Explanation in history and social science

By Ruben, David-Hillel

Historians and social scientists explain at least two sorts of things: (a) those individual human actions that have historical or social significance, such as Stalin’s decision to hold ...

Methodological individualism

By Segal, Gabriel

Methodological individualism (MI) is the thesis that certain psychological properties are intrinsic properties, such as ‘being made out of iron’, rather than externally relational properties, such ...

Lebensphilosophie

By Gaiger, Jason

In its most general sense Lebensphilosophie denotes a philosophy which asks after the meaning, value and purpose of life, turning away from purely theoretical knowledge towards the ...

Theory and observation in social sciences

By Outhwaite, William

The concept of observation has received relatively little systematic attention in the social sciences, with the important exceptions of social psychology, social anthropology and some areas of sociological ...

Archaeology, philosophy of

By Wylie, Alison

Questions about the scientific status of archaeology have been central to field-defining debates since the late nineteenth century and have frequently involved appeals to philosophical sources. With the ...

Economics, philosophy of

By Hausman, Daniel

People have thought about economics for as long as they have thought about how to manage their households, indeed Aristotle compared the study of the economic affairs of ...

Explanation

By Kitcher, Philip

Philosophical reflections about explanation are common in the history of philosophy, and important proposals were made by Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Mill. But the subject came of age ...

Holism and individualism in history and social science

By Bhargava, Rajeev

Methodological individualists such as Mill, Weber, Schumpeter, Popper, Hayek and Elster argue that all social facts must be explained wholly and exhaustively in terms of the actions, beliefs ...

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. His ...

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. He ...

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

By Skorupski, John

John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. He ...

Social sciences, philosophy of

By Ruben, David-Hillel

Although some of the topics and issues treated in the philosophy of social science are as old as philosophy itself (for example, the contrast between nature and convention ...

Weber, Max (1864–1920)

By Turner, Stephen P.; Factor, Regis A.

Max Weber, German economist, historian, sociologist, methodologist, and political thinker, is of philosophical significance for his attempted reconciliation of historical relativism with the possibility of a causal social ...

Schütz, Alfred (1899–1959)

By Collin, Finn

Alfred Schütz, Austrian-American philosopher and social scientist. Combining ideas from Weber, Bergson and Husserl, Schütz developed a methodology for social science that integrated subjectivist, phenomenological elements with the ...

Social sciences, prediction in

By Lagerspetz, Eerik

Prediction is important in science for two reasons. First human beings have a practical interest in knowing the future. Therefore, all science is potentially predictive in the sense ...

Critical realism

By Collier, Andrew

Critical realism is a movement in philosophy and the human sciences starting from Roy Bhaskar’s writings. It claims that causal laws state the tendencies of things grounded in ...

Functionalism in social science

By Bigelow, John C.

In the social sciences, functionalists are theorists who give an especially prominent role to functional explanations. One of the most influential self-defined functionalists, Malinowski (1926), summed up this ...

Social science, methodology of

By Rosenberg, Alex

Each of the sciences, the physical, biological, social and behavioural, have emerged from philosophy in a process that began in the time of Euclid and Plato. These sciences ...

Social science, contemporary philosophy of

By Braybrooke, David

Some philosophers think that the study of social phenomena must apply methods from natural science. Researchers should discover causal regularities (whenever C operates, E occurs) and fit them ...

Marx, Karl (1818–83)

By Rosen, Michael

Karl Marx was the most important of all theorists of socialism. He was not a professional philosopher, although he completed a doctorate in philosophy. His life was devoted ...

Popper, Karl Raimund (1902–94)

By Jarvie, Ian C.

Popper belongs to a generation of Central European émigré scholars that profoundly influenced thought in the English-speaking countries in this century. His greatest contributions are in philosophy of ...

Social science, history of philosophy of

By Manicas, Peter T.

The history of social science can conveniently be divided into four uneven periods, starting with the beginnings of both western science and philosophy in the ancient Greek ...