ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at what it means to apply philosophy, some formalisms for how to do it, and describes the best path forward for those interested in applying philosophy to questions in entrepreneurship and the social sciences in general. There are efforts to apply philosophy to research in entrepreneurship theory, and not only entrepreneurship of course, but all the business sciences – strategy, organizational behavior, management, and finance. In fact, all of entrepreneurship, strategy, management, organizational behavior, institutional theory, and every other social science is fundamentally different from the physical sciences in that the social sciences all study ontologically subjective social phenomena. There have also been at least a few other camps working on the core problem – social evolutionary theory, institutional theory, and critical realism. Social evolutionary theory suggests that the very mechanisms of evolution are not unique to biology but applicable universally, including to the social world. Neither institutional theorists nor critical realists hold a unified position, respectively.
