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Populism is often characterized as a rejection of scientific expertise and a key obstacle to societies' ability to address the climate crisis today. I challenge this account, arguing for a more inclusive conception of populism and a more critical account of expertise. Consistent with this, I delineate a range of responses to the challenges of climate politics in populist times. In doing so, I have two primary aims: first, to highlight limitations of "anti-populist" responses among proponents of climate change action, and, second, to lean into populist criticisms of elite expertise, by delineating how some challenges to dominant forms of science and elite power are themselves expert knowledge and integral to promising movements that address climate change. This can allow expertise to be distinguished from elitism and to be recognized in caring relations to the subjects of knowledge. Here, expertise is not manifest as separation from the common world, but as immersion in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The citizens' disappointment with the government's policy favours the populist Alternative for Germany. Opinion polls indicate the rise of its support when at the same time, it becomes more radical and poses a threat to the democratic country. During discussions about the need to contain this unfavourable development, the name of the icon of the German Left is mentioned - Sahra Wagenknecht. The article presents her political career up to the founding of her own party in January 2024, in relation to opportunities and challenges that creating such a grouping on the German political scene would bring. It also includes the analysis of the factors influencing the great popularity of the activist and her most recent initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a corpus study of over 16,000 tokens of -er nominalizations on 62 verbal bases that were extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus. We show that an individual -er nominal can often be given a range of modal and aspectual readings and that a number of factors influence the availability of different readings for -er nominals, including verb type, syntactic context (verb tenses, adverbs), and encyclopedic information. On the basis of these data, we argue, contra Cohen (2016), that the core meaning of the affix -er (as in writer, printer, etc.) cannot be that of a dynamic modal. We show that neither Cohen’s (2016) analysis nor syntactic analyses such as that of Alexiadou and Schäfer (2010) can account for the range of readings we find. We conclude by sketching one possible analysis in terms of the Lexical Semantic Framework of Lieber (2004, 2016) that postulates underspecified lexical representations of the -er nominals and resolution of underspecification in context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a brief, modest comment on Schmidt and Schäfer's discourse analysis of dominant normative views in the climate policy debate. I take their empirical findings as a starting point to reflect on the way democratic societies should handle normative and factual dissent in policy deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her article "The Spirit of Matter in Büchner" Barbara Natalie Nagel investigates different vectors of Georg Büchner's materialism: historical, philosophical, ethical, physiological. The analysis of what Büchner presents to be a necessary link between physiology and revolution aims to show how Büchner has a tendency first to entangle two relatively static, binary oppositions — literal/figurative and material/spiritual — in order then to play them against one another. Büchner thus uses the dynamics of literalization to evoke necessity: for example, if the revolution is conceived of in physiological terms, then the will either has to become physiological or biology has to become spiritual. With this, Büchner achieves a literary parody of materialism that points to alternative forms of materialism, such as Benjamin's "anthropological materialism" or Gnostic materialism, neither of which are purely material or purely ideal. Rather, Büchner's literary parody of materialism approaches what one might call "materiality without matter." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]