Product Description: Insights developed in the past two decades by philosophers of the social sciences can serve to enrich the challenging intellectual tasks of conceptualizing, investigating, and representing the human past. Likewise, intimate engagement with the writings of

Product Description: This volume represents a contribution to the philosophy of economics with a distinctive point of view -- the contributors have selected particular areas of economics and have probed these areas for the philosophical and methodological issues that they raise...read more

Product Description: We live in a time of human paradoxes. Scientific knowledge has reached a level of sophistication that permits understanding of the most arcane phenomena and yet religious fundamentalism dominates in many parts of the world. We witness the emergence of a civil, liberal constitutionalism in many regions of the world and yet ethnic violence threatens the lives and dignity of millions...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The convergence of inexactness and intelligibility in social phenomena makes social and historical inquiry fascinating. The social world is not chaotic and social processes are not unrelated strings of events. We can explain social patterns in ways that illuminate social outcomes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this innovative look at several current debates in China studies, Daniel Little investigates the merits of social scientists' hypotheses, reasoning, and explanations. Little focuses on four topics: the relative importance of individual rationality and community values in explaining traditional peasant behavior; the role of marketing and transportation systems in Chinese society; the causes of agricultural stagnation in traditional China; and the reasons for peasant rebellions in Qing China...read more

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