The phenomenological movement is a century-old international movement in philosophy that has penetrated most of the cultural disciplines, especially psychiatry and sociology. It began in Germany with the ...
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 ...
‘Alienation’ is a prominent term in twentieth-century social theory and social criticism, referring to any of various social or psychological evils which are characterized by a harmful separation, ...
Anthropology, like philosophy, is multifaceted. It studies humans’ physical, social, cultural and linguistic development, as well as their material culture, from prehistoric times up to the present, in ...
Anti-positivist philosophy arose in Latin America at the turn of the twentieth century in response to the dominance of closed positivistic systems of historical development in the climate ...
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 ...
Classical behaviourism has had almost no direct reflection in the social sciences, in that there has never been a behaviourist social psychology or sociology. However, various features of ...
In modern social and political philosophy civil society has come to refer to a sphere of human activity and a set of institutions outside state or government. ...
The concept of ‘communicative rationality’ is primarily associated with the work of the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas. According to Habermas, communication through language necessarily involves the ...
Originally proposed by sociologists of science, constructivism or social constructivism is a view about the nature of scientific knowledge held by many philosophers of science. Constructivists maintain that ...
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 ...
Cultural traits are those phenotypic traits whose development depends on social learning. These include practices, skills, beliefs, desires, values, and artefacts. The distribution of cultural traits in the ...
If cultural identity means that a person achieves the fullest humanity within an accepted context of traditional symbols, judgments, values, behaviour and relationships with specific others who self-consciously ...
Culture comprises those aspects of human activity which are socially rather than genetically transmitted. Each social group is characterized by its own culture, which informs the thought and ...
Decision theory studies individual decision-making in situations in which an individual’s choice neither affects nor is affected by other individuals’ choices; while game theory studies decision-making in situations ...
Dialectical materialism is the official name given to Marxist-Leninist philosophy by its proponents in the Soviet Union and their affiliates elsewhere. The term, never used by either Karl ...
Unlike many other sciences, economics is linked both to ethics and to the theory of rationality. Although many economists regard economics as a ‘positive’ science of one sort ...
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 ...
Rooted in the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment was a branch of the Moderate Enlightenment that dominated the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. ...
Ethnophilosophy refers to bodies of belief and knowledge that have philosophical relevance and which can be redescribed in terms drawn from academic philosophy, but which have not been ...
Ideas from evolutionary theory impinge on the social sciences in two ways. First, there is the research programme of sociobiology, which attempts to demonstrate the impact of biological ...
Within social science the experiment has an ambiguous place. With the possible exception of social psychology, there are few examples of strictly experimental studies. The classic study still ...
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 ...
Broadly speaking, there have been two main types of philosophical response to psychoanalysis. The first sets out to assess the scientific status of Freud’s hypotheses; the second uses ...
Feminists have two sorts of interest in the social sciences. With the advent of the second-wave women’s movement, they developed wide-ranging critiques of gender bias in the conceptual ...