Search results for ""Author John G Gunnell""
The University of Chicago Press The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation
This work reveals the origins and development of political theory as it is presently understood - and misunderstood. Tracing the evolution of the field from the 19th century to the present, John G. Gunnell shows how controversies, like those over liberalism or the relationship of theory to practice, are actually the unresolved legacy of a forgotten past. Gunnell reconstructs the evolution of the field by locating it within the development of American social science. During the behavioural revolution of the 1950s, political theory was relegated to the margins of an increasingly empirical political science. Gunnell demonstrates that the estrangement of political theory is rooted in a much older quarrel: the authority of knowledge versus political authority, academic versus public discourse.
£30.59
The University of Chicago Press Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry: Channeling Wittgenstein
When social scientists and social theorists turn to the work of philosophers for intellectual and practical authority, they typically assume that truth, reality, and meaning are to be found outside rather than within our conventional discursive practices. John G. Gunnell argues for conventional realism as a theory of social phenomena and an approach to the study of politics. Drawing on Wittgenstein's critique of "mentalism" and traditional realism, Gunnell argues that everything we designate as "real" is rendered conventionally, which entails a rejection of the widely accepted distinction between what is natural and what is conventional. The terms "reality" and "world" have no meaning outside the contexts of specific claims and assumptions about what exists and how it behaves. And rather than a mysterious source and repository of prelinguistic meaning, the "mind" is simply our linguistic capacities. Taking readers through contemporary forms of mentalism and realism in both philosophy and American political science and theory, Gunnell also analyzes the philosophical challenges to these positions mounted by Wittgenstein and those who can be construed has his successors.
£35.00
Columbia University Press Social Inquiry After Wittgenstein and Kuhn: Leaving Everything as It Is
A distinctive feature of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work after 1930 was his turn to a conception of philosophy as a form of social inquiry, John G. Gunnell argues, and Thomas Kuhn's approach to the philosophy of science exemplified this conception. In this book, Gunnell shows how these philosophers address foundational issues in the social and human sciences, particularly the vision of social inquiry as an interpretive endeavor and the distinctive cognitive and practical relationship between social inquiry and its subject matter. Gunnell speaks directly to philosophers and practitioners of the social and human sciences. He tackles the demarcation between natural and social science; the nature of social phenomena; the concept and method of interpretation; the relationship between language and thought; the problem of knowledge of other minds; and the character of descriptive and normative judgments about practices that are the object of inquiry. Though Wittgenstein and Kuhn are often criticized as initiating a modern descent into relativism, this book shows that the true effect of their work was to undermine the basic assumptions of contemporary social and human science practice. It also problematized the authority of philosophy and other forms of social inquiry to specify the criteria for judging such matters as truth and justice. When Wittgenstein stated that "philosophy leaves everything as it is," he did not mean that philosophy would be left as it was or that philosophy would have no impact on what it studied, but rather that the activity of inquiry did not, simply by virtue of its performance, transform the object of inquiry.
£49.50
