The What and the Why of History deals with history as a cognitive discipline concerned to establish justifiable knowledge about a past we can never experience. It is divided into three parts. The first focuses on the conditions that are presupposed when historians offer explanations of what they have come to know. But whatever is to be explained must first come to be known, and the second part is concerned with the character of the cognitive activity which is the constitution of the historical past. The point is that we must attend to the historical enterprise on its own terms, and not...

Conceptual Tension: Essays on Kinship, Politics, and Individualism is a critical philosophical examination of the role of concepts and concept formation in social sciences. Written by Leon J. Goldstein, a preeminent Jewish philosopher who examined the epistemological foundations of social science inquiry during the second half of the twentieth century, the book undertakes a study of concept formation and change by looking at the four critical terms in anthropology (kinship), politics (parliament and Rousseau s concept of the general will), and sociology (individualism). The author challenges...