Social metaphysics concerns the existence and nature of social entities. Social metaphysicians have focused primarily on the existence and nature of three ontological categories: social facts (e.g. the ...
A social norm may be defined as the rule of a particular social group. That men are to open doors for women, for instance, may be the rule ...
People in different societies have very different beliefs and systems of belief. To understand such diversity is a prime task of the student of society. The task is ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Social theory embodies the claim that philosophical analyses, reflections on specific historical experience and systematic empirical observations of social conditions may be combined to construct theoretical explanations of ...
While socialist ideas may retrospectively be identified in many earlier forms of protest and rebellion against economic injustice and political oppression, socialism both as a relatively coherent theoretical ...
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While socialist ideas may retrospectively be identified in many earlier forms of protest and rebellion against economic injustice and political oppression, socialism both as a relatively coherent theoretical ...
The term ‘society’ is broader than ‘human society’. Many other species are described as possessing a social way of life. Yet mere gregariousness, of the kind found in ...
Socinianism was both the name for a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological movement which was a forerunner of modern unitarianism, and, much less precisely, a polemic term of abuse ...
Following Darwin, biologists and social scientists have periodically been drawn to the theory of natural selection as the source of explanatory insights about human behaviour and social institutions. ...
Sociologists of knowledge contribute to the enterprise of generating a naturalistic account of knowledge by describing and explaining the observed characteristics of shared cultures. They assume that knowledge ...
Throughout the history of sociology, three types of theorizing have co-existed, sometimes uneasily. ‘Theories of’ provide abstract models of empirical processes; they function both as guides for sociological ...
After Socrates’ death in 399 bc, a number of his followers composed imaginary dialogues between Socrates and various persons, usually historical. In addition to the dialogues of ...
For approximately one and a half centuries after Socrates’ death in 399 bc, several Greek philosophical schools and sects each claimed to be the true intellectual heirs ...
Solidarity exists among a group of people when they are committed to abiding by the outcome of some process of collective decision-making, or to promoting the wellbeing of ...
‘Solipsism’ (from the Latin solus ipse – oneself alone) is the doctrine that only oneself exists. This formulation covers two doctrines, each of which has been called ...
The Sophists were itinerant educators, the first professors of higher learning, who appeared in Greece in the middle and later fifth century bc. The earliest seems to ...
The discussion of the human soul, its existence, nature, ultimate objective and eternity, occupies a highly important position in Islamic philosophy and forms its main focus. For the ...
For the Greeks, the soul is what gives life to the body. Plato thought of it as a thing separate from the body. A human living on earth ...
Although it is incorrect to refer to an independent South African philosophical tradition, South Africa is nevertheless the location of an interesting history of philosophical institutionalization. This institutionalization ...
In legal and political philosophy sovereignty is the attribute by which a person or institution exercises ultimate authority over every other person or institution in its domain. Traditionally, ...
In some of its uses, the word ‘space’ designates an empty or potentially empty expanse among things, for example, when a driver finds a space in a crowded ...