Understanding Society

Stephen Greenblatt is a pathbreaking literary critic. But since the 1990s I've also looked at Greenblatt as a genuinely innovative and i...

Some philosophers and others have imagined that human beings are largely fixed in their most fundamental capacities -- their "human nat...

Moral philosophers have often written of ethical obligations, principles, and theories as if they were timeless and unchanging. Kant, for ex...

Quite a bit of the GDP of the United States goes into a broad category we can call "entertainment" -- television, video stream...

Each individual has a distinctive personality and orienting set of values. It is intriguing to wonder how these features take shape in t...

Gabriel Abend has recently published The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics , a remarkable book on what see...

photo: Morris Engel, Dock Workers 1947 ( link ) The topic of how actors arrive at their choices and behavior has come up a number of ti...

It is often said that culture change within an organization or workplace is difficult -- perhaps the most difficult part of trying to refor...

Steven Greenblatt's recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern , is an ambitious widening of Greenblatt's intellectual p...

I find the question of how other people think to be one of the most interesting angles we can raise about the social world. By "thin...