The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change [Hardcover]

Randall Collins (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674816471 | ISBN-13: 978-0674816473 | Publication Date: August 30, 1998

A comprehensive history of world philosophy, this book is also a social history of global intellectual life. Eschewing polemics, it presents a sophisticated view of the multiple cultures of world history, disintegrates stereotypes of regional cultures, and reveals how creativity is driven by a range of conflicting positions in each community. We see what is sociologically universal about Western, Indian, and Asian intellectual life, as well as what combinations of social ingredients have produced their divergent pathways. Through network diagrams and sustained narrative, Randall Collins traces the development of philosophical thought in China, Japan, India, ancient Greece, the medieval Islamic and Jewish world, medieval Christendom, and modern Europe. What emerges from this history is a general theory of intellectual life, one that avoids both the reduction of ideas to the influences of society at large and the purely contingent local construction of meanings. Instead, Collins focuses on the social locations where sophisticated ideas are formed: the patterns of intellectual networks and their inner divisions and conflicts. His theory describes how, when the material bases of intellectual life shift with the rise and fall of religions, educational systems, and publishing markets, opportunities open for some networks to expand while others shrink and close down. It locates individuals - among them celebrated thinkers like Socrates, Aristotle, Chu Hsi, Shankara, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger - within these networks and explains the emotional and symbolic processes that, by forming coalitions within the mind, ultimately bring about original and historically successful ideas. A self-reflexive sociological philosophy of intellectual life, Collins's work aims to open a path beyond relativsm and realism.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In just under 900 pages (with another 100 or so pages of notes and bibliography), sociologist Randall Collins elaborates upon his proposed model for how intellectuals--"people who produce decontextualized ideas"--work among one another. Borrowing Erving Goffman's concept of the "interaction ritual," Collins discusses how "intellectuals gather, focus their attention for a time on one of their members, who delivers a sustained discourse. The discourse itself builds on elements from the past, affirming and continuing or negating." Or, to put it more simply, intellectuals attend a lot of lectures and have discussions afterwards.

General readers may be put off by a hefty tome with chapters given such titles as "The Post-revolutionary Condition: Boundaries and Philosophical Puzzles" (which includes the subsection "The Vienna Circle as a Nexus of Struggles"), but those with a dedicated interest in the history of philosophy will find much to enjoy in the multicultural examples Collins draws upon. Ancient China, classical Greece, medieval Islam, and the French existentialists are just the tip of the iceberg illustrating his theory that intellectual progress is made through the personal interaction of philosophers and other thinkers. "Great intellectual work," Collins writes, "is that which creates a large space on which followers can work," and The Sociology of Philosophies certainly qualifies. --Ron Hogan

From Library Journal

This astonishing book testifies to decades of research through the greater part of philosophyAEast and West. Collins, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist who has written many basic theoretical works (Sociological Insight, Oxford Univ., 1992) attacks myths of the origin and spread of ideas about knowledge and the world. He demolishes at least two. One is that ideas flow ready-made from the heads of a few great men. The other is that ideas are created by "cultures." Collins shows again and again that small groups are the source of innovation. They are often stimulated by a single figure who tends to move from group to group, but several people make a contribution. Small factual errors inevitably turn up in such a book, but overall the research is deep and sound, and years of debate should lead to refinements. Right now, this is a mine of valuable informationAmeant for academic libraries but really fostering the oldest aims of the public library. Written without pretense or jargon, it reaches out to the ordinary reader, who could acquire a rich education in the humanities just by following it through.ALeslie Armour, Dominican Coll. of Philosophy & Theology, Ottawa
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1120 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press (August 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674816471
• ISBN-13: 978-0674816473
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,930,723 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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72 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sociology of Philosophy Has Come of Age!, October 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Hardcover)

I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised, by A.C. Grayling's superficial grasp of Randall Collins's achievement in The Sociology of Philosophies (New York Times Sunday Book Review, 27 September). I write as someone who holds a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science but who now holds a professorial chair in sociology and works in the terrain staked out in Collins's book, which is often called "social epistemology." Grayling argues that Collins fails to appreciate the perennial character of philosophical argument because of his exclusive focus on the social networks that develop and transmit ideas. This is not quite right. Rather, Collins wants to explain this perenniality in terms of social networks. Given the vast numbers of philosophers, and the variety of arguments they have had over the last 2500 years, how is it that they seem reducible to a handful of general questions and representative figures? Grayling seems to believe that everybody has been asking the same questions but only very few have done a really good job answering them. Yet, it is little more than a finger exercise in the history and sociology of thought to show that posing questions in similar terms does not necessarily mean that the same question is being asked. And even figures as perennial as Plato and Aristotle have stood for different things at different times. The appearance of "depth" in philosophical matters that Grayling wishes to convey is, in sociological terms, shorthand for the collected means by which philosophers maintain their institutional presence. It is quite literally a myth, one comparable to the belief that priests are holier, or scientists smarter, than the run of humanity. However, it would be mistake -- again one that Grayling makes -- to conclude that Collins is merely concerned more with the social context surrounding the philosophical ideas than the ideas themselves. On the contrary, for Collins, sociology is essential for understanding the nature of philosophical ideas and argument, especially what counts as a good answer to a question. This explains why the perception of philosophical depth and superficiality has varied so much in history. For example, Grayling claims that we are now making "slow progress" on the problem of mind. Yet, only a generation ago -- under the influence of Ryle and Wittgenstein -- it was fashionable to hold that this was a pseudo-problem. What changed in the interim were the criteria of a good answer. Philosophers have become much more accountable to the findings of experimental science, on the one hand, and the experiences of diversely situated cultures, on the other. A solution to the problem of mind that satisfies both constituencies will be, indeed, difficult. But from a sociological standpoint, "depth" is a euphemism for philosophy's insecure institutional position, which requires that it reconciles the interests of these largely opposed groups. I was not surprised by Grayling's response because sociology has traditionally met its strongest opposition when studying forms of knowledge: religion, science, and now philosophy. There are successful precedents of theologians using the sociology of religion to understand and critique their own practices. If the Science Wars simmer down, the sociology of science may play a similar role. Hopefully, philosophy will not be the last holdout -- though, as Hegel said, the Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk...

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Change as a constant..., May 18, 2003

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FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Paperback)

'I am thinking' is irrefutable because 'I am not thinking' nevertheless displays oneself thinking.
-- p. 858

The book 'The Sociology of Philosophies' purports to be 'The first comprehensive history of world philosophy,' as well as 'a social history of global intellectual life.' Collins in this book takes as his subject the whole of human intellectual endeavour, exploring the strands and developments of philosophical thought in all the major cultures of the world.

Collins begins this weighty and, at times, hyper-intellectual tome by building a theory of intellectualism, ritual, education, and philosophical reflection. He identifies two of the longest and most dominant philosophical strands as being those arising in Greece and China.

Collins posits the theory that intellectual pursuits do not arise in a vacuum, and are more of a societal and communal development than an individual pursuit or achievement.

'That ideas are not rooted in individuals is hard to accept because it seems to offend against a key epistemological point. Here the question is analytically distinct from the propensity to worship intellectual heroes.'

However, when one looks at the history of ideas, they usually arise in groups. While there are certainly key individuals who arose at different times in history, it is also true that there are patterns -- the age of philosophy in Greece, the Renaissance in Italy, etc. There is a particular atmosphere and sociological aspect to the culture that encourages and develops intellectual development that is unique to each, and leads to differing developments.

After exploring this history and the rituals of intellectuals and intellectualism (which is little acknowledged among scholars in the West), Collins explores who the major individuals are, who the minor individuals are, and what places they occupy in the chain of intellectual history. These chains are most pronounced in developments from Greece and developments from China; the Chinese strands continue through almost all subsequent Eastern thought, which is always responding to or reacting against key ideas formed there; in Western thought, almost all philosophical and intellectual development does the same with regard to the Greek development.

Collins proceeds from this to a theoretical framework (in which he develops more closely the Greek philosophical reflective framework, being the one from which Collins was educated, and thus the dominant underpinning of his writing) that explores the importance and rarity of true creativity. From this, he continues, doing a comparative analysis of intellectual communities, drawing in, in addition to Ancient Greece and Ancient China, India, Japan, Neo-Confucian China, Medieval Christendom, Islamic philosophies, Jewish philosophical development, then surveying modern western philosophies, French, German, and British.

Strong historical themes, political and other intellectual developments (such as the shift from faith-based to experimental-based knowledge and the rise of scientific method and mathematical objectivism) are included in his analysis. Collins concludes this work with Meta-Reflections, in which he explores the sequence and branches in the production of ideas socially (exploring the future of philosophy, which Collins states is 'a partisan theme which announces that the era of foundational questions is over. The call for the end of philosophy is recurrent, a standard ploy in intergenerational rearrangements, usually a prelude to a new round of deep troubles and new creativity.'

Collins' meta-reflections also include an epilogue on sociological realism. The quote that starts this review comes from this section. Self-evident truths are explored here.

'Virtually no one actually doubts the reality of the world of ordinary experience. It is only within specialised intellectual networks that the question has arisen whether this banal reality can be proven to a high standard of argument; and even intellectuals, when they are 'off duty', go back to assuming the reality of the ordinary time-space world.'

Sociological realism accepts the world as it is, which is not always the case with philosophy, even though philosophy purports to explain the world. This is a disconnect that occurs frequently in history. Collins further looks to mathematics and 'rapid-discovery science' for complications and developmental pieces in the intellectual history of the world.

Collins includes an extensive bibliography (worth the value of the book in itself), indexes of persons and of ideas, keys and timelines to figures, and a very interesting appendix entitled 'The Clustering of Contemporaneous Creativity', in which the ebb and flow of intellectual development on a global scale is examined and shows interesting results. He charts here the 'cultural production' of intellectuals, and their influence on their respective cultures. He traces such developments across hundreds of major and minor figures, determining fewer than 20 'isolates' in any cultural strand, and those being only among the minor figures.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new way to view philosophy, December 13, 2004

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Stephen Ferg (Arlington, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Paperback)

I have a Ph.D. in history of philosophy, but I now follow it as an interested layman rather than a professional. In short, this review is written from the viewpoint of someone whose background and interests lie in philosophy rather than sociology.

For me, this was an interesting and useful book for a couple of reasons:

1. It discusses philosophers in the context of social networks, where the thinkers are linked by relationships such as: was the student of, reacted against, was married to the sister of, etc.

Often, philosophy is taught (or studied) by looking only at the works of philosophers, in isolation from the philosophers' relationships with others around them. Placing a philosopher in the context of a network of relationships helps considerably in understanding what the philosopher is trying to do, and why. In short, it can help you better to understand any particular philosopher that you are studying.

2. I found the author's notion of an "attention space" very interesting. The notion of an "attention space" in the history of philosophy seems to me similar to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a "paradigm" in the history of science. Philosophers' roles in the history of philosophy are described as moving the attention space, or elaborating within the attention space, and so on, where moving the attention space is comparable to Kuhn's "paradigm shift" and elaborating within the attention space is comparable to Kuhn's "normal science". This approach to the history of philosophy is, I think helpful. It gives you genuine insight into the history of philosophy.

I recommend this book. You may not wish to read it all -- I didn't -- but if you dip into it here and there, at spots that look interesting to you, you will encounter ideas and concepts that are useful, stimulating and thought-provoking.