This paper discusses particular traits of historical thinking, including the role of the historian’s mentality in the perception of history.

Fin-de-siècle Central European scholarship takes on a different complexion, if it is approached from the perspective of politically responsible action. The article analyses neither scholarship involved into party politics nor apolitical scientific and scholarly activities but focuses on a specific approach: The scholars I am concerned with in this article strove for the strict division of science and politics; they nevertheless remained committed to political objectives such as improving social conditions. The approaches of Bernard Bolzano, Ernst Mach, Alois Riegl, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Otto Neurath, Hans Kelsen are taken into account.

In this study we investigate why bequests are left using a life course approach. Planned post mortem wealth transfers to children are linked with inter vivos transfers and inheritances left by the parents of the plan-makers. Individual decisions concerning wealth accumulation and bequeathing can be understood better if adjacent generations are taken into account. Moreover, particular events from an individual life history (widowhood, divorce, disease, and others) affect bequest decisions. A life course perspective proved fruitful in better understanding bequest behavior.

This article deals with the problem of the knowledge’s utility. This issue is considered from three perspectives. The dualistic perspective is based on the two-component structure: knowledge–reality; the subject–the object. In this regard, the knowledge’s utility is measured by the measure of the power that can be obtained over the world. From the monistic perspective knowledge is useful if it allows the internal improvement of the bearer of the knowledge. Knowledge in terms of the emergent system arises in the fluid cognitive relationship between components of changing system. Relations between the system (whole) and units (part of ) are variable and undetermined by the specificity of the individual components which are also reciprocal and mutually forming.

This article focuses on the question of the relation between the subject of The Modern World-System by Immanuel Wallerstein and the theoretical object of worldsystem analysis as a multidisciplinary approach that he proposed for history and the social sciences. The importance of this approach as well as its theoretical deficiencies are shown by examining two unanswered critiques of the first volume of The Modern World-System — one coming from Robert Brenner and the second from Fernand Braudel.

Philip Sabin points out that modern wargames not only contain substantial amounts of historical information but also arrange it into interactive models which depict historical processes in a simplified manner. Such models can be used in historical research as well, complementing the discourse through more holistic and mathematically strict accounts, and providing tools that impose some discipline on counter- factual speculation.