Research Catalog

Title

The sociology of philosophies : a global theory of intellectual change / Randall Collins.

Author

Collins, Randall, 1941-

Publication

Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xix, 1098 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

• 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. According to his theory, 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, Wirt Henstein, 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.

Subjects

• Comparative civilization
• Philosophers > Social networks
• Knowledge, Sociology of
• Philosophy > History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• 1. Coalitions in the Mind -- 2. Networks across the Generations -- 3. Partitioning Attention Space: The Case of Ancient Greece -- 4. Innovation by Opposition: Ancient China -- 5. External and Internal Politics of the Intellectual World: India -- 6. Revolutions of the Organizational Base: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China -- 7. Innovation through Conservatism: Japan -- 8. Tensions of Indigenous and Imported Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom -- 9. Academic Expansion as a Two-Edged Sword: Medieval Christendom -- 10. Cross-Breeding Networks and Rapid-Discovery Science -- 11. Secularization and Philosophical Meta-territoriality -- 12. Intellectuals Take Control of Their Base: The German University Revolution -- 13. The Post-revolutionary Condition: Boundaries as Philosophical Puzzles -- 14. Writer's Markets and Academic Networks: The French Connection -- 15. Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas -- Epilogue: Sociological Realism --
• App. 1. The Clustering of Contemporaneous Creativity -- App. 2. The Incompleteness of Our Historical Picture.

ISBN

• 0674816471 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 9780674001879 (pbk.)

LCCN

97018446

OCLC

ocm37315227

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries