framework of Peirce's tradition it turns out to be simpler to speak about concrete manifestations of fear, but the Saussurean angle makes it possible to speak about fear as a specific language that does not only apply the existing signs but also creates them.

Analysing the models of fear in Russian culture, the author applies a systemic approach. He does not refer to individual texts or viewpoints that characterize their authors, but rather uses those views that occur in the texts of different authors in different periods and different genres. Thus, they can be believed to represent culture-specific stereotypes.

One of the significant specific features of Russian culture is its emphatic cognition of space, which is closely related to threat and fear. Such a threat has a dual nature – large, limitless space is dangerous and frightening, but decrease in space is also dangerous. Agoraphobia transforms into claustrophobia.

Another specific feature of Russian culture is glossophobia. At the level of the individual, glossophobia manifests itself in fear of speaking; at the cultural level, it can acquire a specific form, which is expressed as fear of (foreign) languages. Namely this kind of glossophobia has been characteristic of Russian culture throughout the times, where language has always been a dangerous and alien element.

The understanding of threat in one or another culture is at least partly determined by the cognitive structure of the respective language. Therefore, it is illuminating to compare the Russian models of fear with those that have been expressed in Estonian, where fear is much more isolated from threat (sayings like "better be afraid than regret", in any wording, remain incomprehensible when translated into Russian).

In the last part, the author returns to the theoretical framework of fear and elaborates considerably on the premises presented in the first part.

Published 2009-05-20