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110 results in Philosophy of social science

Page 1 of 6

Karl Popper
  • Edited by Anthony O'Hear
  • Published online:
    25 April 2024
    Print publication:
    02 May 2024
  • Sir Karl Popper was a major thinker of the twentieth century, one who – as Anthony O'Hear writes in his new Foreword – 'has had a beneficent influence on those who have come under the spell of his thought and of the inimitable prose in which he articulates it'. It is now twenty-five years since Popper died, and thus seems – after a quarter of a century – an apposite moment to revaluate his impact, significance, and influence. The several chapters in this classic volume focus on many key elements of Popper's thought and philosophy. They are by no means uncritical, but afford Popper the respect due to a philosopher who wrote always with a degree of clarity, precision, and directness rare in the academic world of his time, and – as O'Hear puts it – 'even rarer subsequently'. This important book constitutes an essential introduction to some of the most esteemed philosophical writing of our times.

Black X
  • Liberatory Thought in Azania
  • Tendayi Sithole
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    03 April 2024
    Print publication:
    01 February 2024
  • Black X examines the signifier X, a marker of the dehumanization of the black subject, and argues for Azania as a liberatory project in South Africa.

Identity, Capabilities, and Changing Economics
  • Reflexive, Adaptive, Socially Embedded Individuals
  • John B. Davis
  • Published online:
    11 January 2024
    Print publication:
    01 February 2024
  • Mainstream economics assumes economic agents act and make decisions to maximize their utility. This model of economic behavior, based on rational choice theory, has come under increasing attack in economics because it does not accurately reflect the way people behave and reason. The shift towards a more realistic account of economic agents has been mostly associated with the rise of behavioral economics, which views individuals through the lens of bounded rationality. Identity, Capabilities, and Changing Economics goes further and uses identity analysis to build on this critique of the utility conception of individuals, arguing it should be replaced by a conception of economic agents in an uncertain world as socially embedded and identified with their capabilities. Written by one of the world's leading philosophers of economics, the book develops a new approach to economics' theory of the individual, explaining individuals as adaptive and reflexive rather than utility maximizing.

Systems, Relations, and the Structures of International Societies
  • Jack Donnelly
  • Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023
  • Inspired by recent work in evolutionary, developmental, and systems biology, Systems, Relations, and the Structures of International Societies sketches a robust conception of systems that grounds a new conception of levels (of organization, not merely analysis). Understanding international systems as multi-level multi-actor complex adaptive systems allows explanations of important features of the world that are inaccessible to dominant causal and rationalist explanatory strategies. It also develops a comprehensive critique of IR's dominant conception of systems and structures (narrow, rigid, and unfruitful); presents a novel conception of the interrelationship of the social production of continuities and the social production of change; and sketches models of spatio-political structure that cast new light on the development of international systems, including a distinctive account of the nature of globalization.

Reproduction, Kin and Climate Crisis

The Poverty of Strategy
  • Organization in the Shadows of Technology
  • Robin Holt, Mike Zundel
  • Published online:
    14 July 2023
    Print publication:
    29 June 2023
  • At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct and distinguish organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers limited view of organized life, but because it is dedicated to concealing these limits behind grand generalities. The situation is exacerbated when machines and algorithms, not humans, organize. Holt and Zundel draw on philosophy, literature, media theory, art, mathematics, computing and military thinking in an attempt to rescue strategy by isolating what, they argue, remains its essence: strategy is a continual organizational struggle towards authenticity. This, too, is a condition of poverty, but one that sets in place an unhomely condition of questionability as opposed to one of distinctive settlement. It is, argue Holt and Zundel, the sole gift of strategy to thoughtfully refuse rather than impose, organizational imperatives.

The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics
  • 2nd edition
  • Daniel M. Hausman
  • Published online:
    25 May 2023
    Print publication:
    08 June 2023
  • Is economics a science? What distinguishes it from other sciences, both natural and social? Like many of the natural sciences, its theories are mathematically complex. Yet, like the social sciences, its 'laws' are largely everyday generalizations. Can such generalizations, which are far from universal truths, constitute a science? Does economics have a distinctive method? The first edition answered these and other questions about the scientific status of economics and its underlying methodology. In this fully updated new edition, Dan Hausman reflects on developments in both economics and the philosophy of economics over the last thirty years. It includes a new chapter on the methodology of macroeconomics, an updated discussion on the use of models, and new discussions causal inference and behavioural economics and their implications for theory appraisal. It is the perfect choice for a new generation of students studying the methodology of modern economics.

What Matters Most
  • Conversations on the Art of Living
  • Edited by Anthony Morgan
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    23 January 2024
    Print publication:
    18 May 2023
  • The ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus insisted that philosophy should be concerned with nothing less than 'what matters most'. This collection of philosophical conversations seeks to honour Plotinus' vision by addressing questions related to the art of living.

    Much has been written about the 'art of living' and it typically conjures up ideas of therapy, meditation, peace, happiness, and so on. But what about the art of living in the midst of all the spectacular messiness generated by an aggressive, anxiety-ridden, acquisitive and lustful species? The conversations that make up this book explore the questions that matter most to us as citizens of increasingly fractious societies and inhabitants of an increasingly fractured planet. They invite us to think anew about the complexities and challenges involved in living a good life in a world characterized by uncertainty and change.

The Philosopher's Guide to Parenthood
  • Storks, Surrogates, and Stereotypes
  • Teresa Baron
  • Published online:
    15 January 2023
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023
  • Our understanding of what it means to be a parent in any given context is shaped by our biological, social, legal, and moral concepts of parenthood. These are themselves subject to the influence of changing expectations, as new technologies are produced, cultural views of the family are transformed, and laws shift in response. In this book Teresa Baron provides a detailed and incisive overview of the key questions, widespread presuppositions, and dominant approaches in the field of philosophy of parenthood. Baron examines paradigm cases and problem cases alike through an interdisciplinary lens, bringing philosophy of parenthood into dialogue with research on family-making and childrearing from across the social sciences and humanities. Her book aims to answer old questions, draw out new questions, and interrogate notions that we often take for granted in this field, including the very concept of parenthood itself.

Explaining Management Phenomena
  • A Philosophical Treatise
  • Eric W. K. Tsang
  • Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • One key objective of management research is to explain business phenomena. Yet understanding the nature of explanation is essentially a topic in philosophy. This is the first book that bridges the gap between a technical, philosophical treatment of the topic and the more practical needs of management scholars, as well as others across the social sciences. It explores how management phenomena can be explained from a philosophical perspective, and renders sophisticated philosophical arguments understandable by readers without specialized training. Covering virtually all the major aspects of the nature of explanation, this work will enhance empirical and theoretical research, as well as approaches combining the two. With many examples from management literature and business news, this study helps scholars in those fields to improve their research outcomes.

Diagnosing Social Pathology
  • Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim
  • Frederick Neuhouser
  • Published online:
    07 October 2022
    Print publication:
    27 October 2022
  • Can a human society suffer from illness like a living thing? And if so, how does such a malaise manifest itself? In this thought-provoking book, Fred Neuhouser explains and defends the idea of social pathology, demonstrating what it means to describe societies as 'ill', or 'sick', and why we are so often drawn to conceiving of social problems as ailments or maladies. He shows how Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim – four key philosophers who are seldom taken to constitute a 'tradition' – deploy the idea of social pathology in comparable ways, and then explores the connections between societal illnesses and the phenomena those thinkers made famous: alienation, anomie, ideology, and social dysfunction. His book is a rich and compelling illumination of both the idea of social disease and the importance it has had, and continues to have, for philosophical views of society.

Security
  • A Philosophical Investigation
  • David A. Welch
  • Published online:
    18 August 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022
  • How do we know when we are investing wisely in security? Answering this question requires investigating what things are worth securing (and why); what threatens them; how best to protect them; and how to think about it. Is it possible to protect them? How best go about protecting them? What trade-offs are involved in allocating resources to security problems? This book responds to these questions by stripping down our preconceptions and rebuilding an understanding of security from the ground up on the basis of a common-sense ontology and an explicit theory of value. It argues for a clear distinction between objective and subjective security threats, a non-anthropocentric understanding of security, and a particular hierarchy of security referents, looking closely at four in particular-the ecosphere, the state, culture, and individual human beings. The analysis will be of interest not only to students and scholars of International Relations, but also to practitioners.

The Anthem Companion to Alfred Schutz
  • Edited by Michael Barber
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    22 November 2022
    Print publication:
    16 August 2022
  • Given that Schutz was a philosopher and a social scientist, this book will examine topics in Schutz's philosophical-phenomenological theory of the social world, such as the second person, the face-to-face relationship, the meaning of human action, signs, symbols, relevance (or interests). Schutz's explanation of the social world, however, was meant to provide a philosophical foundation for the social sciences, and so this book will also consider epistemological questions, such as traditional knowledge and the opacity of knowledge and theory, that is, the neglected or unseen questions that accompany knowing or theorizing. Also, authors from within Schutzian framework will address issues within the social sciences, such as the Durkheimian aspects of Schutz's thought, the sociology of knowledge, and the theory of sociology. It will also explore how Schutzian theory, which is often viewed as a micro-sociology, can be extended to give an account of a macro-sociological reality like modern society (Gesellschaft).

Radical Human Centricity
  • Fulfilling the Promises of Innovation Research
  • Paul Hartley
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    22 November 2022
    Print publication:
    09 August 2022
  • There is a problem with innovation research. Many of the methods used to study people for strategic and design innovation purposes are not up to the task. They are holdovers from market research or are simplified versions of tools borrowed from other fields of research. The problem exists because these methods cannot provide the kind of understanding, or grounding in people's lived experience to meet the requirements of design and strategy innovation. The world is only becoming more complicated, and innovation's impacts on people's lives and the environment are only increasing. It is essential we work to fulfill the promises of human-centered research with better research practices, and create positive interventions into people's lives while resisting the reductionist, damaging, and wasteful tendencies of design thinking research and human-centered design (HCD). This book critiques many of the common methods used in innovation research and provides directions to overcome their weaknesses by developing a radical human-centric approach.

Questioning
  • A New History of Western Philosophy
  • Gideon Baker
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    14 July 2023
    Print publication:
    31 July 2022
  • Gideon Baker provides a gripping genealogy of Western philosophy as a history of questioning. As well as revealing the ancient in the modern, Baker reflects on newer questions in Western philosophy, including: is human being uniquely defined by questioning? And does the negativity of questioning lead to nihilistic despair?

    Staying faithful to his theme, Baker calls Western philosophy itself into question, asking why questioning should be seen as central to the true life. Is this not the same prejudice that led Socrates, at the beginning of Western philosophy, to ask whether the unexamined life is worth living?

    Far from being timeless, the questioning that lies at the heart of Western philosophy has a strange and unsettling history that concerns us all.

Uncertainty and Its Discontents
  • Worldviews in World Politics
  • Edited by Peter J. Katzenstein
  • Published online:
    29 June 2022
    Print publication:
    07 July 2022
  • Worldviews are the unexamined, pre-theoretical foundations of the approaches with which we understand and navigate the world, and this volume provides the first major study of worldviews in international relations. Advances in twentieth century physics and cosmology questioning anthropocentrism have fostered the articulation of alternative worldviews, rivalling conventional Newtonian humanism and its assumption that the world is constituted by controllable risks. This matters for accepting uncertainties that are an indelible part of many spheres of life including public health, the environment, finance, security and politics – uncertainties that are concealed by the conventional presumption that the world is governed only by risk. The confluence of risk and uncertainty requires an awareness of alternative worldviews, alerts us to possible intersections between humanist Newtonianism and hyper-humanist Post-Newtonianism, and reminds us of the relevance of science, religion and moral values in world politics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Unspoken Morality of Childhood
  • Family, Friendship, Self-Esteem and the Wisdom of the Everyday
  • Kristen Renwick Monroe
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    06 October 2022
    Print publication:
    10 May 2022
  • The Unspoken Morality of Childhood: reflects the thoughts of a senior ethicist. Each essay begins with a homey essay about the kind of everyday event that happens to everyone and then proceeds to discuss the ethical issues raised by such an event. The manuscript is interdisciplinary, located at the intersection of ethics, political psychology, moral psychology, philosophy, and political science/political theory. It uses stories to teach ethics and falls in the virtue ethics approach to ethics, making it perfect as a supplementary text for introductory courses to philosophy, moral psychology and political theory.

    The manuscript discusses complex ethical concepts such as identity, agency, self-esteem, forgiveness, relations with our parents, dealing with loss, the moral imagination, and a wide range of other issues that people confront every day.

    One of the essays, Walnut, tells a story about the author’s visiting her grandparents in a small, Midwestern town. This is turned into a discussion of the need for roots, how children formulate their sense of self, and how politicians like Donald Trump can turn the love of family and nostalgia for the past into a vicious tool in politics in which clever politicians exploit fears of foreigners and people who are 'not like us'. The essay uses this prompt to discuss the importance of the moral imagination and the ability some have to conceptualize their way out of a dilemma that can plague others.

The Quest for Knowledge in International Relations
  • How Do We Know?
  • Richard Ned Lebow
  • Published online:
    07 April 2022
    Print publication:
    14 April 2022
  • What do we mean by theory in international relations? What kinds of knowledge do theories seek? How do they stipulate it is found? How should we evaluate any resulting knowledge claims? What do answers to these questions tell us about the theory project in IR, and in the social sciences more generally? Lebow explores these questions in a critical evaluation of the positivist and interpretivist epistemologies. He identifies tensions and problems specific to each epistemology, and some shared by both, and suggests possible responses. By exploring the relationship between the foundations of theories and the empirical assumptions they encode, Lebow's analysis enables readers to examine in greater depth the different approaches to theory and their related research strategies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations theory and philosophy of social science.

In Defense of Reason after Hegel
  • Why We Are So Wise
  • Richard Dien Winfield
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    26 May 2022
    Print publication:
    08 March 2022
  • In Defense of Reason after Hegel builds upon and enlists the arguments of Hegel to refute the disempowerment of reason perpetrated by the peddlers of misinformation in public life and by analytic philosophy and postmodernism in the academy. Undermining their assaults on truth, this book shows how the fundamental character of nature and of mind allow reason to be autonomous and allow us to enact a reality of freedom in accord with right and freely create works of fine art.

    The book examines how life and language provide the means for reason to be autonomous and how the autonomy of thought precludes natural evolution or bioengineering from enhancing our capacity for philosophical thinking. It unravels the perplexities of the logic of self-determination and to show how the will can achieve self-determination in the conventions by which agents engender the institutions of freedom. The book then unveils the limitations of the principle of contradiction, which bars the way to an understanding of how anything can be determinate and how thought and action can be free. The book also draws upon Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind to show how language can originate and be an appropriate vehicle of autonomous reason.

Wittgenstein's Critique of Russell's Multiple Relation Theory of Judgement
  • James R. Connelly
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    06 April 2021
    Print publication:
    30 March 2021
  • Wittgenstein’s May–June 1913 critique of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgement (or MRTJ) marked a crucial turning point in the lives of two great twentieth-century thinkers. It was also a watershed moment within the history of analytic philosophy itself. Yet scholarly consensus around a satisfactory interpretation of the nature of the critique, the extent of and reasons for its impact on Russell, along with the role it played within Wittgenstein’s development have remained elusive. With these facts in mind, this book aims to accomplish four interrelated goals. The first is to develop a compelling reading of Wittgenstein’s May–June 1913 critique of Russell’s MRTJ. The second is to defend this reading, called the ‘logical interpretation’ (or LI) against its most prominent competitors in the scholarly literature. Third, the book aims to situate Wittgenstein’s critique of the MRTJ and Russell’s reaction to it, within the broader context of each of Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s respective philosophical developments. Fourth and finally, the book aims to introduce students and scholars of early analytic philosophy to, and familiarize them with the historical events, textual evidence, scholarly controversies, letters, notes and diagrams, consideration of which is integral to constructing a plausible reading of Wittgenstein’s objection.

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