Leon J. Goldstein critically examines the philosophical role of concepts and concept formation in the social sciences. The book undertakes a study of concept formation and change by looking at four critical terms in anthropology , politics , and sociology.

A collection of papers dealing with history as a way of knowing, not a mode of discourse.

This book introduces Robert Corrington’s “ecstatic naturalism,” a new perspective in understanding “sacred” nature and naturalism, and explores what can be done with this philosophical thought. This is an excellent resource for scholars of Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and American pragmatism.

"An adequate theory of culture," says David Bidney in Theoretical Anthropology, "must explain the origin of culture and its intrinsic relations to the psychobiological nature of man. To insist upon the self-sufficiency and autonomy of culture, as if culture were a closed system requiring only historical explanations in terms of other cultural phenomena, is not to explain culture, but to leave its origin a mystery or an accident of time". Earlier, on the same page, he writes, "Culture is not an (...) 'objective construct' whose existence is independent of man; it depends, rather, upon man's innate equipment and biological inheritance." These formulations reflect both his own interests and his misconstrual of the intentions of other anthropologists. One would suspect from the way he puts it that it was quite common for anthropologists to talk about a self-subsistent entity, culture, really existing independent of human beings. This is simply not the case, but the reasons for his view must be made apparent. (shrink)

Though many would prefer to have nothing to do with teleological explanations, it is evident that the writings of biologists and social scientists abound with them, and it is worth paying attention to the conditions under which they may be made responsibly. It emerges that responsible teleological statements would have to be made about instances of recurrent structures having specifiable characteristics, a situation which is patently the case for biology but still unsettled in, say, anthropology. In the final part of (...) the paper it is shown that satisfying this condition provides a basis for formulating general laws of the more orthodox kind. (shrink)