Ian Morris has written a pair of books that are intended to contribute to a particularly important set of disagreements in comparative economic history: what accounts for the advantage in economic development that seems to be enjoyed by Western Europe at various points in history? The key arguments are presented in Why the West Rules--for …
Guest post by Elizabeth Anderson on race in American politics
Elizabeth Anderson is John Dewey Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author most recently of The Imperative of Integration. This contribution extends a question posed in a recent post on the conservative war on poor people (link). Thanks for contributing, Liz! American Conservative Politics and the …
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Cruickshank on philosophical issues with critical realism
Justin Cruickshank is an interesting commentator on the philosophical underpinnings of critical realism. Critical realism was developed initially by Roy Bhaskar in A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences, and has been further elaborated by a number of philosophers. The theory is now playing a …
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European Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences Call for Papers
THE THIRD CONFERENCEOF THEEUROPEAN NETWORK FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES (ENPOSS) UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN A DISTANCIAUNEDMADRID,SEPTEMBER 10-12, 2014 Keynote Speakers:Margaret Gilbert (University of California, Irvine)Uskali Mäki (University of Helsinki) CALL FOR PAPERS: The European Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (ENPOSS) invites contributions to its 3rd Conference to be held …
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Structural realism and social realities?
The topic of realism has come up frequently here -- causal realism, critical realism, scientific realism. Each of these realisms comes out of somewhat different fields of questions and assumptions. Within mainstream philosophy of science there is another realism that has been debated in the past twenty years, referred to as structural realism. The view …
Guest post by Jeroen Van Bouwel: On microfoundations and macrofoundations
[Jeroen Van Bouwel accepted my invitation to offer his thoughts about several recent posts here on the topic of microfoundations. Jeroen is co-author (with Erik Weber and L. De Vreese) of Scientific Explanation (Springer, 2013). Jeroen is a post-doctoral fellow at Ghent University and a visiting scholar in philosophy at Uppsala University. Thanks, Jeroen!] In his …
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Thorstein Veblen’s critique of the American system of business
Thorstein Veblen was certainly a heterodox observer of modern capitalism. He was trained in the late nineteenth-century iteration of neoclassical economics, but he was more impressed by the irrationality of what he observed than the optimizing rationality that is postulated by the neoclassicals. He was also an intelligent observer and analyst of contemporary economic and …
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Six years of Understanding Society
This week celebrates six years of Understanding Society. This effort represents over 850 posts, on topics ranging from current debates in philosophy about causal powers to China's urban transformation to the conservative war on the poor, leading to nearly three million page views since the first post in 2007. I’m grateful to the communities of …
Mechanisms and powers
source: William Bechtel, Discovering Cell Mechanisms: The Creation of Modern Cell Biology The causal-powers approach to the understanding of causation is sometimes presented as an exclusive alternative to both traditional regularity theories and to more recent causal mechanism theories. In an earlier post I discussed Ruth Groff’s contributions to this topic. Here I would like …
Causality and metaphysics
Advocates of the causal powers approach attach a great deal of importance to the metaphysics of causation -- the sorts of properties and relations that we attribute to the kinds of things that we want to postulate. The neo-Aristotelian point of view represented by Ruth Groff and others appears to have metaphysical objections to the …
Understanding Society 