{"id":56,"date":"2008-10-05T22:40:48","date_gmt":"2008-10-06T03:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=56"},"modified":"2017-05-23T11:34:05","modified_gmt":"2017-05-23T19:34:05","slug":"sociology-of-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2008\/10\/05\/sociology-of-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"On french sociology of philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading a lot of French sociology of philosophy, and it continues to frustrate me that the major American text in this genre, Randall Collins’ The sociology of philosophies<\/em> (1998), basically makes no reference to this literature. Admittedly, the French subfield I’ve examined is relatively limited in scope, basically amounting to a very elaborate exploration of the French philosophical field, which is construed in generally orthodox Bourdieuian terms. There’s a lot of stuff about publishing markets, access to jobs, different forms of symbolic capital. But as far as I can tell, the whole French enterprise is dramatically more empirically involved than Collins’ over-ambitious project to theorize all of philosophy throughout world history. (Mostly this involves drawing little network diagrams of who knew whom.)
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\nSo for the benefit of Anglophone sociologists who may be interested in this, I suggest the following partial bibliography. But beforehand, for your amusement, I want to reproduce an table of “the social dilemmas at the base of philosophical positions,” lifted from a review by Steve Fuller of Collins’ book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Table 1: The Origins of Philosophical Positions in Projects of Social Legitimation
\nPhilosophical Position \/ Legitimatory Origins<\/p>\n