Search

Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate edited by Julie Zahle and Finn Collin is reviewed. Each of the contributions contained in the volume is summarized. The review concludes by assessing the volume’s usefulness for bringing clarity into the debate in the light of the editors’ self-set goal of rethinking the individualism-holism debate as one of the more important yet confused debates in philosophy of the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of the book "The Torture Letters: Reckoning With Police Violence," by Laurence Ralph, is presented.

In Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide, Frederic Charles Schaffer makes the case for an interpretivist approach to social science and the concepts used by social scientists. Schaffer adopts an approach to concepts that he calls ‘elucidation’, and the approach involves relating social science concepts to their everyday use by laypersons. The reviewers in this Book Review Symposium - Joe Soss, Douglas C. Dow and Ahmed Khanani - are all sympathetic to the interpretivist approach to social science concepts, but challenge Schaffer on important points. Above all, they focus on three broad questions: how does the researcher gain a critical distance from what she studies, and what does this mean for the concepts she is using? What is the nature of concepts, that is, what is the concept of ‘concept’ we use? And, what is the relationship between concepts and visual signs such as paintings? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]