Realism

About: Realism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10799 publications have been published within this topic receiving 175785 citations.

Charles Tilly, German Historicism, and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science

Abstract: This paper examines Charles Tilly’s relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a “historicist.” The “search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,” he argued, was a “waste of time” and had “utterly failed.” Tilly’s approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on “historical individuals” rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly’s program of “relational realism” resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism’s argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly’s ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical.

After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace

Abstract: List of Figures and Tables ix Preface xi Chapter 1 Managing Race in the American Workplace 1 Chapter 2 Leverage Racial Realism in the Professions and Business 38 Chapter 3 We the People Racial Realism in Politics and Government 89 Chapter 4 Displaying Race for Dollars Racial Realism in Media and Entertainment 153 Chapter 5 The Jungle Revisited? Racial Realism in the Low-Skilled Sector 216 Chapter 6 Bringing Practice, Law, and Values Together 265 Notes 291 Index 383

Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920

Abstract: Introduction: The Analytic Instinct and the Art of the Crash Chapter 1 Literature and the Museum Idea Chapter 2 Realism and the Gordian Knot of Aesthetics and Politics Chapter 3 Women and the Realism of Desire Chapter 4 Celebrity Warriors, Impossible Diplomats, and the Native Public Sphere Chapter 5 Black Bohemia and the African American Novel Chapter 6 Wharton, Mass Travel, and the "Possible Crash" Chapter 7 Neurological Modernity and American Social Thought Conclusion: Literary Analysis and the Perception of Incongruities Notes Index Acknowledgments

The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract: Are works of art imitations? If so, what exactly do they imitate? Should an artist remind his audience that what it is perceiving is in fact artifice, or should he try above all to persuade it to accept the illusion as reality? Questions such as these, which have dominated aesthetic theory since the Greeks, were debated with extraordinary vigour and ingenuity in eighteenth-century France. In this book Dr Hobson analyses these debates, focusing in turn on painting, the novel, drama, poetry and music. In each case she relates theory to contemporary works of art by Watteau, Chardin, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Gluck and many others. She shows that disputes within the theory of each art centred upon the nature of the perceiver's attention. Dr Hobson provides a method of mapping the changes in artistic style which took place as the century advanced. In discussing such conceptual transformations Dr Hobson opens an important perspective for the study of Romanticism and Realism.