How does philosophy intersect with the social world? How does philosophical thinking contribute to better understanding of society? (At the right we see Jurgen Habermas teaching philosophy in 1960.) It is possible that philosophy is not a well-defined discipline. But philosophers regard themselves as having something of a method, and something of a subject matter. …
Was Alexis de Tocqueville a social scientist?
Alexis de Tocqueville is sometimes counted among the founding influences in modern sociology -- one of the intellectual progenitors of the discipline in the 1830s-50s. An aristocrat in post-revolutionary France, de Tocqueville played several roles in his life: historian, politician, traveler, and social observer. My question here is a specific one: in what ways …
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How does philosophy help guide the sciences?
Philosophy observes the sciences. But it has also played a role in the formation of the sciences. And this is especially true in the case of the social sciences. The idea here is an elusive one. It is that the founders of the social sciences – perhaps similar to all intellectual or creative founders – …
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Does historical materialism have a place in today’s social sciences?
Marx's theory of historical materialism came with a few central concepts, a large hypothesis, and a heuristic for social research. The concepts include class, the forces and relations of production, the economic structure, the superstructure, and the idea of determination ("in the last instance", as Althusser and Poulantzas put it) between the economic structure and …
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How not to create a classification system
Does social science require systems of classification? From Jorge Luis Borges' description of a fictional Chinese classification of animals: “These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are …
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Sociology as a social science discipline
Sociology is one of the core disciplines of the social sciences, along with political science, economics and anthropology. So one might imagine that it is a coherent, unified, and comprehensive science with a well-defined subject matter and a clear set of methods. But as most practitioners will agree, this is not the case. And that …
Positivism and social science
There is a strong current of positivism in contemporary sociology --in fact, one might say this is the dominant paradigm. Other paradigms exist -- feminism, Marxism, comparative historical sociology, and ethnographic sociology, to name several. But the claim of science is generally couched in terms of a positivist theory of science and inquiry. This is …
Understanding Society 