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Åsa Burman, Nonideal Social Ontology: The Power View, Oxford University Press, 2023, 253pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780197509579.
Reviewed by Amie L. Thomasson, Dartmouth College
Åsa Burman’s Nonideal Social Ontology is field-changing work that aims to both make visible and contribute to a paradigm shift from ‘ideal’ to ‘nonideal’ theorizing in social ontology.
Burman gives us a top-down view of the landscape that enables us to focus on the negative space, what is not said, and what shared presuppositions in the dominant prior discourse are false. She also shows why it matters, and how we should aim to change things. As she presents it, the landscape looks something like this: In its early days (as it was dominated by figures such as Margaret Gilbert, John Searle, and Raimo Tuomela), social ontology emerged with what Burman calls a ‘standard model of ideal social ontology’, with shared examples, assumptions, methods, and blind…
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