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92 results in Philosophy of social science

Page 1 of 5

  • Diagnosing Social Pathology
  • Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim
  • Frederick Neuhouser
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date: November 2022
  • Print publication: 30 November 2022
  • View description
    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.
Uncertainty and Its Discontents
  • Uncertainty and Its Discontents
  • Worldviews in World Politics
  • Edited by Peter J. Katzenstein
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date: June 2022
  • Print publication: 30 June 2022
  • View description
    This volume provides the first major study of worldviews in international relations. Worldviews are the unexamined, pre-theoretical foundations of the approaches with which we understand and navigate the world. Advances in twentieth century physics and cosmology and other intellectual developments questioning anthropocentrism have fostered the articulation of alternative worldviews that rival conventional Newtonian humanism and its assumption that the world is constituted by controllable risks. This matters for coming to terms with the 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.
The Quest for Knowledge in International Relations
  • The Quest for Knowledge in International Relations
  • How Do We Know?
  • Richard Ned Lebow
  • Published online: 07 April 2022
  • Print publication: 14 April 2022
  • View description
    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.
Wittgenstein's Critique of Russell's Multiple Relation Theory of Judgement
  • 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
  • View description
    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.
The Metahistory of Western Knowledge in the Modern Era
  • The Metahistory of Western Knowledge in the Modern Era
  • Four Evolving Metaparadigms, 1648 to Present
  • Mark E. Blum
  • Published by: Anthem Press
  • Published online: 02 March 2021
  • Print publication: 04 February 2021
  • View description
    The book is a study of the evolving history of knowledge in the arts and sciences in the modern era - from 1648 through the present. Modernism is treated as an epoch with evolving disciplines whose articulated problems of a time and the inquiry methods to address them, develop in a coordinated manner, given a mutual awareness. When one organizes the development of knowledge over periods of years, and gives it an appellation such as ‘Modernism,’ the organization of facts is guided by concepts and values discerned throughout these periods. These facts of knowledge development share sufficient understandings to be called an ‘era,’ or an ‘epoch,’ or other terms that insist on the shared aspects of those years. One can call such an effort a ‘metahistory,’ in that what is tracked is not merely a knowledge that is political, economic, ideological, sociological, or scientific, but an overview that tracks the respective conceptual developments of the fields in how they have changed and augmented their problem formulations, inquiry methods, and explanatory conceptions over time.
Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding
  • Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding
  • Peter Winch
  • Edited by Michael Campbell, Sarah Tropper
  • Published by: Anthem Press
  • Published online: 20 January 2022
  • Print publication: 06 November 2020
  • View description
    Peter Guy Winch (1926–1997) was one of the most important philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He is best known for his early work on the philosophy of the social sciences, in particular his monograph The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958), which generated controversy within both philosophical and social scientific circles.

    This volume unites Peter Winch’s previously unpublished work on Baruch de Spinoza. The primary source for the text is a series of seminars on Spinoza that Winch gave, first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then at King’s College London in 1989. Audio recordings of the majority of the Swansea seminars have survived. The editors have transcribed these, edited them for coherence, style and clarity, and supplemented them with material drawn from Winch’s typescripts and preparatory notebooks. What emerges is an original interpretation of Spinoza’s work that demonstrates his continued relevance to contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and establishes connections to other philosophers - not only Spinoza’s predecessors such as Descartes, but also to the philosophical views of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil.

    There is currently a resurgence of interest in Spinoza’s philosophy, and this volume will contribute to burgeoning debates within that field. Winch’s account of Spinoza is uncommon insofar as it takes as central to Spinoza’s project his conceptions of meaning, understanding and language, and directly connecting these to his ethical concerns. At the same time, Winch makes useful links to modern debates in ways that throw helpful light on Spinoza. As well as issues which are central to the philosophy of language, these include debates on the nature of the mind, naturalism and the place of the human being within the natural world.
Reason and Cause
  • Reason and Cause
  • Social Science and the Social World
  • Richard Ned Lebow
  • Published online: 29 February 2020
  • Print publication: 12 March 2020
  • View description
    Philosophy and social science assume that reason and cause are objective and universally applicable concepts. Through close readings of ancient and modern philosophy, history and literature, Richard Ned Lebow demonstrates that these concepts are actually specific to time and place. He traces their parallel evolution by focusing on classical Athens, the Enlightenment through Victorian England, and the early twentieth century. This important book shows how and why understandings of reason and cause have developed and evolved, in response to what kind of stimuli, and what this says about the relationship between social science and the social world in which it is conducted. Lebow argues that authors reflecting on their own social context use specific constructions of these categories as central arguments about the human condition. This highly original study will make an immediate impact across a number of fields with its rigorous research and the development of an innovative historicised epistemology.
Challenging Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood
  • Challenging Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood
  • Media, Literature and Theory
  • Edited by Marquita Gammage, Antwanisha Alameen-Shavers
  • Published by: Anthem Press
  • Published online: 29 May 2019
  • Print publication: 22 March 2019
  • View description
    'Challenging Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood' investigates the stereotyping of Black womanhood and the larger sociological impact on Black women's self-perceptions. It details the historical and contemporary use of stereotypes against Black women and how Black women work to challenge and dispel false perceptions, and highlights the role of racist ideas in the reproduction and promotion of stereotypes of Black femaleness in media, literature, artificial intelligence and the perceptions of the general public. Contributors in this collection identify the racists and sexist ideologies behind the misperceptions of Black womanhood and illuminate twenty-first–century stereotypical treatment of Black women such as Michelle Obama and Serena Williams, and explore topics such as comedic expressions of Black motherhood, representations of Black women in television dramas and literature, and identity reclamation and self-determination. 'Challenging Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood' establishes the criteria with which to examine the role of stereotypes in the lives of Black females and, more specifically, its impact on their social and psychological well-being.
Praxis</I>
  • Praxis
  • On Acting and Knowing
  • Friedrich Kratochwil
  • Published online: 27 July 2018
  • Print publication: 16 August 2018
  • View description
    Praxis investigates both the existing practices of international politics and relations during and after the Cold War, and the issue of whether problems of praxis (individual and collective choices) can be subjected to a 'theoretical treatment'. The book comes in two parts: the first deals with the constitution of international relations and the role of theoretical norms in guiding decisions, in areas such as sanctions, the punishment of international crimes, governance and 'constitutional' concern, the second is devoted to 'theory building'. While a 'theorization' of praxis has often been attempted, Kratochwil argues that such endeavours do not attend to certain important elements characteristic of practical choices. Praxis presents a shift from the accepted international relations standard of theorizing, by arguing for the analysis of policy decisions made in non-ideal conditions within a broader framework of practical choices, emphasizing both historicity and contingency.
Post-Truth
  • Post-Truth
  • Knowledge As A Power Game
  • Steve Fuller
  • Published by: Anthem Press
  • Published online: 14 July 2018
  • Print publication: 25 May 2018
  • View description
    'Post-truth' was Oxford Dictionaries 2016 word of the year. While the term was coined by its disparagers in the light of the Brexit and US presidential campaigns, the roots of post-truth lie deep in the history of Western social and political theory. Post-Truth reaches back to Plato, ranging across theology and philosophy, to focus on the Machiavellian tradition in classical sociology, as exemplified by Vilfredo Pareto, who offered the original modern account of post-truth in terms of the 'circulation of elites'. The defining feature of 'post-truth' is a strong distinction between appearance and reality which is never quite resolved and so the strongest appearance ends up passing for reality. The only question is whether more is gained by rapid changes in appearance or by stabilizing one such appearance. Post-Truth plays out what this means for both politics and science.
Deleuze's Kantian Ethos
Fashion and Materialism
  • Fashion and Materialism
  • Ulrich Lehmann
  • Published by: Edinburgh University Press
  • Published online: 11 November 2020
  • Print publication: 01 February 2018
  • View description
    Ulrich Lehmann brings together methods and ideas from social sciences and material production to give us a new political reading of fashion in today's post-democracy. Accessing rare source material across a wide range of European languages and cultures, he gives us insight into new working structures in the manufacture of garments and textiles.
Debating Humanity
  • Debating Humanity
  • Towards a Philosophical Sociology
  • Daniel Chernilo
  • Published online: 07 June 2017
  • Print publication: 20 April 2017
  • View description
    Debating Humanity explores sociological and philosophical efforts to delineate key features of humanity that identify us as members of the human species. After challenging the normative contradictions of contemporary posthumanism, this book goes back to the foundational debate on humanism between Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger in the 1940s and then re-assesses the implicit and explicit anthropological arguments put forward by seven leading postwar theorists: self-transcendence (Hannah Arendt), adaptation (Talcott Parsons), responsibility (Hans Jonas), language (Jürgen Habermas), strong evaluations (Charles Taylor), reflexivity (Margaret Archer) and reproduction of life (Luc Boltanski). Genuinely interdisciplinary and boldly argued, Daniel Chernilo has crafted a novel philosophical sociology that defends a universalistic principle of humanity as vital to any adequate understanding of social life. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Afterlives of Georges Perec
  • The Afterlives of Georges Perec
  • Edited by Rowan Wilken, Justin Clemens
  • Published by: Edinburgh University Press
  • Published online: 07 December 2017
  • Print publication: 08 March 2017
  • View description
    These 14 essays examine Georges Perec's impact on architecture, art, design, media, electronic communications, computing and the everyday.
    What do Perec's descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life reveal about our use of information and communications technologies?What happens if we read Life: A User’s Manual as a toolbox of ideas for games studies?What light does the concept of the ‘infra-ordinary’ shed on social media?What insights does algorithmic writing generate for the digital humanities?What lessons can architects, artists, game-designers and writers draw from Perec's fascination with creative constraints?
    Through an examination of such questions, this collection takes Perec scholarship beyond its existing limits to offer new ways of rethinking our present.
The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924-1925
  • The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924-1925
  • Philosophical Presuppositions of Science
  • Edited by Paul Bogaard, Jason Bell
  • Published by: Edinburgh University Press
  • Published online: 07 December 2017
  • Print publication: 18 January 2017
  • View description
    Beginning in September of 1924, Alfred North Whitehead presented a regular course of 85 lectures which concluded in May of 1925. These represent the first ever philosophy lectures he gave and capture him working out the philosophical implications of the remarkable turns physics had taken in his lifetime. This volume finally recreates these lectures by transcribing notes by W. P. Bell, W. E. Hocking and Louise Heath taken at the time - many of which have only recently been discovered and including hundreds of sketches of Whitehead's blackboard diagrams. This is a unique insight into the evolution of Whitehead’s thought during the months when he was drafting his seminal work, 'Science and the Modern World'.
Philosophical Criminology
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences
  • Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences
  • Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation
  • Paul Ricoeur
  • Edited and translated by John B. Thompson
  • Published online: 05 July 2016
  • Print publication: 26 August 2016
  • View description
    Collected and translated by John B. Thompson, this collection of essays by Paul Ricoeur includes many that had never appeared in English before the volume's publication in 1981. As comprehensive as it is illuminating, this lucid introduction to Ricoeur's prolific contributions to sociological theory features his more recent writings on the history of hermeneutics, its central themes and issues, his own constructive position and its implications for sociology, psychoanalysis and history. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Charles Taylor, illuminating its enduring importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this classic work has been revived for a new generation of readers.
Agamben and Radical Politics
Explanatory Pluralism
  • Explanatory Pluralism
  • C. Mantzavinos
  • Published online: 05 May 2016
  • Print publication: 26 May 2016
  • View description
    Explaining phenomena is one of the main activities in which scientists engage. This book proposes a new philosophical theory of scientific explanation by developing and defending the position of explanatory pluralism with the help of the notion of 'explanatory games'. Mantzavinos provides a descriptive account of the explanatory activity of scientists in different domains and shows how they differ from commonsensical explanations offered in everyday life by ordinary people and also from explanations offered in religious contexts. He also shows how an evaluation and a critical appraisal of explanations put forward in different social arenas can take place on the basis of different values. Explanatory Pluralism provides solutions to all important descriptive and normative problems of the philosophical theory of explanation as illustrated in sophisticated case studies from economics and medicine, but also from mythology and religion.
Imagined Sovereignties
  • Imagined Sovereignties
  • The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age
  • Kevin Olson
  • Published online: 05 May 2016
  • Print publication: 15 April 2016
  • View description
    Movements like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party embody some of our deepest intuitions about popular politics and 'the power of the people'. They also expose tensions and shortcomings in our understanding of these ideals. We typically see 'the people' as having a special, sovereign power. Despite the centrality of this idea in our thinking, we have little understanding of why it has such importance. Imagined Sovereignties probes the considerable force that 'the people' exercises on our thought and practice. Like the imagined communities described by Benedict Anderson, popular politics is formed around shared, imaginary constructs rooted in our collective imagination. This book investigates these 'imagined sovereignties' in a genealogy traversing the French Enlightenment, the Haitian Revolution, and nineteenth-century Haitian constitutionalism. It problematizes taken-for-granted ideas about popular politics and provokes new ways of imagining the power of the people.

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