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The idea of philosophical sociology

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conference contribution
posted on 2016-11-29, 12:42 authored by Daniel Chernilo
This article introduces the idea of philosophical sociology as an enquiry into the relationships between implicit notions of human nature and explicit conceptualizations of social life within sociology. Philosophical sociology is also an invitation to reflect on the role of the normative in social life by looking at it sociologically and philosophically at the same: normative selfreflection is a fundamental aspect of sociology’s scientific tasks because key sociological questions are, in the last instance, also philosophical ones. For the normative to emerge, we need to move away from the reductionism of hedonistic, essentialist or cynical conceptions of human nature. Sociology needs equally to grasp the conceptions of the good life, justice, democracy or freedom whose normative contents depend on more or less articulated conceptions of our shared humanity rather than on strategic considerations. The idea of philosophical sociology is then sustained on three main pillars and I use them to structure this article: (1) a revalorization of the relationships between sociology and philosophy; (2) a universalistic principle of humanity that works as a major regulative idea of sociological research, and; (3) an argument on the social (immanent) and pre‐social (transcendental) sources of the normative in social life. As invitations to embrace posthuman cyborgs, nonhuman actants and material cultures proliferate, philosophical sociology offers the reminder that we still have to understand more fully who are the human beings that populate the social world.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

British Sociological Association Annual Meeting

Pages

0 - 0

Citation

CHERNILO, D.E., 2012. The idea of philosophical sociology. BSA Annual Conference 2012 - Sociology in an Age of Austerity, 11th-13th April 2012, University of Leeds, UK

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2012

Notes

This conference paper was subsequently published by Wiley as: CHERNILO, D., 2014. The idea of philosophical sociology. British Journal of Sociology, 65 (2), pp.338-357. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. The definitive published version can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12077.

Language

  • en

Location

Leeds