Understanding Society

My current book  Rethinking Analytical Sociology has now appeared in print. The book is intended to provide a sympathetic but critical revi...

Many universities have witnessed a decline in students pursuing majors in the humanities, including English literature. Why has ...

There is sometimes an inclination within the social sciences to unify and "improve" the methodologies of the social sciences to al...

Quantitative social scientists have something of a catechism when it comes to providing evidence for causal assertions. If we want to assert...

Derek Parfit hit the philosophy firmament in the early 1960s, while Karl Popper arrived on the Vienna scene three decades earlier. David Edm...

A defining component of Eric Hobsbawm’s historical writings is the quartet of “Age” books: Age of Revolution , Age of Capital , Age of Em...

E. P. Thompson was one of the great social historians of the twentieth century ( link , link ). He was also a committed socialist from youth...

The "historical turn" in the philosophy of science in the 1960s and 1970s gave most of its attention to the development of the phy...

In 1964 Jim Marshall, a defensive player for the Minnesota Vikings, committed a mistake by recovering a fumble by the San Francisco 49ers an...

Bertolt Brecht composed his play Life of Galileo (1939) ( link ) while on the run in Denmark from Nazi Germany in 1938. Brecht was a determ...