Non-technical summaryIn this paper we discuss current challenges to the sustainability concept. This article focuses on seven dimensions of the concept. These dimensions are crucial for understanding sustainability. Even today, the literature contains basic misunderstandings about these seven dimensions. This article sketches such fallacies in the context of global and planetary sustainability. The sustainability concept has been criticized as a content-empty ‘fuzzy notion’ or non-committal ‘all-purpose glue’. This article thus has a critical intention of reflecting the sustainability concept accurately. The aim is to contribute a better understanding of the concept.

The current climate crisis confronts us with a deep discrepancy between knowledge and action. Therefore, this article is looking for a readjustment of the relationship between science and society. The positivist self-understanding of science and its fragmented organizational form lead to a marginalization of ethical questions. Instead, sustainability calls for a re-examination of the preconditions and embedding contexts of supposedly value-free research. Faced with the increasing complexity of the modern world, ethics must spell out a new “grammar of responsibility” that addresses the prevalent “declamatory overload of responsibility”. Ethicists can fulfil this role by uncovering and regulating conflicting goals and dilemmas. Instead of playing the role of “marginal echo chambers”, universities ought to assume their social responsibility as structural policy actors. This article suggests a methodology of responsible research as a specific ethical contribution to the model of “transformative” and “catalytic” science for a “post-normal age”. True to their founding mission, academia should herald a “New Enlightenment” that is more self-reflexive regarding its own practical and ethical preconditions, foundations, and consequences. This article presents a possible practical method for fostering the dialogue between the natural sciences and the humanities and to link research, education, practice, and social communication in new ways. It is concluded that a foundation of a whole-rationality approach with a multidimensional understanding of wisdom and, respectively, rationality and sagacity is necessary for sustainable universities.

Resilienz aus Sicht einer responsiven Ethik: Das bedeutet nicht nur, auf Herausforderungen zu reagieren, sondern vielmehr, sich von ihnen betreffen zu lassen und auf sie zu antworten. Durch diese Öffnung auf Andere und Anderes hin lassen wir uns in die Pflicht nehmen. Im Antwortgeben selbst liegt die normative Dimension einer Responsible resilience begründet.Within many practical, professional and political fields, resilience has become a normative, barely questioned orientation principle, yet it has not been the subject of explicit reflection. The following considerations aim to contribute to closing this gap without assuming a dichotomy between the functional and the normative levels. Resilience is understood as a process whose focus is the response to upheaval and problems. The ability to respond, then, is the starting point from which the normative aspects of resilience can be more clearly brought out and connected to conceptual differences (simple and reflective resilience; specific and general resilience) within resilience discourse. This is grounded in Bernhard Waldenfels’ idea of responsive ethics. Our concept seeks to provide greater understanding of the term “responsible resilience” and bring up the normativity of resilience in a reflective, non-dichotomous way.

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Nachdem der Resilienzbegriff eine enorme Konjunktur erfahren hat, stellt sich die Frage nach seiner analytischen Qualität und Relevanz. Die These dieses Sonderhefts besteht darin, dass Resilienz das Potenzial zu einem interdisziplinären Analysetool sozialer Transformationen aufweist. Dazu muss sie jedoch einer systematischen Kontextualisierung unterzogen und hinsichtlich ihrer normativen Implikationen reflektiert werden.