This paper describes Tarski’s project of rehabilitating the notion of truth, previously considered dubious by many philosophers. The project was realized by providing a formal truth definition, which does not employ any problematic concept.

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has intensified efforts to open European research programmes to the world. This paper focuses on the opening of European research to the world by studying the case of the FP7 international cooperation programme. It is based on a mixed-methods approach including analyses of quantitative data, documents and interviews with programme participants, policymakers and other stakeholders involved in 131 EU projects worldwide. The paper identifies features specific to the European international research cooperation scheme and contributes to our understanding of the supranational intervention and its impact on European research integration. Policymakers can use this piece of evidence to formulate enhanced strategies and better design and target activities both within the EU and globally, to achieve stronger, long-lasting research outcomes and effects.

Every year, Gallup Inc. surveys the societal relationships that EU countries have with the USA, Germany, Russia and the PRC as well as the EU itself. The respondents furnish information on Europeans’ views regarding designated international political entities as international community leaders. This article examines the attitude of the European Union’s citizens to the above indicated potential and real leaderships in 2014–2016.

The European Union (EU) has suffered from fall-out recently. Clear cases in point were the anti-EU outcomes of the referenda in France and the Netherlands, as well as the messy process in response to the Euro crisis. More broadly, recent elections in many European countries have resulted in winning parties that advertise an explicit anti-EU sentiment, often linked to an equally explicit anti-immigrant stance. Apparently, in the eyes of many, the EU is not delivering – quite to the contrary. In this essay, insights from a variety of social sciences will be reviewed that may shed light on this issue, with a focus on the role of a multidimensional conception of diversity.

In spite of all their assets and resources, global cities (to be understood as a concentration of global capital players along with a large diversity of other presences) have disorder wired into the urban space itself. There are contrasted understandings of public disorder and of its links with globalization. Some disorder is a necessary step in the adjustment of change. Urban space is then a political resource for all kinds of grievances, given coverage by the media and by the internet. The police are an essential piece in their own interaction with protesters. The ritualized nature of public confrontations should be underlined. France offers a good illustration of this phenomenon with its approach to order maintenance. Police officers’ ability to use or not use force, to distribute social status and to categorize their opponents in dealing with order reveals that the police’s role lies at the root of political order and the claims a state makes upon its people for deference to rules, laws and norms. Recent uprisings unveil the role played by urban space and by the empowerment it provides for people assembled together to make claims. Civil societies’ capacity of resistance to decisions or processes perceived as harmful should not be downplayed. New forms of religious terrorism however mark a new chapter in the links of globalization and disorder. Lots of unknowns emerge and we need to understand and accept unpredictability and even embrace it in order to make sense of it in the future. My assumption is that some current forms of public disorder are not just a repetition of past disorder and that we see new patterns emerging.

The article argues that the question of this Focus about national models versus local aspirations must be supplemented with the question of a European dimension. The question is whether a European social model is conceivable in parallel to or beyond the local, the regional and the national models. The article argues that the question of prosperity in Europe must have a reasonable dimension of political redistribution of the fruits of economic growth. The concept of prosperity does not only have a bearing on the economic but also on the social. The article critically discusses the concepts of model and path dependency. Model is seen as a stereotype emerging in the dynamics between reflection on Self and imagination of the Other. Path dependencies are seen as trajectories laid out towards the past for a better understanding of the present, as ex post mental constructions, but they have no or little prognostic value. The argument is for a soft version of path dependency as a heuristic tool as opposed to hard versions with an ambition of prediction. The problem with the concept as such is that it is inscribed in a long tradition of ideals of predictability in social sciences based on a structural instead of a constructivist view of history and society.

The amount and quality of clinical research are constantly increasing; however, the translation of results into daily practice is not keeping pace. University curricula provide minimal methodological background for understanding the latest scientific findings. In this project, we aimed to investigate the quality and amount of clinical research compared with basic research by analysing ten doctoral schools in Hungary. We found that 71% of PhD theses were submitted in basic sciences. The majority of physicians (53%) working in clinical institutions did their PhD projects in theoretical departments. Importantly, recent clinical methodologies such as pre-registered randomized clinical trials and meta-analysis are only rarely used (1% and 1%, respectively) compared with retrospective data analysis or cross-sectional studies (30% and 43%, respectively). Quality measures such as international registration, sample size calculation, and multicentricity of clinical sciences are generally absent from articles. Our results suggest that doctoral schools are seriously lagging behind in both teaching and scholarly activity in terms of recent clinical research methodology. Innovation and new educational platforms are essential to improve the proportion of science-oriented physicians.

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was one of the most significant thinkers of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democracy. His work, notably the two-volume, 1200-page Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West, 1918/22), had a profound influence on the intellectual discourses of the time in Germany and beyond.1 Yet, despite the high esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries, his thought has been seriously under-researched. In English, only four major studies have appeared in the last 70 years.2 This is all the more surprising in that the historical period in which he wrote has been extensively covered by both English- and German-language scholars and that some of the thinkers who drew critically on his ideas, such as Heidegger and Adorno, have become household names in Germany intellectual history.

Academics all over the world rightly desire to understand how modern science has come about. Indeed there was a time when historians of science had on offer a clear-cut conception of how that happened. But ongoing innovation in historiographical approaches has rendered the period from Galileo to Newton ever more elusive. Its monolithic coherence has been dissolved, a mood of sceptical resignation reigns in the profession over the very possibility of treating seventeenth-century science as more than a string of loosely connected episodes. I argue that, without returning to a historiographical past definitively behind us, coherence may be restored at a higher level of sophistication. Cross-cultural comparison, and unusual ways of dealing with historical concepts and causes, are proper tools to revitalize the issue and come up with partly novel answers to a question that in any case refuses to go away.

This article discusses the chryselephantine statue known as the Palaikastro Kouros, which was recovered in the excavations at Palaikastro in eastern Crete in the 1980s. The statue and the sanctuary building in which it had stood had been deliberately destroyed c. 1450 bc. It is probable that the motivation for the destruction was iconoclastic. This situates the fate of the Palaikastro Kouros within a broader context of iconoclasm in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean area.

Is a common approach to knowledge about man and nature possible? With Leonardo da Vinci as our starting point we will explore this question. Leonardo was much more than a painter; he was a sharp observer of man and nature. What he saw (structures) and what he did (using his miraculous left hand as syntax) was translated into insights and methods of constructions as recorded in his notebooks. His view was holistic, as witnessed by his study of the eye; from the anatomy of the eye he proceeded outwards to a theory of perspective, and inwards to an understanding how perception and the mind are grounded in the brain. In this we see similarities to current studies of language, mind and brain. It is possible to see a kind of proto-version of the art and science of mathematical modelling in Leonardo. This is a methodology of wide scope, extending far beyond physics and engineering. With a sufficiently broad understanding of the key concepts of structure, syntax and algorithms we have a method strong enough to allow for a common approach to knowledge of man and nature, to what there is and how we know.

Research framed around issues of diversity and representation in STEM is often controversial. The question of what constitutes a valid critique of such research, or the appropriate manner of airing such a critique, thus has a heavy ideological and political subtext. Here, we outline an attempt to comment on a paper recently published in the research journal Physical Review – Physics Education Research (PRPER). The article in question claimed to find evidence of ‘whiteness’ in introductory physics from analysis of a six-minute video. We argue that even if one accepts the rather tenuous proposition that ‘whiteness’ is sufficiently well defined to observe, the study lacks the proper controls, checks and methodology to allow for confirmation or disconfirmation of the authors’ interpretation of the data. The authors of the whiteness study, however, make the stunning claim that their study cannot be judged by standards common in science. We summarize our written critique and its fate, along with a brief description of its genesis as a response to an article in which senior officers of the American Physical Society (which publishes PRPER) explained that the appropriate venue for addressing issues with the paper at hand is via normal editorial processes.

The opposition between rationality and irrationality is often portrayed as a struggle between rational evidence-based science and irrational, ungrounded myth. I shall argue that this is too simplistic and that different forms of rationality need to be recognised – in particular, the rationality of everyday life. All scientific inquiry and reasoning is based and depends upon the practices, activities and antecedent beliefs of human knowers, who are embedded in cultural life-worlds in ways that science has hitherto ignored. Progress in civilisational rationality requires that the rationality of the life-world be understood.

International boundaries are man-made separation lines. All of today’s boundaries were created in the past, sometimes years, sometimes decades, even in some cases centuries ago. Thus, international boundaries reflect the historical moments in the life of a State, when its limits were made according to its force and ability at a given time. Understanding the process of boundary making and the location of boundaries can become a bridge of research and knowledge between three major scientific areas – history, geography and political science.

The definition of the term culture has become so vague as to be almost synonymous with human life; as an analytic term it has become nearly valueless. Of course, it can be used as a description of artistic activity, but this also becomes dubious when applied to popular mass culture. Culture often carries a sense of superior ethical values, but this too declines into confusion when multiculturism is opposed to culture as a whole.

The paper deals with the role of Latin and the whole Latin tradition (Latinitas) in East and Central Europe. The main thesis is that, when viewed from various perspectives, this tradition proves to be an integrating as well as a disintegrating factor in the cultural community of the region. Concluding remarks concern the relevance of the Latin heritage for preservation of the cultural identity in East-Central Europe.

Approaching the 21st century, humankind faces a paradox: the ocean covers more than two-thirds of the Earth's surface and has a core role in providing living and non-living resources for the world's population, but it is much less understood than the terrestrial part of our planet.

Archaeological sites can be excellent alternative museums. They need appropriate enclosures and an imaginative arrangement of archaeological objects or replicas.

In recent years large global programmes on the environment have been developed in which geography provides an essential component. This article outlines the main programmes in progress.

A preoccupation with hybridity is natural in a period like ours marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters. Globalization encourages hybridization. However we react to it, the globalizing trend is impossible to miss, from curry and chips – recently voted the favourite dish in Britain – to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu or ‘Bollywood’ films. The process is particularly obvious in the domain of music, in the case of such hybrid forms and genres as jazz, reggae, salsa or, more recently, Afro-Celtic rock. New technology (including, appropriately enough, the ‘mixer’), has obviously facilitated this kind of hybridization.

It is no wonder then that a group of theorists of hybridity have made their appearance, themselves often of double or mixed cultural identity. Homi Bhabha for instance, is an Indian who has taught in England and is now in the USA. Stuart Hall, who was born in Jamaica of mixed parentage, has lived most of his life in England and describes himself as ‘a mongrel culturally, the absolute cultural hybrid’. Ien Ang describes herself as ‘an ethnic Chinese, Indonesian-born and European-educated academic who now lives and works in Australia’. The late Edward Said was a Palestinian who grew up in Egypt, taught in the USA and described himself as ‘out of place’ wherever he was located.

The work of these and other theorists has attracted growing interest in a number of disciplines, from anthropology to literature, from geography to art history, and from musicology to religious studies. In this issue, the contributions discuss Africa, Japan and the Americas as well as Europe and range from the 16th century to the 21st, from religion to architecture and from clothing to the cinema.