Du renforcement de la « monarchie paternelle » à l’existence d’un « empire des mères », la confrontation des sources du droit civil et des archives criminelles du Châtelet, au premier XVIIIe siècle, donne une vision complexe des rapports noués entre l’expérience de la maternité et l’exercice de l’autorité. Statutairement, les mères légitimes sont associées, sur un mode mineur ou de plein droit dans le cas du veuvage et de l’institution tutélaire, à l’exercice de l’autorité paternelle. Mais en débordant ces (...) catégories juridiques admises, en les utilisant à leur avantage ou en les contournant, les mères de la société parisienne se révèlent plus autoritaires que tendres, usant des prérogatives du patriarche, tout en revendiquant l’existence d’une sphère d’autorité purement féminine, dont elles assurent d’ailleurs, avec leurs filles, la reproduction. Par le biais des statuts octroyés ou des rôles assumés, les mères jouissent ainsi de pouvoirs, qui participent de l’institution paternelle et de la culture féminine. (shrink)

The Venetian state has aptly been called a work of art. So absolute and necessary appear its fictions that continuity and tradition are always in the foreground, while change recedes to the distant horizon. It is this quality of timeless truth that characterizes the “myth of Venice”: Venice remains perfect and unchanged while other governments rise and fall. It remains unchanged because of two things: the “perfect” system of government, combining the best features of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy; and (...) the reliance on impartial justice, the key to preserving harmony between conflicting groups. (shrink)

This article is concerned primarily to re-discover the contours of a doctrine -- Winock's �nationalisme ouvert� -- that (however unsuccessfully and for however short a time) intended to combine liberalism and nationalism. To that end it will concentrate upon the period that surrounded the birth of the July Monarchy in 1830 and specifically upon the writings of Armand Carrel, founder (with Thiers and Mignet) of Le National and supporter of the nationalist causes in Belgium, Poland and Italy. Other (...) writers --ost notably Lamennais, founder of L'Avenir, and Jules Michelet -- could have been taken as representatives of this body of opinion but Carrel, not merely upon the legitimate grounds of rescuing him from undeserved obscurity, especially merits our attention. (shrink)

Scholars of the nineteenth-century race sciences have tended to identify the period from c.1820– c.1850 as a phase of transition from philologically to physically focused study. In France, the physiologist William Frédéric Edwards is normally placed near the center of this transformation. A reconsideration of Edwards’ oeuvre in the context of his larger biography shows that it is impossible to see a clear-cut philological to physical “paradigm shift.” Although he has been remembered almost solely for his principle of the permanency (...) of physical “types,” Edwards was also committed to what he recognized as the new science of “ linguistique” and proposed a new branch of comparative philology based on pronunciation. Bearing Edwards’ attention to linguistics in mind, this article reconstructs his racial theories in their intellectual contexts and suggests that at a time of emergent disciplinary specialization, Edwards tried to hold discrete fields together and mold them into a new “natural history of man.”. (shrink)

The Belgian Constitution of 1831 marked a decisive step in the continental evolution from Restoration constitutional monarchy, based on the monarchical principle, towards the establishment of parliamentary constitutional monarchy. At the time, the new balance of power desired by the Belgian revolutionaries was captured by the phrase ‘republican monarchy’. It is remarkable that this concept, despite being so central to the founding fathers’ deliberations, has hardly been commented upon by later historians and public lawyers. This article aims (...) to reconstruct the origin, meaning and uses of this concept in the context of the 1830 revolutionary wave. French revolutionary veteran general Lafayette was responsible for popularizing republican monarchy in the July Revolution, although the term’s origins went back to eighteenth-century debates on the reform of absolute monarchy. Lafayette used it to summarize the institutional demands of the republican movement vis-à-vis king Louis Philippe. Its transnational migration to the Belgian context subsequently entailed a shift in meaning which will be charted through an analysis of the Belgian constituent and public debates. Finally, the reasons for the concept’s sudden disappearance from the political stage will be addressed. (shrink)

The name recognition of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in France during the early twentieth century was used to rally left-wing syndicalists and right-wing neo-monarchists to the 1911–14 Cercle Proudhon, a small political organization whose creation was once considered to represent the origins of European ‘fascism’. Oddly, no scholars have examined what Proudhon’s actual ideas about monarchy were and how they might have related to his criticisms of existing forms of political representation. This first part of a two-part series examines Proudhon’s evolving (...) consideration of royalty from the July Monarchy until his exile in Belgium in 1858. It explores how Proudhon’s ideas about monarchy were impacted by his hostility to French liberal and republican attempts at electoral reform from 1838 until 1848. It then looks at how his assessment of monarchy began to change after his experience of the Second Republic and the latter’s experiment in universal manhood suffrage. For Proudhon, the ill-fated 1848-52 regime showed how democratic voting could contribute to a dangerous Caesarist personalization of state power and facilitate a fluid transition from republic to empire. During the early years of the Second Empire, Proudhon sometimes expressed nostalgia for liberal ideas of constitutional monarchy fashionable during the earlier 1814–48 era. He did not advocate restricting suffrage again like during the pre-1848 period, however. (shrink)

This second half of a two-part essay examines how Proudhon’s ideas about monarchy changed during his 1858–62 Belgian exile and further evolved upon his return to France around the time of the 1863 legislative elections. If Proudhon justified monarchy’s role in state formation in the French pre-revolutionary past, he did not want the political liberalization of the Second Empire to lead to a return to a regime ressembling the July Monarchy. He attempted in the final years (...) of his life to develop a theory of constitutional evolution which could explain France’s internal political evolution since 1789 and Europe’s geopolitical evolution since the Vienna Settlement. This theory was designed to indicate why the teleological logic at work in both national and international developments since the French Revolution spelled the death knell for Napoleon III’s regime and pre-empted any regression to those political constitutions which came before the February 1848 Revolution in France. While developing these reflections, Proudhon continued to imagine alternative forms of political and social representation anticipating and influencing the way in which later theories of federalism and corporatism were discussed during the French Third Republic in a context of general dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

Globalizing Feminist Bioethics is a collection of new essays on the topic of international bioethics that developed out of the Third World Congress of the International Association of Bioethics in 1996. Rosemarie Tong is the primary editor of this collection, in which she, Gwen Anderson, and Aida Santos look at such international issues as female genital cutting, fatal daughter syndrome, use of reproductive technologies, male responsibility, pediatrics, breast cancer, pregnancy, and drug testing.

In this article, I examine the relation between Bateson and Guattari’s ecological thoughts: two thinkers whose ecological ideas at first sight have a lot in common. In order to show the difference between the thoughts of both thinkers, I will take my clue from Guattari’s remark that he parts ways with Bateson on the role of context. Explaining the role of context in both authors will allow me to show how Guattari’s thought implies both an endorsement and a critique of (...) cybernetics, and, specifically, promoting a machinic rather than cybernetic ecology. I will conclude by indicating what is at stake in this distinction. (shrink)

An important volume connecting classical studies with feminism, Feminism and Ancient Philosophy provides an even-handed assessment of the ancient philosophers' discussions of women and explains which ancient views can be fruitful for feminist theorizing today. The papers in this anthology range from classical Greek philosophy through the Hellenistic period, with the predominance of essays focusing on topics such as the relation of reason and the emotions, the nature of emotions and desire, and related issues in moral psychology. The volume contains (...) some new, ground-breaking essays on Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, as well as previously published pieces by established scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Julia Annas. It promises to be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including those working in classics, ancient philosophy, and feminist theory. (shrink)

It is currently common to conceive of the classic methodological individualism–holism debate in level terms. Accordingly, the dispute is taken to concern the proper level of explanations in the social sciences. In this paper, I argue that the debate is not apt to be characterized in level terms. The reason is that widely adopted notions of individualist explanations do not qualify as individual-level explanations because they span multiple levels. I defend this claim relative to supervenience, emergence, and other accounts of (...) the social world as levelled. Moreover, I discuss the consequences of this finding for the ongoing methodological individualism–holism debate. (shrink)

There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to society as a whole. Julie Stephens examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, Stephens details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that (...) has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal. Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care. (shrink)

The common assumption is that if a group comprising moral agents can act intentionally, as a group, then the group itself can also be properly regarded as a moral agent with respect to that action. I argue, however, that this common assumption is the result of a problematic line of reasoning I refer to as “the collective fallacy.” Recognizing the collective fallacy as a fallacy allows us to see that if there are, in fact, irreducibly joint actors, then some of (...) them will lack the full-fledged moral agency of their members. The descriptivist question of whether a group can perform irreducibly joint intentional action need not rise and fall with the normative question of whether a group can be a moral agent. (shrink)

This is an overview of Davidson's theory of anomalous monism. Objections and replies are also detailed.

_Threshold Concepts on the Edge_ explores new directions in threshold concept research and practice and is of relevance to teachers, learners, educational researchers and academic developers.

This book examnines the developments, themes, and social frameworks that determined the development of American linguistics since the founding of the American Philosophical Society in 1769 to the founding of the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. Julie Andersen proposes that three developments capture a significant portion of American linguistics activity. These are the study of American Indian languages, the emergence of a distinctive Anglo-American `thought' which has been accompanied by the defence of American English and the influence of European (...) linguistic theories on American scholarship. Throughout the book the idea is developed that theories of language do not transcend the language in which they are written, and metaphors and images are uncovered that are particular to the American-language linguisitc tradition. Undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics will find this book ideal background reading. It will be particularly useful to all students of historical linguisitcs. (shrink)

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. Urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American (...) Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. In fact, at the 2004 annual meeting of the AAMC six separate presentations addressed professionalism with such titles as "Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism," Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation," or "Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations". Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing, describing, decrying, and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don’t argue with these attributes. Instead, we ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment. (shrink)

This article discusses what is involved in having full moral status, as opposed to a lesser degree of moral status and surveys different views of the grounds of moral status as well as the arguments for attributing a particular degree of moral status on the basis of those grounds.

Recent debates about inequality have focused almost exclusively on the distribution of wealth and disparities in income, but little notice has been paid to the distribution of free time. Free time is commonly assumed to be a matter of personal preference, a good that one chooses to have more or less of. Even if there is unequal access to free time, the cause and solution are presumed to lie with the resources of income and wealth. In Free Time, Julie Rose (...) argues that these views are fundamentally mistaken. First, Rose contends that free time is a resource, like money, that one needs in order to pursue chosen ends. Further, realizing a just distribution of income and wealth is not sufficient to ensure a fair distribution of free time. Because of this, anyone concerned with distributive justice must attend to the distribution of free time. On the basis of widely held liberal principles, Rose explains why citizens are entitled to free time—time not committed to meeting life's necessities and instead available for chosen pursuits. The novel argument that the just society must guarantee all citizens their fair share of free time provides principled grounds to address critical policy choices, including work hours regulations, Sunday closing laws, public support for caregiving, and the pursuit of economic growth. Delving into an original topic that touches everyone, Free Time demonstrates why all citizens have, in the words of early labor reformers, a right to "hours for what we will.". (shrink)

From the Supreme Court to the bedroom, privacy is an intensely contested interest in our everyday lives and privacy law. Some people appeal to privacy to protect such critical areas as abortion, sexuality, and personal information. Yet, privacy skeptics argue that there is no such thing as a right to privacy. I argue that we cannot abandon the concept of privacy. If we wish to avoid extending this elusive concept to cover too much of our lives or shrinking it to (...) cover too little, we must come to understand it. After exploring the privacy arguments of philosophers and constitutional and tort privacy law, I argue for a new definition of privacy and an explanation of its value that clarifies and resolves many of our conflicts. Privacy is critical because it allows us to protect a realm in which we can have intimate relations with others. (shrink)

Le catalogue des Belles Lettres s’est enrichi en 2016 d’une nouvelle traduction de deux œuvres parmi les plus importantes de la philosophie et de la rhétorique, le Gorgias de Platon et l’Éloge d’Hélène de Gorgias, réunies dans un volume unique, accessible, dense, et riche d’un notable travail de synthèse. Cette traduction en langue française rejoint donc celles d’É. Chambry (1912), d’A. Croiset (1923), de L. Robin (1940) et de M. Canto (1987) pour le Gorgias, et celles de J.-L. Poirier (1988)...

Acknowledgments THROUGHOUT this book I cite the many people who have provided information on individual programs and activities. ...

In a recent article in this journal, Brian Alters argued that, given the many ways in which the nature of science is described and poor student responses to NOS instruments such as Nature of Scientific Knowledge Scale, Nature of Science Scale, Test on Understanding Science, and others, it is time for science educators to reconsider the standard lists of tenets for the NOS. Alters suggested that philosophers of science are authorities on the NOS and that consequently, it would be wise (...) to investigate their views of current NOS tenets. To that end, he conducted a survey of members of the Philosophy of Science Association, and, via various statistical techniques, made claims about the nature and extent of variation among philosophers of science regarding basic beliefs about the NOS. As three philosophers of science, we laud Alters’ attempt to understand philosophers of science’ view on the NOS. We believe, however, that his techniques for investigating this question are inappropriate and that consequently, several of his conclusions are unwarranted. In this comment, we will substantiate these criticisms. In addition, we will address some of the important questions that motivate Alters’ research and attempt to unravel the “byzantine complexity” of philosophical views about the NOS. We begin with our concerns regarding Alters’ research. We then provide a taxonomy of philosophic issues; and finally, we suggest some roles for philosophy of science in science teaching and the education of science teachers. (shrink)

In the recent methodological individualism-holism debate on explanation, there has been considerable focus on what reasons methodological holists may advance in support of their position. We believe it is useful to approach the other direction and ask what considerations methodological individualists may in fact offer in favor of their view about explanation. This is the background for the question we pursue in this paper: Why be a methodological individualist? We start out by introducing the methodological individualism-holism debate while distinguishing two (...) forms of methodological individualism: a form that says that individualist explanations are always better than holist accounts and a form that says that providing intervening individualist mechanisms always makes for better explanations than purely holist ones. Next, we consider four lines of reasoning in support of methodological individualism: arguments from causation, from explanatory depth, from agency, and from normativity. We argue that none of them offer convincing reasons in support of the two explanatory versions of individualism we consider. While there may well be occasions in which individualists’ favorite explanations are superior, we find no reason to think this always must be the case. (shrink)

This collection of papers investigates the most recent debates about individualism and holism in the philosophy of social science. The debates revolve mainly around two issues: firstly, whether social phenomena exist sui generis and how they relate to individuals. This is the focus of discussions between ontological individualists and ontological holists. Secondly, to what extent social scientific explanations may and should, focus on individuals and social phenomena respectively. This issue is debated amongst methodological holists and methodological individualists. -/- In social (...) science and philosophy, both issues have been intensively discussed and new versions of the dispute have appeared just as new arguments have been advanced. At present, the individualism/holism debate is extremely lively and this book reflects the major positions and perspectives within the debate. This volume is also relevant to debates about two closely related issues in social science: the micro-macro debate and the agency-structure debate. -/- This book presents contributions from key figures in both social science and philosophy, in the first such collection on this topic to be published since the 1970s. -/- . (shrink)

We propose the Selfish Goal model, which holds that a person's behavior is driven by psychological processes called goals that guide his or her behavior, at times in contradictory directions. Goals can operate both consciously and unconsciously, and when activated they can trigger downstream effects on a person's information processing and behavioral possibilities that promote only the attainment of goal end-states (and not necessarily the overall interests of the individual). Hence, goals influence a person as if the goals themselves were (...) selfish and interested only in their own completion. We argue that there is an evolutionary basis to believe that conscious goals evolved from unconscious and selfish forms of pursuit. This theoretical framework predicts the existence of unconscious goal processes capable of guiding behavior in the absence of conscious awareness and control (theautomaticity principle), the ability of the most motivating or active goal to constrain a person's information processing and behavior toward successful completion of that goal (thereconfiguration principle), structural similarities between conscious and unconscious goal pursuit (thesimilarity principle), and goal influences that produce apparent inconsistencies or counterintuitive behaviors in a person's behavior extended over time (theinconsistency principle). Thus, we argue that a person's behaviors are indirectly selected at the goal level but expressed (and comprehended) at the individual level. (shrink)

The National Institutes of Health and other federal health agencies are considering establishing a national biobank to study the roles of genes and environment in human health. A preliminary public engagement study was conducted to assess public attitudes and concerns about the proposed biobank, including the expectations for return of individual research results. A total of 141 adults of different ages, incomes, genders, ethnicities, and races participated in 16 focus groups in six locations across the country. Focus group participants voiced (...) a strong desire to be able to access individual research results. Recognizing the wide range of possible research results from a large cohort study, they repeatedly and spontaneously suggested that cohort study participants be given ongoing choices as to which results they received. (shrink)

The dominant theory of cross-disciplinarity represents multidisciplinarity as ‘lower’ or ‘less interesting’ than interdisciplinarity. In this paper, it is argued that this unfavorable representation of multidisciplinarity is ungrounded because it is an effect of the theory being incomplete. It is also explained that the unfavorable, ungrounded representation of multidisciplinarity is problematic: when someone adopts the dominant theory of cross-disciplinarity, the unfavorable representation supports the development of a preference for interdisciplinarity over multidisciplinarity. However, being ungrounded, the support the representation provides for (...) a preference for interdisciplinarity, is invalid. The issue is even more pressing because research policy makers and funding bodies are among the adopters of the theory, which means that there is a risk of policies reflecting an unjustified preference for interdisciplinarity over multidisciplinarity. This paper presents an improved version of the dominant theory of cross-disciplinarity, obtained by completing the original version with the information it was missing. Because the improved version is more neutral regarding the value of different types of cross-disciplinarity, it is better suited for use by research policy makers and funding bodies. (shrink)

This book is the most comprehensive and rigourous critique of the ways disciplinary boundaries still inhibit knowledge-production and integration.

The argument from multiple realization is currently considered the argument against intertheoretic reduction. Both Little and Kincaid have applied the argument to the individualism-holism debate in support of the antireductionist holist position. The author shows that the tenability of the argument, as applied to the individualism-holism debate, hinges on the descriptive constraints imposed on the individualist position. On a plausible formulation of the individualist position, the argument does not establish that the intertheoretic reduction of social theories is highly unlikely. Nonetheless, (...) the reductive project may run into other potential obstacles. For this reason, it is concluded that the prospect of intertheoretic reduction is uncertain rather than unlikely. Key Words: argument from multiple realization • intertheoretic reduction • reductionism • individualism • holism. (shrink)

Must a society aim indefinitely for continued economic growth? Proponents of economic growth advance three central challenges to the idea that a society, having attained high levels of income and wealth, may justly cease to pursue further economic growth: if environmentally sustainable and the gains fairly distributed, first, continued economic growth could make everyone within a society and globally, and especially the worst off, progressively better off; second, the pursuit of economic growth spurs ongoing innovation, which enhances people’s opportunities and (...) protects a society against future risks; and third, continued economic growth fosters attitudes of openness, tolerance, and generosity, which are essential to the functioning of a liberal democratic society. This article grants these challenges’ normative foundations, to show that, even if one accepts their underlying premises as requirements of justice, a society may still justly cease to aim for economic growth, so long as it continues to aim for and realize gains on other dimensions. I argue that, while continued economic growth might instrumentally serve valuable ends, it is not necessary for their realization, as a society can achieve these ends through other means. (shrink)

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs are increasingly popular corporate marketing strategies. This paper argues that CSR programs can fall along a continuum between two endpoints: Institutionalized programs and Promotional programs. This classification is based on an exploratory study examining the variance of four responses from the consumer stakeholder group toward these two categories of CSR. Institutionalized CSR programs are argued to be most effective at increasing customer loyalty, enhancing attitude toward the company, and decreasing consumer skepticism. Promotional CSR programs are (...) argued to be more effective at generating purchase intent. Ethical and managerial implications of these preliminary findings are discussed. (shrink)

Encouraged by the financial incentives in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009, electronic health record adoption is on the rise. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in 2014, 78% of office-based physicians had adopted some type of EHR system, up from 18% in 2001. Implementation of EHRs able to support the Department of Health and Human Services “meaningful use” requirements has also significantly increased since 2010. Such a (...) growth in EHR adoption with the capacity to achieve “meaningful use” standards suggests that the goal of nationwide, interoperable health records is moving closer to a reality.While movement toward a system-wide, interoperable EHR promises benefits of such an electronic information management tool, the risks related to patients’ privacy of their health information remains a concern. (shrink)

Encouraged by the financial incentives in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009, electronic health record adoption is on the rise. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in 2014, 78% of office-based physicians had adopted some type of EHR system, up from 18% in 2001. Implementation of EHRs able to support the Department of Health and Human Services “meaningful use” requirements has also significantly increased since 2010. Such a (...) growth in EHR adoption with the capacity to achieve “meaningful use” standards suggests that the goal of nationwide, interoperable health records is moving closer to a reality.While movement toward a system-wide, interoperable EHR promises benefits of such an electronic information management tool, the risks related to patients’ privacy of their health information remains a concern. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a partial analysis of the role of values in qualitative data collection in social research. The partial analysis shows that nonepistemic values have both required and permissible roles to play during this phase of research. By appeal to the analysis, I reject the ideal of value-free science as applied to qualitative data collection, and I demonstrate why two alternative ideals should likewise be dismissed as standards for values in qualitative data collection. Also, I briefly discuss (...) the extent to which the partial analysis carries over to quantitative data collection in social research. (shrink)

Social scientists associate agent-based simulation (ABS) models with three ideas about explanation: they provide generative explanations, they are models of mechanisms, and they implement methodological individualism. In light of a philosophical account of explanation, we show that these ideas are not necessarily related and offer an account of the explanatory import of ABS models. We also argue that their bottom-up research strategy should be distinguished from methodological individualism.

One issue of dispute between methodological individualists and methodological holists is whether holist explanations are dispensable in the sense that individualist explanations are able to do their explanatory job. Methodological individualists say they are, whereas methodological holists deny this. In the first part of the paper, I discuss Elder-Vass’ version of an influential argument in support of methodological holism, the argument from emergence. I argue that methodological individualists should reject it: The argument relies on a distinction between individualist and holist (...) explanations that they find unacceptable and Elder-Vass’ reasons in support of his way of drawing this distinction are not good ones. In the second part, I examine what, if anything, would be good reasons in support of a particular way of differentiating between individualist and holist explanations. I propose that a good reason is one which shows, in an acceptable manner, that the distinction, drawn in the same way in all contexts, is useful from the perspective of offering explanations of the social world. I show that if this criterion is adopted, it will result in a fruitful reorientation of the whole debate between methodological individualists and methodological holists. (shrink)

The introduction provides an overview of the ontological and the methodological individualism-holism debates. Moreover, these debates are briefly discussed in relation to two kindred disputes: The micro-macro and the agency-structure debates. Finally, the contributions to this book are briefly presented.