My current book Rethinking Analytical Sociology has now appeared in print, and an ebook version is available on the Elgar website here. The book is intended to provide a sympathetic but critical review of analytical sociology as a relatively new sub-discipline within sociology. Here is a video preview of the book. https://youtu.be/pDpnkY2AIEA The book argues that the …
Why are English majors disappearing?
Many universities have witnessed a decline in students pursuing majors in the humanities, including English literature. Why has this happened? This sounds like a fairly simple and parochial subject -- why are students and families losing interest in liberal arts majors like philosophy, literature, or history? But this impression is misleading. The subject is not …
Regulatory failure in freight rail traffic
On any given day some 7,000 freight trains are in motion around the United States, with perhaps 70,000 individual freight cars and intermodal units in transit daily (link). (Here is the US DOT Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) website, which provides a fair amount of information about the industry.) Freight rail is big business, with record …
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Journal of Critical Realism CFP on Judgemental Rationality
Roy Bhaskar is best known for his ideas about social ontology. However, he also had a substantial interest in "the epistemology of social science" -- the means through which social scientists provide their theories with rational credibility. The Journal of Critical Realism is planning a special issue on the key concept that Bhaskar introduced in this area, …
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Fifteen years of Understanding Society
This week represents the fifteenth anniversary of publication of Understanding Society, with a total of 1,484 posts and 13.3 million page views to date. There have been 72 posts and 657K page views in the past twelve months. The blog has remained consistent with the original vision of a "lab notebook for open-source philosophy". And the topics …
Злі наслідки тоталітарних ідеологій
[This entry provides Ukrainian and Russian translations of a recent post on totalitarian evil offered as a gesture of support for potential Ukrainian readers. The translation is based on Google Translate. If you are in Ukraine or Russia, please comment if you can...] Очевидно, що люди створюють зло; але людьми часто керують тоталітарні ідеології, які роблять можливим …
Fourteen years of Understanding Society
Greetings, readers... This week marks the fourteenth anniversary of Understanding Society. With this post there are 1,412 entries in the blog -- about 1.4 million words. The blog began on November 2, 2007, with a post on the topic of the plasticity of the social -- a theme that has persisted to the present. Here is …
Thirteen years of Understanding Society
This month represents the end of the thirteenth year of publication of Understanding Society. Since 2010 the blog has received 11,874,515 pageviews. (Pageviews increased quickly through 2018, and have declined and stablized in 2019 and 2020.) So far the blog has published 1,340 posts and about 1.3 million words. (That's about the length of thirteen normal academic …
Twelve years of Understanding Society
Understanding Society has now reached its twelfth anniversary of continuous publication. This represents 1,271 posts, and over 1.3 million words. According to Google Blogspot statistics, the blog has gained over 11 million pageviews since 2010. Just over half of visitors came from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada, with the remainder spread out over …
Asian Conference on the Philosophy of the Social Sciences
photo: Tianjin, China A group of philosophers of social science convened in Tianjin, China, at Nankai University in June to consider some of the ways that the social sciences can move forward in the twenty-first century. This was the Asian Conference on the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, and there were participants from Asia, Europe, …
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Understanding Society 