Resilience is often promoted as a boundary concept to integrate the social and natural dimensions of sustainability. However, it is a troubled dialogue from which social scientists may feel detached. To explain this, we first scrutinize the meanings, attributes, and uses of resilience in ecology and elsewhere to construct a typology of definitions. Second, we analyze core concepts and principle...

Short biography: Dr. Helberger specializes in the regulation of converging information and communications markets. Focus points of her research are the interface between technique and information law, user rights and the changing role of the user in information law and policy. Natali has conducted research for the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and national ...

Meanings of pluralism in different disciplines – Meaning in jurisprudence, esp. European Court of Human Rights – Feature of society and idea of society – Individual freedom v. group existence – Politics, religion, education – Pluralism as expression of rights and as guarantee of rights – Rejection of legal pluralism – Contradiction of elitist theory – State protection of pluralism and its limits

Causal pluralism is increasingly gaining interest as a promising alternative for monistic approaches toward causation. However, although the debate is scarcely out of the egg, the term “causal pluralism” already covers diverse meanings. This creates confusion, and to remedy that confusion, it is necessary to discern different kinds of pluralistic approaches to causation and different possible p...

My intention is to cast light on the characteristics of epistemic or fundamental research (in contrast to application-oriented research). I contrast a Baconian notion of objectivity, expressing a correspondence of the views of scientists to the facts, with a pluralist notion, involving a critical debate between conflicting approaches. These conflicts include substantive hypotheses or theories b...

It is widely known that there exists a multitude of possible explanations for the maintenance of sex; however, it is less clear how to handle such an explanatory pluralism. In this paper, we address one older and one more recent discussion on what might constitute a good theory for sex and find that they reflect a trade-off between maximizing the scientific virtues of generalism, realism, and p...