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7The Caterpillar’s Question: Contesting Anti-Humanism’s ContestationsJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27 (2&3). 1997.The caterpillar’s question is the question Wonderland’s caterpillar posed to Alice: Who are you? This is a question Alice finds she cannot answer. According to postmodernist anti-humanism, Alice cannot answer the question because there is no coherent Alice there to answer it, no unitary subject of consciousness.This paper contests the anti-humanist denial of a coherent subject of experience. While it is conceded that phenomenologically, we may have difficulty today identifying who we are essenti…Read more
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8On Elder-Vass: Refining a refinementJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37 (2). 2007.This paper responds to Dave Elder-Vass's generally sympathetic critique of Margaret Archer's position on structure and emergence. Elder-Vass does helpfully emphasize the synchronic effects of structure. Yet, it is argued here, in his treatment of structure, Elder-Vass tends to concede too much to methodological individualism and to overemphasize social rules at the expense of social relations. Finally, a question is raised about how both Archer and Elder-Vass and Critical Realism in general spea…Read more
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12Cultural rules and material relationsSociological Theory 11 (2): 212-229. 1993.This paper attempts to synthesize the Winchian stress on constitutive rules with the Marxian stress on material relationships by developing the concept of emergently material social relations. Such relationships, it is argued, arise from the constitutive rules that constitute a group's way of life. Although such relationships thus are derivative from the conscious rule-following behavior of actors, nevertheless they have an objective existence independent of actors' specific awareness. It is arg…Read more
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52Response to Tony Lawson: Sociology Versus Economics and PhilosophyJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 46 (4): 420-425. 2016.
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9Nonreductive materialism and the materialisms of Marx and HeideggerHuman Studies 5 (1). 1982.The objective of this paper is to reconsider the relationship between marxism and existential-phenomenological sociology in light of margolis' (1978) recent articulation and systematic defense of what he terms nonreductive materialism--a material monist ontology which acknowledges an irreducible dualism of attributes. it is argued that reductive materialism is philosophically indefensible and that the most important reasons for thinking that marxism entails reductive materialism are mistaken
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6On the post-Wittgensteinian critique of the concept of action in sociologyJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 13 (2). 1983.
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19Four concepts of social structure Douglas V. PorporaJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 19 (2). 1989.
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2Sociology's causal confusionIn Ruth Groff (ed.), Revitalizing causality: realism about causality in philosophy and social science, Routledge. 2008.
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Drexel UniversityRegular Faculty
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |