This is an expanded and thoroughly revised edition of the widely adopted introduction to the philosophical foundations of the human sciences. Ranging from cultural anthropology to mathematical economics, Alexander Rosenberg leads the reader through behaviorism, naturalism, interpretativism about human action, and macrosocial scientific perspectives, illuminating the motivation and strategy of each.Rewritten throughout to increase accessibility, this new edition retains the remarkable achievement of revealing the social sciences' enduring relation to the fundamental problems of philosophy. It includes new discussions of positivism, European philosophy of history, causation, statistical laws, quantitative models, and postempiricist social science, along with a completely updated literature guide that keys chapters to widely anthologized papers.

Philosophy of Social Science (Dimensions in Philosophy)

History

Rosenberg, Alexander

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Oxford University Press

Governing International Labour Migration: Current Issues, Challenges and Dilemmas (Routledge/Ripe Studies in Global Political Economy)

Routledge

Economics today cannot predict the likely outcome of specific events any better than it could in the time of Adam Smith. This is Alexander Rosenberg's controversial challenge to the scientific status of economics. Rosenberg explains that the defining characteristic of any science is predictive improvability—the capacity to create more precise forecasts by evaluating the success of earlier predictions—and he forcefully argues that because economics has not been able to increase its predictive power for over two centuries, it is not a science.

Economics--Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

Business & Money

Economics

University of Chicago Press

Instrumental Biology, or The Disunity of Science (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

Do the sciences aim to uncover the structure of nature, or are they ultimately a practical means of controlling our environment? In Instrumental Biology, or the Disunity of Science, Alexander Rosenberg argues that while physics and chemistry can develop laws that reveal the structure of natural phenomena, biology is fated to be a practical, instrumental discipline. Because of the complexity produced by natural selection, and because of the limits on human cognition, scientists are prevented from uncovering the basic structure of biological phenomena. Consequently, biology and all of the disciplines that rest upon it—psychology and the other human sciences—must aim at most to provide practical tools for coping with the natural world rather than a complete theoretical understanding of it.

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

After the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists working in molecular biology embraced reductionism—the theory that all complex systems can be understood in terms of their components. Reductionism, however, has been widely resisted by both nonmolecular biologists and scientists working outside the field of biology. Many of these antireductionists, nevertheless, embrace the notion of physicalism—the idea that all biological processes are physical in nature. How, Alexander Rosenberg asks, can these self-proclaimed physicalists also be antireductionists? With clarity and wit, Darwinian Reductionism navigates this difficult and seemingly intractable dualism with convincing analysis and timely evidence. In the spirit of the few distinguished biologists who accept reductionism—E. O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jacques Monod, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins—Rosenberg provides a philosophically sophisticated defense of reductionism and applies it to molecular developmental biology and the theory of natural selection, ultimately proving that the physicalist must also be a reductionist.

Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology

Philosophy of Social Science

Philosophy of Social Science provides a tightly argued yet accessible introduction to the philosophical foundations of the human sciences, including economics, anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, history, and the disciplines emerging at the intersections of these subjects with biology. Philosophy is unavoidable for social scientists because the choices they make in answering questions in their disciplines force them to take sides on philosophical matters. Conversely, the philosophy of social science is equally necessary for philosophers since the social and behavior sciences must inform their understanding of human action, norms, and social institutions.The fifth edition retains from previous editions an illuminating interpretation of the enduring relations between the social sciences and philosophy, and reflects on developments in social research over the past two decades that have informed and renewed debate in the philosophy of social science. An expanded discussion of philosophical anthropology and modern and postmodern critical theory is new for this edition.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

This book provides a comprehensive guide to the conceptual methodological, and epistemological problems of biology, and treats in depth the major developments in molecular biology and evolutionary theory that have transformed both biology and its philosophy in recent decades. At the same time the work is a sustained argument for a particular philosophy of biology that unifies disparate issues and offers a framework for expectations about the future directions of the life sciences. The argument explores differences between autonomist and anti-autonomist views of biology. The result is a vindication of reductionism, but one that is unexpectedly hollow. For it leaves the exponents of the autonomy of biology from physical science with as much as their view of biology really requires - and rather more than the reductionist might comfortably concede. Professor Rosenberg shows how the problems of the philosophy of biology are interconnected and how their solutions are interdependent, However, this book focuses more on the direct concerns of biologists, rather than the traditional agenda of philosophers' problems about biology. This departure from earlier books on the subject results both in greater understanding and relevance of the philosophy of science to biology as a whole.

The Structure of Biological Science

Cambridge University Press

Darwinism in Philosophy, Social Science and Policy (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology)

This is a groundbreaking and timely collection of papers by Alexander Rosenberg, the distinguished philosopher of science. The essays cover three broad areas related to Darwinian thought and naturalism: the first deals with the solution of philosophical problems such as reductionism, the second with the development of social theories, and the third with the intersection of evolutionary biology with economics, political philosophy, and public policy. Rosenberg's important writings on a variety of issues are here organized into a coherent philosophical framework that promises to be a significant and controversial contribution to the philosophy of science and the application of evolutionary biology to social science and policy.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rosenberg, Alexander. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rosenberg, Alexander

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rosenberg, Alexander. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Philosophy of Social Science (Dimensions in Philosophy)

Governing International Labour Migration: Current Issues, Challenges and Dilemmas (Routledge/Ripe Studies in Global Political Economy)

Economics--Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

Instrumental Biology, or The Disunity of Science (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

Instrumental Biology, or The Disunity of Science (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology

Philosophy of Social Science

The Structure of Biological Science

The Structure of Biological Science

Darwinism in Philosophy, Social Science and Policy (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology)