Consequences of the crisis: New concepts

The crisis that started in 2008 began with the malfunctioning of the financial mechanisms, i.e. as a financial crisis; it quickly became an economic crisis and is now threatening to become an energetic crisis and, lately, a crisis of agricultural products, announcing at the same time the crisis of a development model and an ontological crisis. It engages the questioning of certain conceptualizations and orientations. If one wonders about the new concepts employed by the foreseen “ontological crisis”, then one may answer, with powerful arguments, that there are concepts such as: “cultural turn”, “transdifference”, “complexity”, “risk” and “vulnerability”. These concepts are assumed in order to understand the world we are living in. If we ask ourselves about the changes in orientation brought by the crisis, then the answer is that this crisis forces us to review the diagnoses given to the current society and to accept that we have entered the “uncertain society”. The paper is based on the speech delivered by the author at the receipt of the Doctor Honoris Causa title of Corvinus University Budapest on the 28th of January 2010.