Langbeschreibung
An extended historical and philosophical argument, this book will be a valuable text for all students of the philosophy of the social sciences. It discusses the serious alternatives to positivist and empiricist accounts of the physical sciences, and poses the debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism in the social sciences in new terms. Recent materialist and realist philosophies of science make possible a defence of naturalism which does not make concessions to positivism and which recognizes the force of several of the anti-positivist arguments from the main anti-naturalist (neo-Kantian) tradition.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Preface; Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Auguste Comte and positivist sociology; Chapter 3 The natural sciences: I. Contempory positivism and the concept of explanation; Chapter 4 The natural sciences: II. The positivist conception of scientific theory and its competitors; Chapter 5 Positivism and ideology in the work of Emile Durkheim; Chapter 6 Kant and the Neo-Kantians; Chapter 7 The methodology of Max Weber, and Peter Winch's 'Corrections'; Chapter 8 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels philosophy of history and theory of knowledge; Chapter 9 Towards a materialist theory of knowledge;