The article contains reflections on the role of reflexivity in contemporary education. The most important is to emphasize the importance of a pragmatic reflexivity in constructing the cultural identity of a young man. The majority of the text consists of references to the thoughts of Hans Georg Gadamer in the context of pragmatics of reflexivity. In conclusion, the author proposes a pedagogical definition of reflexivity.

Objectification in the workplace refers to relationships in which employees can be reduced to the status of objects. This phenomenon has deleterious consequences for health. In this study we examine the protective role of reflexivity, i.e. self-consciousness and team reflexivity. 98 employees answered an online questionnaire which measured objectification, self-consciousness, team reflexivity, mentalization and instrumentality/humanness. The results highlighted a moderation effect of private self-consciousness in the relations between objectification and its consequences. An elevation of self-consciousness is associated with a decrease in dementalization and is associated with an increase in instrumentality. Team reflexivity promotes a decrease in instrumentality and an elevation in humanness either directly or indirectly via the diminution of objectification. The two forms of reflexivity are therefore complementary when facing objectification in the workplace and its consequences. The question of the articulation of the self and co-regulation processes is discussed in connection with these results.

One of the main traits of a society of reflexive modernity is the critical analysis of categories that in the past appeared unquestionable. Socio-cultural gender and health or illness/mental disorders are categories of this type. Above all, they are socially constructed, that is, they are dependent on culture and on political, economic, and religious factors. The author undertakes to analyse the relations between the diagnostic criteria used in the international system of classifying mental diseases (DSM-IV and ICD-10) and traditional schemas of masculinity and femininity. Confirmation of the incidence of particular diseases in connection with gender is the author’s entry point for seeking answers to why individuals suffering from certain illnesses/mental disorders display behaviour corresponding to traditional gender roles, even though contemporary gender roles are fluid in many respects, and hypotheses about biological differences as causes of incidence of disease in men and women have not been empirically confirmed.

The following article can serve as yet another report from the workshop of an Etymological Dictionary of Arabic ( EtymArab).1 Work on a ‘zero version’ of such a dictionary has seen (slow but) steady progress since several years now. Taking the root √SLQ as an example, this contribution gives an idea about the high potential of such a project, but also shows its clear actual limits. The enormous spectrum of semantic values covered by √SLQ—one may distinguish more than thirty meanings that, at first sight, do not seem related to each other—provides a fine illustration of the complex composition of the modern as well as the classical lexicon. The current state of affairs in Arabic etymology allows us, to a certain degree, to ‘sort out things’ and bring some order into this confusing complexity. In many cases, however, research also remains ‘hanging in the air’.