The Mosse-Lectures are an interdisciplinary and internationally based lecture series (so far almost 100 events). With its motto of "public culture and science" to remember the Mosse-Lectures on the German-Jewish family of publishers and the liberal publisher Rudolf Mosse ("Berliner Tageblatt"), for the profile the work of the 1999 late historian George L. Mosse stands. This opened with his presentation "The liberal heritage and the national-socialist public in 1997, the Berlin Mosse-Lectures.

With reference to Niklas Luhmann's distinction of familiarity, confidence and trust, and John Dewey's "Reconstruction in Philosophy," the speaker tells of a self-experiment: the problems encountered by an anthropologist, when he makes the attempt as a "participant observer" research practices and to reconstruct risks of synthetic biology. The presentation focuses on the various methods and inter-relationships between the life sciences and the humanities: an unbalanced power relationship. To observe are opposites of the researchers, the bacteria and responsible action. Is it still in Luhmann's sense, a "system to give confidence" that asks the following risk management, to the next step is to go?

More at:
http://www.klopsgruppe.de/Mosse/de/content/program#paulRabinow
http://www.ici-berlin.org/docu/rabinow/