Science Without Unity: Reconciling the Human and Natural Sciences (Persistence of Reality)

Throughout most of the 20th century the unity of the science programme has dominated Western philosophies of science. This is a detailed defence of a model of the human sciences opposed to this view. The book explores many of the most strategic and difficult topics posed by the human sciences, such as intentionality, causality, top-down and bottom-up strategies, the self, institutions, history, praxis, and context. It examines a large number of prominent views, both Anglo-American and Continental European, and provides both a common idiom for comparing these two traditions and a novel reconcilliation of the best currents of each. Joseph Margolis's argument sets the relativism and realism defended in "Pragmatism without Foundations" (the first volume of the trilogy of which this is the second) in a larger setting focused on reconciling the human and natural sciences. It attempts to do so without favouring either a strong unified model or any of the common dualisms It offers a detailed discussion of the principal philosophical models addressed to the puzzles of the cognitive sciences; and it explores in a systematic way such strategic issues as those of methodological individualism, the nature of functional properties, and invariances in the natural and human sciences.