Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons. For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. Philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target.

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Distinguishing four sources of power in human societies – ideological, economic, military and political – The Sources of Social Power traces their interrelations throughout human history In this first volume, Michael Mann examines interrelations between these elements from neolithic times, through ancient Near Eastern civilizations, the classical Mediterranean age and medieval Europe, up to just before the Industrial Revolution in England It offers explanations of the emergence of the state and social stratification; of city-states, militaristic empires and the persistent interaction between them; of the world salvation religions; and of the particular dynamism of medieval and early modern Europe It ends by generalizing about the nature of overall social development, the varying forms of social cohesion and the role of classes and class struggle in history First published in 1986, this new edition of Volume 1 includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of the work

The sources of social power

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area—European culture since the sixteenth century—one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it.. .. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the. .. only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance. .. was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge.. .. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared. .. one can certainly wager that man would be erased.

Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument

Network analysis is one of the most promising currents in sociological research, and yet it has never been subjected to a theoretically informed assessment and critique. This article outlines the theoretical presuppositions of network analysis. It also distinguishes between three different (implicit) models in the network literature of the interrelations of social structure, culture, and human agency. It concludes that only a strategy for historical explanation that synthesizes social structural and cultural analysis can adequately explain the formation, reproduction, and transformation of networks themselves. The article sketches the broad contours of such a theoretical synthesis in the conclusion.

Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency

The concept of territoriality has been studied surprisingly little by students of international politics. Yet, territoriality most distinctively defines modernity in international politics, and changes in few other factors can so powerfully transform the modern world polity. This article seeks to frame the study of the possible transformation of modern territoriality by examining how that system of relations was instituted in the first place. The historical analysis suggests that “unbundled” territoriality is a useful terrain for exploring the condition of postmodernity in international politics and suggests some ways in which that exploration might proceed. The emergence of multiperspectival institutional forms is identified as a key dimension of the condition of postmodernity in international politics.

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Territoriality and beyond: problematizing modernity in international relations

"The Machiavellian Moment" is a classic study of the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness of the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. J.G.A. Pocock suggests that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, and which he calls the "Machiavellian moment."After examining this problem in the thought of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, Pocock turns to the revival of republican thought in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America. He argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance. He relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in the thought of the eighteenth century.

The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

The Machiavellian Moment

1. Introduction: the state of the art Part I: 2. Virtues, rights and manners: a model for historians of political thought 3. Authority and property: the question of liberal origins 4. 1776: the revolution against parliament Part II: 5. Modes of political and historical time in early eighteenth-century England 6. The mobility of property and the rise of eighteenth-century sociology 7. Hume and the American Revolution: the dying thoughts of a North Briton 8. Gibbon's Decline and Fall and the world view of the late enlightenment 9. Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke and Price: a study in the varieties of eighteenth-century conservatism 10. The political economy of Burke's analysis of the French Revolution Part III: 11. The varieties of Whiggism from exclusion to reform: a history of ideology and discourse Index.

Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century

Professor Pocock's subject is how the seventeenth century looked at its own past. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the most important modes of studying the past was the study of the law - the historical outlook which arose in each nation was in part the product of its law, and therefore, in turn of its history. In clarifying the relation of the historical outlook of seventeenth-century Englishmen to the study of law, and pointing out its political implication, Pocock shows how history's ground was laid for a more philosophical approach in the eighteenth century.

J. G. A. Pocock

Papers

The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

The Machiavellian Moment

Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century

The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century