Power and Decision

Panaiotis Kondylis (1943–1998) — a Greek philosopher and translator who wrote his main works in German. The book "Power and Decision" (1984), first translated into Russian, is one of his central works, presenting the theory of descriptive decisionism — a value-neutral understanding of decision-making and its connection with the formation of representations of the world and social relations. Relying on a historicist method, as well as on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber, the author addresses the problem of social ontology of power. In a later article "Science, Power and Decision" (1994), Kondylis demonstrates that the mechanisms of power relations he described also extend to the scientific sphere. Kondylis's research today gains new relevance as an example of a productive combination of methods from philosophy and social sciences.