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366Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the SocialCambridge University Press. 1996.This book addresses key topics in social theory such as the basic structures of social life, the character of human activity, and the nature of individuality. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein, the author develops an account of social existence that argues that social practices are the fundamental phenomenon in social life. This approach offers insight into the social formation of individuals, surpassing and critiquing the existing practice theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, Lyotard and Oakeshott.…Read more
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274Practices and actions a Wittgensteinian critique of Bourdieu and GiddensPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 27 (3): 283-308. 1997.This article criticizes Bourdieu's and Giddens's overintellectualizing accounts of human activity on the basis of Wittgenstein's insights into practical under standing. Part 1 describes these two theorists' conceptions of a homology between the organization of practices (spatial-temporal manifolds of action) and the governance of individual actions. Part 2 draws on Wittgenstein's discussions of linguistic definition and following a rule to criticize these conceptions for ascribing content to the…Read more
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223The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (edited book)Routledge. 2000.This book provides an exciting and diverse philosophical exploration of the role of practice and practices in human activity. It contains original essays and critiques of this philosophical and sociological attempt to move beyond current problematic ways of thinking in the humanities and social sciences. It will be useful across many disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, science, cultural theory, history and anthropology
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170A new societist social ontologyPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 33 (2): 174-202. 2003.This article delineates a new type of social ontologysite ontologyand defends a particular version of that type. The first section establishes the distinctiveness of site ontologies over both individualist ontologies and previous societist ones. The second section then shows how site ontologies elude two pervasive criticisms, that of incompleteness directed at individualism and that of reification leveled at societism. The third section defends a particular site ontology, one that depicts the …Read more
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161Overdue analysis of Bourdieu's theory of practiceInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 30 (1 & 2). 1987.Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice is an unsung classic of contemporary social philosophy. It combines the first analysis by a social theorist of the practical intelligibility governing action with an exciting perspective on how the structure of social phenomena determines and is itself perpetuated by action. Bourdieu, however, misinterprets his own theory of intelligibility as a theory of the causal generation of action. Moreover, he attempts to analyze the underlying structure of intelligibi…Read more
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137The time of activityContinental Philosophy Review 39 (2): 155-182. 2006.This essay analyzes the time of human activity. It begins by discussing how most accounts of action treat the time of action as succession, using Donald Davidson's account of action as illustration. It then argues that an adequate account of action and its determinants, one able to elucidate the ``indeterminacy of action,'' requires an alternative conception of action time. The remainder of the essay constructs a propitious account of the time and determination of action. It does so by criticall…Read more
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135This book develops an original Heideggerian account of the timespace and indeterminacy of human activity while describing insights that this account provides into the nature of activity, society and history. Drawing on empirical examples, the book argues that activity timespace is a key component of social space and time, shows that interwoven timespaces form an essential infrastructure of social phenomena, offers a novel account of the existence of the past in the present, and defends the teleo…Read more
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108Reply to 'Rethinking Social Criticism: Rules, Logic and Internal Critique'History of the Human Sciences 16 (4): 91-94. 2003.
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104Pippin's Hegel on ActionInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (5): 490-505. 2010.This essay is a commentary on and critique of the conception of human activity that Robert Pippin attributes to Hegel in his recent book, Hegel's Practical Philosophy. Two principal features of this conception are that it treats human activity as indeterminate and that it construes what someone does and why on a given occasion as depending on social contexts. Pippin suggests that these two features will sound strange to contemporary philosophers. The essay claims, by contrast, that these feature…Read more
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94Wittgenstein + Heidegger on the stream of lifeInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 36 (3). 1993.This paper combines views of Wittgenstein and Heidegger into an account of mind/ action. It does this by suggesting that these two philosophers be viewed in part as descendants of Life?philosophy (Lebensphilosophie). Part I describes the conception of life that informs and emerges from these thinkers. Parts Two and Three detail particular aspects of this conception: Wittgenstein on the constitution of states of life and Heidegger on the flow?structure of the stream of life. The Conclusion offers…Read more
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94Elements of a Wittgensteinian philosophy of the human sciencesSynthese 87 (2). 1991.In this paper, a Wittgensteinian account of the human sciences is constructed around the notions of the surface of human life and of surface phenomena as expressions. I begin by explaining Wittgenstein's idea that the goal of interpretive social science is to make actions and practices seem natural. I then explicate his notions of the surface of life and of surface phenomena as expressions by reviewing his analysis of mental state language. Finally, I critically examine three ideas: (a) that the…Read more
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93Living out of the past: Dilthey and Heidegger on life and historyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 46 (3). 2003.This essay examines continuities and transformations in Heidegger's appropriation of Dilthey's account of life and the accompanying picture of history between the end of World War One and Being and Time . The essay also judges the cogency of two conclusions that Heidegger draws in that book about history, viz, that historicity qua feature of Dasein's being both underlies objective history and makes the scholarly narration of history possible. Part one describes Dilthey's account of life, Heidegg…Read more
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85The social bearing of natureInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 43 (1). 2000.This essay examines how nature pertains to social life. Part I describes the social ontology the essay employs to address this issue. This ontology is of the site variety and is opposed to ontologies of both the individualist and socialist sorts. Part II describes where nature appears in this ontology. Artifacts are differentiated from nature, and much of ?nature? is shown to be second nature, a type of artifact that looks and feels like nature. Part II concludes by disputing the idea that natur…Read more
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82Nature and technology in historyHistory and Theory 42 (4). 2003.This essay sketches an expanded theoretical conception of the roles of nature and technology in history, one that is based on a social ontology that does not separate nature and society. History has long been viewed as the realm of past human action. On this conception, nature is treated largely as an Other of history, and technology is construed chiefly as a means for human fulfillment. There is no history of nature, and the history of technology becomes the history of useful products. The essa…Read more
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74The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and ChangePennsylvania State University Press. 2002.Inspired by Heidegger’s concept of the clearing of being, and by Wittgenstein’s ideas on human practice, Theodore Schatzki offers a novel approach to understanding the constitution and transformation of social life. Key to the account he develops here is the context in which social life unfolds—the "site of the social"—as a contingent and constantly metamorphosing mesh of practices and material orders. Schatzki’s analysis reveals the advantages of this site ontology over the traditional individu…Read more
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69Wittgenstein and the social context of an individual lifeHistory of the Human Sciences 13 (1): 93-107. 2000.This article argues that two significant implications of Wittgenstein’s writings for social thought are (1) that people are constitutively social beings and (2) that the social context of an individual life is nexuses of practice. Part one concretizes these ideas by examining the constitution of action within practices. It begins by criticizing three arguments of Winch’s that suggest that action is inherently social. It then spells out two arguments for the practice constitution of action that a…Read more
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68The Temporality of TeleologyNew Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 5 123-143. 2005.
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65On sociocultural evolution by social selectionJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 31 (4). 2001.The essay criticizes an alleged new paradigm for explaining sociocultural change: selectionism. Part one describes the general selectionist explanatory schema, which selectionists claim applies to realms beyond the biological, in particular, the sociocultural. Part two focuses on the way most selectionists, in focusing on cultural change alone, wrongly separate culture from society. Particular atten-tion is paid to the accounts these selectionists offer of human action. Part three fills out a co…Read more
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64Mind/Action for Wittgenstein and HeideggerSouthwest Philosophy Review. forthcoming.The paper outlines how Wittgenstein and Heidegger's views can be combined to form a general account of mind and action. It accomplishes this by interpreting Heidegger of the "Being and Time" era and Wittgenstein of the "Philosophical Investigations" onwards asdescendents of the School of Thought called life philosophy. Heidegger is construed as analyzing the occurrence of The Stream of Life, while Wittgenstein is understood as examining (a) The appearances of The Stream in The World and (b) The …Read more
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51On studying the past scientificallyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 49 (4). 2006.This critical review of Aviezer Tucker's Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography examines the character, scope, and limits of scientific historiography, the overall topic of Tucker's book. The review begins by arguing that the book both unwittingly juggles two criteria for scientific, as opposed to nonscientific, historiography - the production of knowledge and Kuhnian disciplinary matrices - and wrongly construes the subject matter of such historiography to be present evidence…Read more
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454 Landscapes as Temporalspatial PhenomenaIn Jeff Malpas (ed.), The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies, Mit Press. pp. 65. 2011.This chapter argues that landscapes are not only spatial phenomena but spatial-temporal entities in that they both occur in time and occupy space. It further argues that aside from being spatial-temporal entities, they are “temporalspatial” phenomena as well, by virtue of the fact that they are anchored and drawn into the timespace of human activity. This phenomenon of “activity timespace” is an overlooked aspect in social theory, although it is arguably an important aspect of social life. Times…Read more
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45Social science in societyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 45 (1). 2002.This Article does not have an abstract
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