This paper considers substantive and methodological issues that are raised by the deployment of Goethe’s notion of the Urphänomen in the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. The paper is exploratory. I employ Goethe’s idea, and his approach to empirical observation and theory more generally, to examine affinities and contrasts between the methodology of Simmel and Benjamin. Like Goethe, bo...

In this paper, a symbolic version of the Simmel effect has been explored via computer simulation. By Simmel effect, we mean the dynamics of status symbols in hiearchically ordered societies. This phenomemon was highligthed by the sociologist Georg Simmel (1895), when he attempted to explain the rapid diffusion and decline of fashion. Simmel, hypothesised that the instability of fashion results ...

As Privatdozent and later, außerordentlicher Professor at the University of Berlin hoping to be appointed to a permanent position, Georg Simmel’s task was to prove himself by attracting students to his courses. By all accounts, he was rather successful in this; the majority of the articles on Simmel contained in Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel (Gassen and Landmann, 1958), a collection put toget...

Max Weber and Georg Simmel are considered as ideal-typical founders of sociology. Whereas Simmel pleaded for a large conception of sociology, which would include the epistemological and metaphysical issues as well, Max Weber explicitly excluded philosophical questions from the domain of sociology. A philosophical reading of Max Weber’s sociology, which uncovers his philosophy in the margins of ...

Seventy years ago, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel described an influential study of the perception of intention, where a simple movie of animated geometric shapes evoked in their subjects rich narrative interpretations involving their psychology and social relationships. In this paper, we describe the Heider-Simmel Interactive Theater, a web application that allows authors to cr...

The social psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel have shown in the 1950s that movies about very simple object interactions are typically interpreted in a very social manner, quickly perceiving motivations and emotions. We have developed a tool to generate Heider-Simmel-like videos. In contrast to the Heider-Simmel Interactive Theater project by Andrew Gordon and colleagues, though, our...

RESUMEN Interesado en los motivos que impulsaron la recuperación de Georg Simmel como sociólogo modernidad, el artículo indaga rol desempeña su ensayística concepto estado ánimo (Stimmung), probada relevancia tradición filosófica alemana, pero escasamente estudiado para caso Simmel. Se sostiene carácter radicalmente subjetivista asume Stimmung condiciona comprensión dialéctica entre sujeto y ob...

Simmel develops his concept of the stranger in an overly structural and reductionist manner. Contrary to Simmel’s suggestion, there is an indeterminate relation between structural exclusion and the attribution of strangeness. After showing that ‘the stranger’ must be rethought in a culturalsociological way, this essay demonstrates an alternative approach. Articulating a ‘discourse’ that structu...