Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Introduction C. Mantzavinos; Part I. Basic Problems of Sociality: 1. Language and social ontology John R. Searle; Comment: De Rerum Natura: dragons of obliviousness and the science of social ontology Mark Turner; 2. Shared agency Michael E. Bratman; Comment: Where is the social? Pierre Demeulenaere; 3. The reality of group agents Philip Pettit; Comment: A note on group agents Diego Rios; Part II. Laws and Explanation in the Social Sciences: 4. Physicalism and the human sciences David Papineau; Comment: Reductionism in the human sciences: a philosopher's game Robert G. Shulman and Ian Shapiro; 5. Complexity and explanation in the social sciences Sandra Mitchell; Comment: Conditional knowledge: an oxymoron? James Alt; 6. The heterogeneous social: new thinking about the foundations of the social sciences Daniel Little; Comment: Causal mechanisms and generalizations Jack Knight; 7. What is this thing called 'efficacy'? Nancy Cartwright; Comment: Randomized controlled trials and public policy Gerd Gigerenzer; Part III. How Philosophy and the Social Sciences Can Enrich Each Other: Three Examples: 8. Why do people cooperate as much as they do? James Woodward; Comment: Putting the problem of social order into perspective Werner Güth and Hartmut Kliemt; 9. Situations against virtues: the situationist attack on virtue theory Ernest Sosa; Comment: Do people have character-traits? Steven Lukes; 10. What kind of problem is the hermeneutic circle? C. Mantzavinos; Comment: Going in circles David-Hillel Ruben; Epilogue C. Mantzavinos.

Mantzavinos, C.
Professor Mantzavinos holds the Chair of Economics and Philosophy at Witten/Herdecke University, Germany. He is the author of Wettbewerbstheorie (1994), Individuals, Institutions, and Markets (Cambridge, 2001) and Naturalistic Hermeneutics (Cambridge, 2005).