After tracing the story of modern science and its impact on social scientific practice, the author outlines and critically reviews the major approaches to social scientific enquiry, ranging from positivism to postmodernism. The core dilemmas of the philosophy of social sciences are readdressed in the light of contemporary debates on: perception and imagination; detachment and involvement; simplicity and complexity; representation and reality; subjectivity and objectivity. The book is published as a course book for the Open University postgraduate foundation module, "Challenge of the Social Sciences" (D820).