Explores the development of the ideas of evolutionary biology, particularly as affected by the increasing understanding of genetics and of the chemical basis of inheritance.

Widely acclaimed as the most authoritative and accessible one-volume dictionary available in English this second edition offers an even richer, more comprehensive, and more up-to-date survey of ideas and thinkers written by an international team of 436 contributors. Includes the most comprehensive entries on major philosophers, 400 new entries including over 50 on preeminent contemporary philosophers, extensive coverage of rapidly developing fields such as the philosophy of mind and applied ethics, more entries on non-Western philosophy than any comparable volume, and (...) increased coverage of Continental philosophy. (shrink)

Editorial preface to the fourth edition and modified translation -- The text of the Philosophische Untersuchungen -- Philosophische untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations -- Philosophie der psychologie, ein fragment = Philosophy of psychology, a fragment.

This volume complements two highly successful previously published volumes of Richard Rorty's philosophical papers: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, and Essays on Heidegger and Others. The essays in the volume engage with the work of many of today's most innovative thinkers including Robert Brandom, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, and Charles Taylor. The collection also touches on problems in contemporary feminism raised by Annette Baier, Marilyn Frye, and Catherine MacKinnon, and considers issues (...) connected with human rights and cultural differences. Anyone with a serious interest in contemporary philosophy and what it can do for us in the modern world will enjoy this invaluable collection. (shrink)

Margaret Archer develops here her morphogenetic approach, heralded in Culture and Agency (CUP, 1988), and applies it to the problem of structure and agency, that is, how we both shape society and are shaped by it. Her aim is to capture the interplay between these two processes rather than collapse them into one, as has been the case with the traditional competing individualist and collectivist methodologies. The morphogenetic approach offers a new understanding of social change and poses a direct challenge (...) to Giddens' structuration theory. (shrink)

Synthesizing forty years' work by France's leading sociologist, this book exemplifies Bourdieu's unique ability to link sociological theory, historical information, and philosophical thought. It makes explicit the presuppositions of a state of 'scholasticism', a certain leisure liberated from the urgencies of the world. Philosophers have brought these presuppositions into the order of discourse, more to legitimate than analyze them, and this is the primary systematic, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic error that Bourdieu subjects to methodological critique. Pascalian because he, too, was (...) concerned with symbolic power, he refused the temptation of foundationalist thinking, attended to 'ordinary people', and was determined to seek the reason for seemingly illogical behavior rather than simply condemning it. Bourdieu charts a negative philosophy, whose intellectual debt to such other 'heretical' philosophers as Wittgenstein, Austin, Dewey, and Peirce, renews traditional questioning of concepts of violence, power, time, history, the universal, and the purpose and direction of existence. (shrink)

In this work the distinguished physical chemist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, demonstrates that the scientist's personal participation in his knowledge, in both its discovery and its validation, is an indispensable part of science itself. Even in the exact sciences, "knowing" is an art, of which the skill of the knower, guided by his personal commitment and his passionate sense of increasing contact with reality, is a logically necessary part. In the biological and social sciences this becomes even more evident. The (...) tendency to make knowledge impersonal in our culture has split fact from value, science from humanity. Polanyi wishes to substitute for the objective, impersonal ideal of scientific detachment an alternative ideal which gives attention to the personal involvement of the knower in all acts of understanding. His book should help to restore science to its rightful place in an integrated culture, as part of the whole person's continuing endeavor to make sense of the totality of his experience. In honor of this work and his The Study of Man Polanyi was presented with the Lecomte de Noüy Award for 1959. (shrink)

In this important new work, Haack develops an original theory of empirical evidence or justification, and argues its appropriateness to the goals of inquiry. In so doing, Haack provides detailed critical case studies of Lewis's foundationalism; Davidson's and Bonjour's coherentism; Popper's 'epistemology without a knowing subject'; Quine's naturalism; Goldman's reliabilism; and Rorty's, Stich's, and the Churchlands' recent obituaries of epistemology.

Since its original publication in 1979, The Possibility of Naturalism has been one of the most influential works in contemporary philosophy of science and social science. It is a cornerstone of the critical realist position, which is now widely seen as offering a viable alternative to move positivism and postmodernism. This revised edition includes a new foreword.

This unique collection of studies, based for the most part on transcripts of talks in India, Europe and America over the last five years, covers the period in which Roy Bhaskar was developing out of the seeds of the most radical phase of critical realism, his new philosophy of meta-Reality. Because of the spontaneous and informal nature of these talks and discussions, this book provides probably the most immediately accessible introduction to his thought, both for those new to it and (...) those already familiar with it alike. (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

This book is Dewey's most fully developed treatment of logic as the theory of Inquiry. It is a later work which reflects, in part, Dewey's readings of C.S. Peirce during the 1930's. -/- Reprinted in Series: The collected works of John Dewey / ed. by Jo Ann Boydston, 3,12.; The later works, 1925 - 1953, Vol. 12.

Davidson attacks the intelligibility of conceptual relativism, i.e. of truth relative to a conceptual scheme. He defines the notion of a conceptual scheme as something ordering, organizing, and rendering intelligible empirical content, and calls the position that employs both notions scheme-content dualism. He argues that such dualism is untenable since: not only can we not parcel out empirical content sentence per sentence but also the notion of uninterpreted content to which several schemes are relative, and the related notion of a (...) theory ”fitting the evidence’, can be shown to lack intelligibility too. Davidson argues further that belief in incommensurable schemes or non-intertranslatable languages is possible only on violating a correct understanding of interpretability : if we succeed in interpreting someone else then we have shown there is no need to speak of two conceptual schemes, while if we fail ”there is no ground for speaking of two.’. (shrink)

Abstract Ontological holism is the thesis that social groups are best understood as composite material particulars. At a high level of taxonomic classification groups such as mobs, tribes and nations are the same kind of thing as organisms and artefacts. This holism is opposed by ontological individualism, which maintains that in our formal and folk social scientific discourse we only really refer to individuals and the relations in which they stand. The paper begins from the claim that ontological holism is (...) given prima facie plausibility by the apparently ineliminable role of groups in some descriptions and explanations of the social domain. If the individualist accepts the link between indispensabilty and realism, then individualism must show that groups cannot play the role the holist requires. Three arguments are considered which aim to show that groups are indeed unfitted for this ineliminable role: the appeal to reduction-in principle, the claim that groups cannot possess the causal powers attributed to them by holism, and the view that holism is committed to the attribution of mental properties to groups. Each is rejected as a basis for undermining holism. The paper concludes that this leaves holism in a position to be articulated within a framework that supports a broadly naturalist conception of the social sciences. (shrink)

"The first two lectures place the alternative I defend -- a kind of pragmatic realism -- in a historical and metaphysical context. Part of that context is provided by Husserl's remark that the history of modern philosophy begins with Galileo -- that is, modern philosophy has been hypnotized by the idea that scientific facts are all the facts there are. Another part is provided by the analysis of a very simple example of what I call 'contextual relativity'. The position I (...) defend holds that truth depends on conceptual scheme and it is nonetheless 'real truth'. "In my third lecture I turn to the Kantian antecedents of this view, explaining what I think should be retained of the Kantian idea of autonomy as the central theme of morality, and extracting from Kant's work a 'moral image of the world' that connects the ideals of equality and intellectual liberty. In this lecture I defend the idea that moral images are an indispensible part of our moral and cultural heritage. "In the final lecture I defend the idea of moral objectivity. I compare our epistemological positions in ethics, history, analysis of human character, and science, and I argue that in no area can we hope for a 'foundation' which is more ultimate than the beliefs that actually, at a given time, function as foundational in the area, the beliefs concerning which one has to say 'this is where my spade is turned'. In ethics such beliefs are represented in moral images of the world.". (shrink)

This book provides an original and provocative combination of ethnomethodological analysis and the concepts of linguistic philosophy with a breadth and clarity unusual in this field of writing. It is designed to be read by sociologists, psychologists and philosophers and concerns itself with the contributions of Wittgenstein, defending the claim for his relevance to the human sciences. However, this book goes some way beyond the usual limitations of such interdisciplinary works by outlining some empirical applications of ideas derived from the (...) Wittgenstein tradition. (shrink)

Daniel C. Dennett is a brilliant polemicist, famous for challenging unexamined orthodoxies. Over the last thirty years, he has played a major role in expanding our understanding of consciousness, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. And with such groundbreaking, critically acclaimed books as Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), he has reached a huge general and professional audience. In this new book, Dennett shows that evolution is the key to resolving the ancient problems (...) of moral and political freedom. Like the planet's atmosphere on which life depends, the conditions on which our freedom depends had to evolve, and like the atmosphere, they continue to evolve-and could be extinguished. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Throughout the history of life on this planet, an interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are more free than their parts-from the unwitting gropings of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies. As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. Here is the story of how we came to be different from all other creatures, how our early ancestors mindlessly created human culture, and then, how culture gave us our minds, our visions, our moral problems-in a nutshell, our freedom. (shrink)

Humanity and the very notion of the human subject are under threat from postmodernist thinking which has declared not only the 'Death of God' but also the 'Death of Man'. This book is a revindication of the concept of humanity, rejecting contemporary social theory that seeks to diminish human properties and powers. Archer argues that being human depends on an interaction with the real world in which practice takes primacy over language in the emergence of human self-consciousness, thought, emotionality and (...) personal identity - all of which are prior to, and more basic than, our acquisition of a social identity. This original and provocative new book from leading social theorist Margaret S. Archer builds on the themes explored in her previous books Culture and Agency (CUP 1988) and Realist Social Theory (CUP 1995). It will be required reading for academics and students of social theory, cultural theory, political theory, philosophy and theology. (shrink)

Putnam's goal is to embed philosophy in social life. The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions.

This is one of the seminal articles of the pragmatist tradition where C.S. Peirce sets out his doctrine of doubt and belief --and their relationship to inquiry and clarity of our concepts. Originally published in the Popular Science Monthly; and widely available in reprints and collections of Peirce's writings.

It behooves a science to pay careful attention to its ontological assumptions, especially in cases where they are likely to be complex. Psychology seems to require both material states of humans as organisms, and symbolic productions. But we must be careful not to think that the grammars of the latter are some sort of superscience. The duality shows up strongly in the difference between skilled perfomances and their material enabling conditions. I argue that the dual ontology appears in a science (...) of psychology as a hybrid grammar. If we try to colonize one or the other side of the hybrid by terms from the other, the transplanted terms make no sense in their new surroundings. We find ourselves with a double or hybrid grammar and three main patterns of action to explain, causal, habitual and monitored. By assimilating the latter two under the symbolic ontology apparent problems dissolve. This is illustrated with a sketch of the sources and character of the sense of personal uniqueness. (shrink)

This bold and lively essay is one of those rarest of intellectual achievements, a big small book. In its short length are condensed enormous erudition and impressive analytical scope. With verve and self-assurance, it addresses a broad, central question: How can we improve our understanding of the large-scale processes and structures that transformed the world of the nineteenth century and are transforming our world today? Tilly contends that twentieth-century social theories have been encumbered by a nineteenth century heritage of “pernicious (...) postulates.” He subjects each misleading belief to rigorous criticism, challenging many standard social science paradigms and methodologies. As an alternative to those timeless, placeless models of social change and organization, Tilly argues convincingly for a program of concrete, historically grounded analysis and systematic comparison. To illustrate the strategies available for such research, Tilly assesses the works of several major practitioners of comparative historical analysis, making skillful use of this selective review to offer his own speculative, often unconventional accounts of our recent past. Historically oriented social scientists will welcome this provocative essay and its wide-ranging agenda for comparative historical research. Other social scientists, their graduate and undergraduate students, and even the interested general reader will find this new work by a major scholar stimulating and eminently readable. This is the second of five volumes commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary. "In this short, brilliant book Tilly suggests a way to think about theories of historical social change....This book should find attentive readers both in undergraduate courses and in graduate seminars. It should also find appreciative readers, for Tilly is a writer as well as a scholar." —Choice. (shrink)

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles. _The Field of Cultural Production_ brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of (...) literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power. The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies. (shrink)

In these eloquent essays, articles and lectures, Rorty gives a stimulating summary of his central philosophical beliefs and how they relate to his political ...

This lucidly written book examines the social and political significance of the natural sciences through a detailed and original account of science as an interpretive social practice.

Fullerand Rouse are both political social epistemologists concerned with the cognitive authority of science, though both disagree on what role it should play in science. Fullerar gues that political factors such as knowledge policy and a constitution play a primary role in the global legitimation of scientific knowledge, while Rouse holds that politics play a role on the local (practices) level but not on the global (metascientific) level of legitimation. While Fullerpr ovides a political response to the legitimation project, Rouse (...) rejects the legitimation project because he holds that it involves the need forglobal legitimation of the place of scientific knowledge in our culture. Key Words: legitimation project • social epistemology • epistemic sovereignty • metascience • scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Philosophers and non-philosophers have been attracted to the idea that the world incorporates levels of being: higher-level items – ordinary objects, artifacts, human beings – depend on, but are not in any sense reducible to, items at lower levels. I argue that the motivation for levels stems from an implicit acceptance of a Picture Theory of language according to which we can ‘read off’ features of the world from ways we describe the world. Abandonment of the Picture Theory opens the (...) way to a ‘no levels’ conception of reality, a conception that honors anti-reductionist sentiments and preserves the status of the special sciences without the ontological baggage. (shrink)

This is the leading, full-scale comprehensive dictionary of philosophical terms and thinkers to appear in English in more than half a century. Written by a team of more than 550 experts and now widely translated, it contains approximately 5,000 entries ranging from short definitions to longer articles. It is designed to facilitate the understanding of philosophy at all levels and in all fields. Key features of this third edition include: • 500 new entries covering Eastern as well as Western philosophy, (...) and covering individual countries such as China, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain • Increased coverage of such growing fields as ethics and philosophy of mind • More than 100 new intellectual portraits of leading contemporary thinkers • Wider coverage of Continental philosophy • Dozens of new technical concepts in cognitive science and other areas • Enhanced cross-referencing to add context and increase understanding • Expansions in both text and index to facilitate research and browsing. (shrink)

This work by Pierre Bourdieu develops the anthropological theory which has formed the basis of his scientific research. It discusses the problems posed by "structuralist" philosophers in order to solve or dissolve them.

Forthright and wryly humorous, philosopher Susan Haack deploys her penetrating analytic skills on some of the most highly charged cultural and social debates of recent years. Relativism, multiculturalism, feminism, affirmative action, pragmatisms old and new, science, literature, the future of the academy and of philosophy itself—all come under her keen scrutiny in _Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate_. "The virtue of Haack's book, and I mean _virtue_ in the ethical sense, is that it embodies the attitude that it exalts... Haack's voice (...) is urbane, sensible, passionate—the voice of philosophy that matters. How good to hear it again."—Jonathan Rauch, _Reason_ "A tough mind, confident of its power, making an art of logic... a cool mastery."—Paul R. Gross, _Wilson Quarterly_ "Few people are better able to defend the notion of truth, and in strong, clear prose, than Susan Haack... a philosopher of great distinction."—Hugh Lloyd-Jones, _National Review_ "If you relish acute observation and straight talk, this is a book to read."—_Key Reporter_ "Everywhere in this book there is the refreshing breeze of common sense, patiently but inexorably blowing."—Roger Kimball, _Times Literary Supplement_ "A refreshing alternative to the extremism that characterizes so much rhetoric today."—_Kirkus Reviews_. (shrink)

Recent pleas for more heterodoxy in explaining economic action have been defending a pluralism for economics. In this article, I analyse these defences by scrutinizing the pluralistic qualities in the work of one of the major voices of heterodoxy, Tony Lawson. This scrutiny will focus on Lawson's alternatives concerning ontology and explanation to mainstream economics. Subsequently, I will raise some doubts about Lawson's pluralism, and identify questions that will have to be addressed by heterodox economists in order to maintain the (...) claim of pluralism. (shrink)

The article discusses the relevance of ontology, the metaphysical study of being, in social sciences through a comparison of three distinct outlooks: Roy Bhaskar's version of critical realism, a pragmatic realist approach the most renowned representatives of which are Rom Harré and Hilary Putnam, and the authors’ own synthesis of the pragmatist John Dewey's and the neopragmatist Richard Rorty's ideas, here called methodological relationalism. The Bhaskarian critical realism is committed to the heavy ontological furniture of metaphysical transcendentalism, resting on essentialist (...) presumptions of causality and social structures, tacitly creating a dualism between individuals and society. Pragmatic realists, for their part, carry much lighter metaphysical baggage than critical realists and, much in a pragmatist vein, accept the idea that social scientists should study society by studying social life—the interwoven activities of individuals. Nevertheless, pragmatic realists only reluctantly, if at all, renounce the subject–object dualism and its ontological implications. Drawing on the ideas of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty, the writers outline their own antirepresentationalist, antiessentialist approach to social sciences. The proposed methodological relationalism is a pragmatist approach of Deweyan origin. Based on a Darwinian understanding of human beings as organisms trying to cope with their environment, it emphasises the insight that one can neither step outside one's own action, nor withdraw from the actor's point of view, just as one cannot cognitively step outside language. (shrink)

John Searle began to discuss his recently published book `The Construction of Social Reality' with Anthony Freeman, and they ended up talking about God. The book itself and part of their conversation are introduced and briefly reflected upon by Anthony Freeman. Many familiar social facts -- like money and marriage and monarchy -- are only facts by human agreement. They exist only because we believe them to exist. That is the thesis, at once startling yet obvious, that philosopher John Searle (...) explores in The Construction of Social Reality. (shrink)

For some time, it seemed that one had to choose between two sharply different theories of epistemic justification, foundationalism and coherentism. Foundationalists typically held that some beliefs were certain, and, hence, basic. Basic beliefs could impart justification to other, non-basic beliefs, but needed no such support themselves. Coherentists denied that there are any basic beliefs; on their view, all justified beliefs require support from other beliefs. The divide between foundationalism and coherentism has narrowed lately, and Susan Haack attempts to synthesize (...) these competing accounts into a view she calls "foundherentism.". (shrink)

Replete with madwomen, murderers, musicians, and mystics, "Lonely Woman" dramatically interweaves the lives of five women. It remains Takako Takahashi's most sustained and multifaceted fictional realization of her concept of "loneliness.".