Abstracts
1999/36
  
Replika Monologue: 
The Natural Matters of the World
Replika publishes the monologue of a lesbian woman, Zsuzsa Svitel, who left Hungary in the mid-seventies at the age of eighteen and became a professional soccer-player in France and Italy. By telling her adventurous life-story, she also paints an interesting picture of contemporary Asian and European cultures. 
Dennett on the Mind and Evolution
Daniel C. Dennett is one of the most influential contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists as well as a best-selling author. The papers in this selection focus on his most famous and controversial ideas. The opening piece by György Kampis defines Dennett’s place both in the philosophical tradition and in the American intellectual context, thereby providing background to the following articles. Kampis discusses the special character and problematic aspects of Dennett’s attitude to Darwinism. GergelyAmbrus explores Dennett’s theory of consciousness. He focuses on three central issues: the rejection of the “Cartesian theatre”, the idea that being conscious is like watching a show inside our head; the analysis of subject experiential qualities; the construal of the self as the center of gravity for narratives. Gábor Forrai analyses the theory of ‘stances,’ which Dennett employs both to explain the relation between various types of psychological and cognitive theories and to give account of the characteristics of our everyday psychological discourse. The paper also highlights how Dennett’s ideas come to bear on some of the main questions in current philosophy of mind. Csaba Pléh applies Dennett’s ‘stances’ to the history of psychology. He shows how Dennett’s distinction can be used in reconstructing some major episodes in the history of psychology, like the emergence of the notion of reflex.


Revolt into Style
This section contains four articles on the social history of European football. Aiming to suggest that the English way of playing football was more varied and complicated than some critics appear to think, Anthony Mason examines how and why English methods and style have changed over time. Outlining the social history of Viennese football between 1890-1930, Michael John studies the process during which this exclusively middle-class sport with Anglo-Saxon characteristics transforms into a kind of cosmopolitan urban popular culture. As a continuation of John’s work, Matthias Marschik concentrates on the period after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. He argues that football played a key-role during the Anschluss as an arena of both symbolic resistance and political manipulations. In the last article, Miklós Hadas studies the permanent tactical revolution in the Hungarian national football team’s play between 1902-1956. Exploring the issue in a relational context, he demonstrates that the success of the ‘Golden Team’ in the fifties might be interpreted as a result of a long-term historical interplay between social dispositional factors and professional skills accumulated mainly through Austrian-Hungarian derbies. 
E-way: 
Review Article on The Information Age by Manual Castells
Castells’ celebrated three-volume work presents a wealth of new insights and perspectives. However, it is vastly overwritten; it often uses metaphors instead of clear-cut arguments; and the author, a frustrated Marxist, most of the time seems to be reluctant to speak in his own voice. Besides offering a general survey of the book, Kristóf Nyíri attempts to provide an archaeology of Castells’ famous phrase “space of flows.” The survey concludes by emphasizing that Castells’ analysis on nations and nationalisms constitute a major topic which was absent from his earlier work.
 

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