Dlittle30
I am a philosopher of social science with a strong interest in China and Southeast Asia. Paying attention to the logical and conceptual issues raised by the social sciences is key to better understanding the modern world. I think philosophers need to interact seriously and extensively with working social scientists and historians if they are going to be able to make a useful contribution.
MY BLOGS
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Understanding Society
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/
Innovative thinking about social agency and structure in a global world
LATEST ARTICLES ( 863 )
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Character and Personality
If we want to have a more adequate theory of the actor (link), we need to broaden our understanding of the factors and capacities that affect action. Read more
Posted on 13 January 2013 HEALTH, PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIETY -
Character and Historical Experience
Source: Gilles Mora and Beverly Brannan, FSA: The American Vision; photos by Dorothea Lange We often think that some historical periods have deep effects on... Read more
Posted on 09 January 2013 CULTURE, HISTORY, SOCIETY -
Simon on Complexity
Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition provided an alternative model for thinking about society. We can think of social institutions as... Read more
Posted on 06 January 2013 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Human Sciences
Nomenclature isn't everything -- but it is important nonetheless. What we call the areas of research that examine history, action, and social life makes a... Read more
Posted on 03 January 2013 SOCIETY -
World History
is more timely today than ever. “Globalization” is almost a cliché, from “The world is flat” to “the homogenization of cultures” to the “commodification of... Read more
Posted on 01 January 2013 SOCIETY -
Epicurus's Philosophy
The philosophy of Epicurus wielded great influence, both in the ancient world and in the early modern world (as Steven Greenblatt shows in The Swerve; link). Read more
Posted on 29 December 2012 SOCIETY -
Behavioral Science
(1958-59 class of Fellows at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; link) Sometimes the rubric "behavioral science" is used to capture some of th... Read more
Posted on 26 December 2012 CURRENT, DEBATE, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, SOCIETY -
Greenblatt on Civilization
Steven Greenblatt's recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, is an ambitious widening of Greenblatt's intellectual palette. Read more
Posted on 22 December 2012 SOCIETY -
New Metaphors for the Social
The social world is not like the natural world. Nature is composed of things, forces, and geometries that have strong determining regularities whose interaction... Read more
Posted on 16 December 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why Does Social Science Matter?
What is the good of social science knowledge? In the natural sciences the answer is often pretty simple and pragmatic: natural science knowledge allows us to... Read more
Posted on 14 December 2012 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Historians of Sociology and Classical Social Theory
Several readers of the recent post on Raymond Aron asked about other surveys of the history of sociology that are sometimes considered helpful. So I've pulled... Read more
Posted on 13 December 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Simulating Social Mechanisms
A key premise of complexity theory is that a population of units has "emergent" properties that result from the interactions of units with dynamic... Read more
Posted on 09 December 2012 SOCIETY -
Neighborhood Effects
In Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect Robert Sampson provides a very different perspective on the "micro-macro" debate. Read more
Posted on 06 December 2012 SOCIETY -
Raymond Aron as Historian of Sociology
How can we best tell the story of the development of sociology as an empirical social science? Raymond Aron undertook to do so in Main Currents in Sociological... Read more
Posted on 04 December 2012 SOCIETY -
Latour's Invisible Paris
Almost the first words of Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory include this intriguing statement: This somewhat... Read more
Posted on 01 December 2012 SOCIETY -
Veblen on Universities
In 1918 Thorstein Veblen wrote a surprising short book about the administration and governance of American universities, The Higher Learning In America. What... Read more
Posted on 29 November 2012 SOCIETY -
Marketing Wittgenstein
Who made Wittgenstein a great philosopher? Why is the eccentric Austrian now regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers? Read more
Posted on 27 November 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Pragmatist Arguments for Democracy
Jack Knight and Jim Johnson engage in a particular kind of political theory in their recent The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism. Read more
Posted on 25 November 2012 HISTORY, POLITICS, SOCIETY -
Deliberation for Activists
What is involved in deliberating within an activist group? This isn't quite as simple a question as it might appear. Deliberation has to do with a discussion... Read more
Posted on 19 November 2012 POLITICS, SOCIETY -
Assemblage Theory
Deleuze's theory (metaphor?) of assemblage as a way of thinking about the social world is an intriguing one. Fundamentally the idea is that there does not... Read more
Posted on 15 November 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY