Philosophy Books - Page 11

Mapping Reality: An Evolutionary Realist Methodology for the Natural Social Sciences (S U N Y Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences)

Jane Azevedo

Amazon Price: $26.50 List Price: $26.50 Usually ships in 3 to 4 weeks By: State University of New York Press Amazon Marketplace: 7 new & used starting at $16.04

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Epistemology
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Anthropology -> Sociobiology
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Philosophy

Modes of Individualism and Collectivism (Modern Revivals in Philosophy)

List Price: $84.95 By: Ashgate Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 7 new & used starting at $93.87

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Methodology

Editorial Review:

A collection of 19 multidisciplinary essays concerned with the intellectual tradition of the social sciences as well as their formal and methodological properties. The arguments focus on the nature of concept formation and the logic of explanation in the social sciences.

Social Theory in the Twentieth Century

Patrick Baert

Amazon Price: $65.00 List Price: $65.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: NYU Press Amazon Marketplace: 3 new & used starting at $64.97

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Politics -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Politics -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Philosophy

Editorial Review:

"I think this is an outstanding book. The coverage is comprehensive, the lines of thought and exposition are clear, and the level of discussion is very high yet remarkably lively and accessible. It has an underlying intellectual seriousness and engagement which shines out through the individual chapters, and the author's unwillingness to make do with secondary analyses and received ideas gives it a strength and freshness of approach which is extremely welcome."
--Professor William Outhwaite, University of Sussex

Social Theory in the Twentieth Century offers an easy-to-read but provocative account of the development of social theory. Patrick Baert covers a wide range of key figures and schools of thought, including Giddens, Foucault and Habermas. Written in a lively style and avoiding jargon, this book is aimed at students who wish to understand the main debates and dilemmas driving social theory.

Rather than providing a neutral summary of the different thinkers and theories, Baert challenges the conventional readings of social theory with new and original interpretations. In effect, he bridges the gap between philosophy and social theory by placing the theoretical views within wider historical traditions.

Social Theory in the Twentieth Century will undoubtedly become the standard introduction to social theory for students in sociology, politics, and anthropology.

Whose Keeper?: Social Science and Moral Obligation

Alan Wolfe

List Price: $37.50 By: Univ of California Pr Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $1.53

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Philosophy
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> Social Theory
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> General

Critical Reasoning in Contemporary Culture (S U N Y Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences)

Amazon Price: $24.50 List Price: $24.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: State University of New York Press Amazon Marketplace: 5 new & used starting at $24.49

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Logic & Language
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General AAS

Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray (S U N Y Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences)

Patricia J. Huntington

Amazon Price: $27.50 List Price: $27.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: State University of New York Press Amazon Marketplace: 8 new & used starting at $20.37

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> History & Surveys
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Movements -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition is a study in critical postmodern social theory. By engaging a dialogue with Heidegger, Kristeva, and Irigaray, it offers unique insights into Heidegger's heroic embrace of the manly ethos of National Socialism. Against certain poststructuralist feminist tendencies to throw the baby of intentionality out with the bath water of voluntarism, Huntington interweaves elements of Kristevan and Heideggerian thought in order to reconstruct a linguistically embedded, existentially and affectively rich, dialectical model of willed self-regulation. Pressing Heideggerian ontology into the service of a viable social theory, she argues that this ontology accounts for the utopian impulse in Irigaray's search for a critical poetic reenchantment of the lifeworld and supplies Irigaray with the philosophical foundation for a model of ethical recognition based upon asymmetrical reciprocity.

Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation, and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences

Richard W. Miller

List Price: $90.00 By: Princeton Univ Pr Amazon Marketplace: 6 new & used starting at $30.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Epistemology
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this bold work of broad scope and rich erudition, Richard W. Miller sets out to reorient the philosophy of science. By questioning both positivism and its leading critics, he develops new solutions to the most urgent problems about justification, explanation and truth. Using a wealth of examples from the the natural and the social sciences, "Fact and Method" applies the new account of scientific reason to specific questions of method in virtually every field of inquiry including biology, physics, history, sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology and literary theory.

For the past quarter-century, the philosophy of science has been in a crisis brought on by the failure of the positivist project of resolving all basic methodological questions by applying absolutely general rules, valid for all fields at all times. "Fact and Method" presents a new view of science in which what counts as an explanation, a cause, a confirming test or a compelling case for the existence of an unobservable is determined by frameworks of specific substantive principles, rationally adopted in light of the actual history of inquiry. Although the history of science has usually been the material for relativism, Professor Miller uses arguments of Darwin, Newton, Einstein, Galileo and others both to undermine positivist conceptions of rationality and to support the positivists' optimism that important theoretical findings are often justifiable from all reasonable perspectives.

"Fact and Method" includes new accounts of causation, explanatory adequacy, approximate truth and confirmation, together with a defense of scientific realism freed from the positivist assumptions that Professor Miller locates on both sides of the realism controversy. Throughout, the new philosophical ideas are applied to specific topics confronting social scientists or natural scientists, for example: value-freedom, methodological individualism, functional explanation, the nature of evolutionary

Microfoundations, Methods, and Causation: On the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Science and Technology Series)

Daniel Little

Amazon Price: $27.55 List Price: $39.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Transaction Publishers Amazon Marketplace: 14 new & used starting at $14.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Anthropology -> Sociobiology

Editorial Review:

This text focuses on the theory of popular politics constructed within the context of analytical Marxism, and asks if rational choice theory provides an adequate basis for explaining patterns of social, political and economic behaviour in traditional China.

Observations on Modernity (Writing Science)

Niklas Luhmann

Amazon Price: $60.00 List Price: $60.00 Usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks By: Stanford University Press Amazon Marketplace: 11 new & used starting at $59.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Anthropology -> Sociobiology
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Philosophy
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> Social Theory

Editorial Review:

This collection of five essays by Germany’s most prominent and influential social thinker both links Luhmann’s social theory to the question “What is modern about modernity?” and shows the origins and context of his theory.

In the introductory essay, “Modernity in Contemporary Society,” Luhmann develops the thesis that the modern epistemological situation can be seen as the consequence of a radical change in social macrostructures that he calls “social differentiation,” thereby designating the juxtaposition of and interaction between a growing number of social subsystems without any hierarchical structure. “European Rationality” defines rationality as the capacity to see the difference between systems and their environment as a unity. Luhmann argues that, in a world characterized by contingency, rationality tends to become coextensive with imagination, a view that challenges their classical binary opposition and opens up the possibility of seeing modern rationality as a paradox.

In the third essay, “Contingency as Modern Society’s Defining Attribute,” Luhmann develops a further and probably even more important paradox: that the generalization of contingency or cognitive uncertainty is precisely what provides stability within modern societies. In the process, he argues that medieval and early modern theology can be seen as a “preadaptive advance” through which Western thinking prepared itself for the modern epistemological situation. In “Describing the Future,” Luhmann claims that neither the traditional hope of learning from history nor the complementary hope of cognitively anticipating the future can be maintained, and that the classical concept of the future should be replaced by the notion of risk, defined as juxtaposing the expectation of realizing certain projects and the awareness that such projects might fail. The book concludes with “The Ecology of Ignorance,” in which Luhmann outlines prospective research areas “for sponsors who have yet to be identified.”

The Expanded Social Scientist's Bestiary

D. C. Phillips

Amazon Price: $110.00 List Price: $110.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Amazon Marketplace: 2 new & used starting at $97.90

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Philosophy
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Reference
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> Social Theory

Editorial Review:

The (Expanded) Social Scientist's Bestiary addresses a number of important theoretical and philosophical issues in the social sciences from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of science. This expanded and revised edition contains four new chapters tackling such contemporary beasts as Popperian rules, narrative research, and various forms of constructivism. The chapters presented in this volume are, as far as possible, self-contained so that each chapter can be consulted without the necessity of having read the others, thus making this volume an invaluable guide for faculty members and graduate students in the whole of the social sciences and related applied fields.