The social sciences have some advantages over the natural as territory for philosophers. They are wilder, less technical and deal with matters closer to home. Indeed they are obligingly in a self-conscious state of 'crisis' and hence responsive to metaphysics. Equally philosophy is directly concerned with the truth about human nature, whatever it may be, and the social sciences are having a healthy impact on the philosophy of mind, ethics and other humane studies. So the philosophy of the social sciences is burgeoning. To survey a pile of recent books is to realize how lively and also how various, uneven, often chaotic, is the state of the realm. A pile is not, of course, an ordered set and the only thing indisputably common to these books is that they all lately reached the same corner of the Editor's desk. But themes recur and I shall start by sketching a broad frame of reference. Of many possible bases for the proper study of social life, three have been especially favoured. One is the experience of individual actors, the meaning which they attach to it and the aims to which they harness it. If 'subjective meaning' is stressed, the path usually leads on, by way of 'intersubjective meanings', to a central value system, durable enough to let individuals secure an identity. If 'meaning' is glossed in terms of utility, the route passes more often through rational-man models to a notion of the social world as a market place. Both lines conjure up the name of Weber as patron saint. Secondly, a start may be made by asking what is the essence of the social. A ready answer lies in the external and constraining character of social norms, the moral order which shapes actors and interactions. This fabric is real and influential for each actor but has no existence external to all. So it seems to have an emergent, irreducible standing, which answers the question. Here Durkheim is founding father. Thirdly, many have begun their analysis with the material world, taking man as another animal and society as the work of laws of nature. There are several ways to continue. Some have had a mechanical and individualist view of animals and tried to construct stimulus-response theories of the mind in the name of behaviourism. Others have inclined to evolutionary and organic accounts of animal and social life-ethology, for instance, or sociobiology. But the most distinguished line has dealt