2014 Chernilo Philosophical Sociology.pdf (222.33 kB)
The idea of philosophical sociology
journal contribution
posted on 2016-11-14, 16:14 authored by Daniel CherniloThis 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 self-reflection 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 and be able 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. 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, non-human 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 Journal of SociologyVolume
65Issue
2Pages
338 - 357Citation
CHERNILO, D., 2014. The idea of philosophical sociology. British Journal of Sociology, 65 (2), pp.338-357Publisher
Wiley (© London School of Economics and Political Science)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
2014Notes
This is the peer reviewed version of the article which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12077. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.ISSN
0007-1315eISSN
1468-4446Publisher version
Language
- en