Most of the story we remember of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s centers around the philosophy of non-violence espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the major civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC. A few historians give emphasis to a very different part of the movement in the …
Intellectual history as history?
How do fields like the history of art or the history of philosophy relate to history simpliciter? Are there similar problems and methods in the history of ideas to those facing social or economic historians? Or is the idea of examining a series of events possessing temporal order the only thing these fields have in common? …
Methodological individualism today
Is it possible to draw a few conclusions on the topic of methodological individualism after dozens of years of debate? (Lars Udehn's Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning is a great study of the long history of the debate over this issue. It is unfortunate there isn't an affordable digital edition of the book. Joseph Heath's entry …
The philosophy of economics
The philosophy of economics intersects with several different areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of science, ethics, and social philosophy. (Dan Hausman is the leading expert in the philosophy of economics. His The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics is a recent contribution.) The field is concerned with methodology, values, and substance. The primary focus of the …
Character and history
How do features of character play into the fabric of history? The first has to do with psychology, motives, and agency; the second has to do with large events and processes. So how might a better understanding of the domain of individual character contribute to better historical understanding? When we talk about a person's character, …
How to think about work
Work defines a large portion of life in any society, traditional or modern. How should we think about the social and economic forces that create "work"? What are the institutions and practices through which individuals use their bodies, brains, skills, and talents to create value within a given set of economic relationships? These questions are just …
The talent supply chain
I had an interesting discussion with a senior executive of Kelly Services that provided some very striking new perspectives on the world of work. Kelly Services is a global workforce solutions company, providing temporary and medium-term workers with a very wide range of specialized skills (link). One thing that was particularly striking is the fact …
Who was Leon Trotsky?
Leon Trotsky was something of a hero for a part of the anti-Stalinist left from the 1930s through at least the 1970s. Sidney Hook and John Dewey offered substantive support to Trotsky and his reputation during and after the end of his life through Dewey's role in the "Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made …
Voter registration, Mississippi, 1960
One of the most important and hard-fought dimensions of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s was the issue of voting rights. The Jim Crow South had made democratic participation almost impossible for black citizens throughout the first half of the century in spite of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, …
Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable Call for Papers
FIFTEENTH ANNUALPHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ROUNDTABLE22-24 MARCH 2013University of California-Santa Cruz >CALL FOR PAPERS We are organizing the fifteenth annual working conference on topics in philosophy of the social sciences. The 2013 Roundtable will continue a tradition of meetings that brings together philosophers and social scientists to discuss a wide range of philosophical issues raised …
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Understanding Society 