Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 896 )

• Ethnography of High-energy Physics

  

  Science proceeds through research communities whose participants share important and often distinctive features of thought and method. Read more

  Posted on 31 July 2025 SOCIETY

• Arrtificial Intelligence Tools for Historians

  

  Historical research may seem to be a field in which AI tools will be especially useful. Historians are often confronted with very large unstructured digital... Read more

  Posted on 19 July 2025 SOCIETY

• Stock Ownership as System-wide Exploitation?

  

  A prior post made an effort to gain greater analytical clarity concerning the unfairness involved in the separation between the “one percent” economy and the... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2025 SOCIETY

• A New Form of Exploitation

  

  Much thinking about economic justice for working people has been framed by the nineteenth-century concept of “capitalism”: owners of enterprises constitute a... Read more

  Posted on 22 June 2025 SOCIETY

• Republicanism and Multicultural Democracy

  

  Philip Pettit’s writings about republicanism offer a valuable and distinctive perspective on individual freedom and the nature of a good society. Read more

  Posted on 25 May 2025 SOCIETY

• In His Influential Article "A Definition of Physicalism" ...

  

  In his influential article "A definition of physicalism" (1993) Philip Pettit attempts to formulate a consistent and coherent account of physicalism as an... Read more

  Posted on 20 May 2025 SOCIETY

• Why "DEI"?

  

  The current war on DEI has proven to be unrelenting and highly destructive to the independence, academic freedom, and inclusiveness of American universities. Read more

  Posted on 29 April 2025 SOCIETY

• A Conversation with Gemini About Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier

  

  In previous posts I've been fairly skeptical about the value of ChatGPT as a research tool (link). In recent weeks I've been exploring Google's Gemini 2.0... Read more

  Posted on 15 April 2025 SOCIETY

• The Continuing Reality of Racism

  

  source: https://www.kff.org/key-data-on-health-and-health-care-by-race-and-ethnicity/?entry=health-status-and-outcomes-birth-risks-and-outcomesThe rightwing... Read more

  Posted on 31 March 2025 SOCIETY

• Rethinking Analytical Sociology

  

  My current book Rethinking Analytical Sociology has now appeared in print. The book is intended to provide a sympathetic but critical review of analytical... Read more

  Posted on 15 March 2025 SOCIETY

• Why Are English Majors Disappearing?

  

  Many universities have witnessed a decline in students pursuing majors in the humanities, including English literature. Why has this happened? Read more

  Posted on 30 June 2024 SOCIETY

• "Rigorous" Sociology

  

  There is sometimes an inclination within the social sciences to unify and "improve" the methodologies of the social sciences to allow them to be "fully... Read more

  Posted on 04 June 2024 SOCIETY

• Assessing Causes in the Past (Kreuzer)

  Quantitative social scientists have something of a catechism when it comes to providing evidence for causal assertions. If we want to assert that A is a... Read more

  Posted on 02 June 2024 SOCIETY

• Popper and Parfit: the Minds of Philosophers

  

  Derek Parfit hit the philosophy firmament in the early 1960s, while Karl Popper arrived on the Vienna scene three decades earlier. Read more

  Posted on 06 April 2024 SOCIETY

• Limitations of Hobsbawm's Historical Writing

  

  A defining component of Eric Hobsbawm’s historical writings is the quartet of “Age” books: Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire, and Age of Extremes. Read more

  Posted on 22 March 2024 SOCIETY

• EP Thompson's Break with Stalinism

  

  E. P. Thompson was one of the great social historians of the twentieth century (link, link). He was also a committed socialist from youth to the end of his life. Read more

  Posted on 28 February 2024 SOCIETY

• Defining Disciplinary Research in the Social Sciences

  

  The "historical turn" in the philosophy of science in the 1960s and 1970s gave most of its attention to the development of the physical sciences -- especially... Read more

  Posted on 31 January 2024 SOCIETY

• Mistakes by Organizations

  

  In 1964 Jim Marshall, a defensive player for the Minnesota Vikings, committed a mistake by recovering a fumble by the San Francisco 49ers and running it into th... Read more

  Posted on 19 December 2023 SOCIETY

• Brecht on Galileo on Science

  

  Bertolt Brecht composed his play Life of Galileo (1939) (link) while on the run in Denmark from Nazi Germany in 1938. Brecht was a determined anti-Nazi, and he... Read more

  Posted on 02 November 2023 SOCIETY

• Thinking About Social Class

  

  Marx's theory of social class is founded on the idea of conflict of interest defined by the property system. Marx puts the point this way in the Communist... Read more

  Posted on 31 October 2023 SOCIETY