Specification of an appropriate relationship, or division of labor, between sociology and philosophy, remains a sensitive issue. Anthony Giddens offers a distinctive variant in his concern, in structuration theory, to develop an ontology of the social without participating in epistemological debate and without articulating and justifying a normative theory (whether a philosophical anthropology or a political philosophy). Both omissions impair the wider reception of structuration theory. The second is the more serious, however, insofar as the postempiricist community of inquirers may (...) make a virtue of the ethical and political factors that inform social science, but it does not yet have any settled means of assessing different, and contesting, values; even if it did, it could not invent Giddens's position for him. There are signs that Giddens now recognizes the need to formulate and justify models of the good society and of the actualized self. (shrink)

Victor Cousin dominated French philosophy for over thirty years from 1815. Manns tracks the progress of his aesthetic theory as far as the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901, René Sully-Proudhomme. The common thread is a family of positions Manns calls "expressionism," to the effect that beauty in physical objects is to be understood as the outer sign of some inner perfection: its origins he finds in Reid on taste. But what in Reid was a cautious (...) attempt to link the pleasure we take in beauty to perfection of character in agents, and especially, in the case of nature, to the more or less evident ingenuity of the Creator's handiwork, becomes in Cousin a metaphysically conjectural claim about the ideal attributes of "the absolute." Manns works hard, without much textual help but with plausible results, to identify the sources of Cousin's thought in Reid, rather than in, say, Hegel, by discussing how his epistemology and metaphysics parallel Reid's common-sense account of perception and the principles of reason. (shrink)