Talking Philosophy

My new book, WITTGENSTEIN AMONG THE SCIENCES, is out today. I am feeling pretty excited; it looks GREAT. Have a look, here: http://ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=11016&edition_id=14506
What is the book about? I would describe it as a broadly post-Schutzian attempt to understand the nature of science, through working through and from the work of Wittgensteinians such as Kuhn and Winch. One of the aspects of it that may be of especial/broader interest is that I seek to inform policy-debates around science through it: e.g. to argue that science-policy ought to be relatively free of government direction, unlike technology-policy which should be subject to tight social constraints. In Part 2 of the book, I seek to employ Wittgensteinian thinking to help in the practical business of understanding the nature of psychopathology. Including the pscyhopathology of unrestrained economism… That is: I argue for instance that, while Friedman’s celebtrated monetary treatise on the U.S. economy and the Great Depression put the latter down in significant part to a failure of monetary policy to make enough money available, one key factor behind the 2007-now economic and financial crisis is a dubious thingifying attitude to money that was _encouraged_ by Friedmanian monetarism and that can be implicitly seen writ large in Friedman’s famous and hugely-influential article, “The methodology of positive economics”.
Enough tasters. See what you think. Let me know here?
(There is an ebook version available, btw.)

Thanks to everyone who helped me with the book, especially my editor Simon Summers. I’d like to mention particularly that the book was also greatly influenced by Wes Sharrock (a Winchian genius) and Bojana Mladenovic (whose work on Kuhn I bow to, which is not the kind of thing I say very often!).