Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1431562 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1118 pages

From Amazon.com
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.

Review
The Sociology of Philosophies is a truly astonishing work of scholarship based on a vast global erudition...it offers rich, highly illuminating and provocative insights on a vast array of topics.
--Benjamin I. Schwartz, author of The World of Thought in Ancient China

[A] rich, systematic and empirically grounded account of intellectual change in three civilizations. The Sociology of Philosophies is an ambitious, comprehensive, and brilliant account of the rationalization process of three world philosophies: Western, Indian, and Asian. In Collins' analysis, this developmental process is shown to be generated via social and conceptual networks...The book expounds upon an immense range of intellectual history, and certainly makes inspiring and interesting reading. And, despite the heavy subject and incredible scope, Collins' writing style resembles an oral lecture more than an abstruse disquisition.
--Ilan Talmud (European Sociological Review )

The one work that all sociologists of ideas, novices and veterans alike, hereafter must read It is beyond question Randall Collins' masterpiece.
--Charles Camic (European Journal of Sociology )

No sociologist who is seriously concerned with understanding intellectual life can afford to ignore it...Randall Collins has rendered a service to sociology second to none.
--Peter Baehr (Canadian Journal of Sociology )

What an impressive book Randall Collins has written...so broadly learned, so ambitious in its analysis, and readable to boot!
--William H. Mcnaeill, author of The Rise of the West

This astonishing book testifies to decades of research through the greater part of philosophy-East and West...It reaches out to the ordinary reader, who could acquire a rich education in the humanities just by following it through.
--Leslie Armour (Library Journal )