A sign of arrival for a sub-discipline is the appearance of a handbook for the field. By that criterion, the philosophy of social science has passed an important threshold with the appearance of Ian Jarvie and Jesus Zamora-Bonilla's SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences. The 750-page volume offers 37 main articles, as well as …
Hobbes in context
We often think of Hobbes as being an originator in English philosophy, a strikingly innovative thinker who burst on the scene with the first formulation of a social contract theory of government. And we sometimes think of his justification of absolute sovereignty as a fairly direct reaction to the disorders Britain experienced during its Civil …
French philosophy?
Is there such a thing as "French philosophy"? Or is philosophy a purely universal discipline, raising the same abstract questions no matter whether the philosopher is Chinese, English, French, or Brazilian? One way to address this question is to consider the collective intellectual practice of "philosophy" from the point of view of sociology -- that …
Mental models for the social world
What is involved in being prepared to understand what is going on around you? In a sense this is Kant's fundamental question in the Critique of Pure Reason: what intellectual resources (concepts, categories, frameworks) does a cognitive agent need in order to make sense of the contents of consciousness, the fleeting experiences and sensations that …
Teaching philosophy
What is it that we expect students to learn when we teach philosophy? Is philosophy an arcane and charmingly useless vestige of a nineteenth-century university education? Or does it have something crucial to add to the liberal education of the twenty-first century -- whether in the arts and sciences or in pre-professional schools? Philosophers would …
Influences and arguments
Lately I've been writing about the influences that can be discerned in the theories of John Rawls. Rawls was a "social contract theorist"; to what extent were his theories shaped and framed by his reading of the great contract theorists such as Locke, Rousseau, or Kant? He was also influenced by the history of economic …
A cognitivist philosophy of history
Many of the posts here have raised issues about the philosophy of history. Here is a bit of a synthesis of many of those prior observations. Fundamentally, we have unfolded a conception of historical explanation that derives from the central idea of situated human action; the idea, as Marx put the point in 1850, that …
Philosophical frameworks in the social sciences
It is fairly evident that there were substantive ontological assumptions about how the social world worked that guided the founders of sociology: individuals create social outcomes (Mill), norms and values have a superordinate role in social action (Durkheim), the problem of social order is the fundamental problem for sociology (Durkheim), crises are common within capitalism …
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Applied philosophy of history
The philosophy of history is difficult to classify. Should we think of it in analogy with the philosophy of physics or economics -- essentially a careful analysis of the modes of research and inference used within an empirical discipline? Or should we think of it in analogy with the philosophy of nature or the philosophy …
Philosophy of X?
When philosophers do their thinking within a field called "the philosophy of X", there is always a natural question that arises: how will philosophical reflection about X be helpful or constructive for the practitioners of X? For example, how might the philosophy of science be helpful for working scientists? How can the philosophy of biology …
Understanding Society 