Nature and society in historical context

This book presents the dynamics of conflict and alliance in the intellectual networks which have existed longest in world history. This enterprise is situated in today’s field of contending positions, in sociology, and in intellectual life generally. It too is framed by its nexus of disagreement. Some might say that the effort undermines itself; that this of all times in world history is the least appropriate for a comparative, global eye, seeking out the universal and fundamental.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2000

is one of America's great sociological theorists, but his new book, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, may have succeeded in writing him out of his own rather considerable reputation. The Sociology of Philosophies is a book of breathtaking range, offering a provocative theory of intellectual creativity and reputations that challenges the very category of a "great theorist" while solidifying Collins's place at the forefront of the sociology of ideas and knowledge. Using a world history of philosophy as case material, Collins outlines a powerful theoretical framework for the social scientific analysis of intellectual networks, academic disciplines and the world of ideas itself. Collins's book will start arguments as well as inspire new research, and it is not difficult to predict the controversies that will emerge. The Sociology of Philosophies is practically a recipe for a turf war. Many intellectual historians will be shocked at the hubris of Collins's analysis. Never one prone to thinking in narrow and specialized terms, Collins offers us a global analytic history of philosophical thinking from the Greeks, Romans, the Enlightenment philosophes, the Reformation and Medieval Catholic theology through to the existentialists in the West, as well as dealing in great detail with non-Western thought over many centuries in China, India, and Japan. Many philosophers will be outraged by Collins's argument that the concept of a "great philosopher" is a social construction, reflecting the needs of intellectual networks fixated on a competition for attention more than on the intrinsic quality of ideas or on a disinterested search for truth. Collins treats many major philosophers with skeptical irreverence, as when he calls F. W. J. Schelling a "niche hog" and refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein's "personality cult" and brooding over suicide as a claim for status in the intellectual elite. Collins's book-length attempt to explain philosophers' creativity and reputations by social, organizational, and network factors will ruffle feathers, as when he offers a sociological account of why G. W. F. Hegel made it and Arthur Schopenhauer did not. And intellectuals more generally will find little comfort in Collins's brutally unsentimental critique of the cult of the intellectual hero. Collins draws a picture of intellectuals as self-interested, calculating status climbers who are as concerned with gaining eminence and financial security as they are with the various social and intellectual movements and causes often associated with what we now call "public intellectuals." Collins's critics have a point. The norms of contemporary intellectual history rightly call for specialization in specific geographical areas in particular times, allowing for the consultation of primary documentary evidence in original languages and the mastery of the relevant literature. Collins, in contrast, writes a global intellectual history based on secondary sources. Errors of detail are inevitable in this book, as is a sacrifice of depth. And while Collins's discussion of world philosophical ideas is well written and impressive, specialists will have many interpretations to challenge and nuances to add. These legitimate criticisms of Collins's book, however, should not deter us from taking his theory of intellectual creativity and reputation very seriously indeed. Turf wars work both ways. Intellectual historians who work in one area or within a

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society , 2011

Global Intellectual History

Pocock's defence of the subject was needed because he and Skinner, rather than supporting traditional readings of western European political thought, were overhauling them. Skinner had originally given his famous essay 'Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas', the challenging title 'The unimportance of the great texts in the history of political thought.' 2 In other words, the accepted canon was explicitly rejected as defining the subject itself, both for methodological reasons and in terms of content. Furthermore, the point about a multiplicity of traditions that Pocock had pressed in his collection of essays Politics, Language and Time was strongly reinforced by the implication of his Machiavellian Moment, namely that far from there being one 'west', or western tradition of political thought, Europe and the Atlantic were fractured by competing and incompatible political cultures, especially by the later eighteenth century. 3 In other words, rather than being traditionalists, Pocock and Skinner were in fact iconoclasts, and it was exactly the ideas that were attacked as mere antiquarianism and conservatism that made them so. More recently, the range of criticism has been extended, with intellectual historians not being sufficiently global in outlook. Since the notion of globality seems uncommonly flexible, the criticism can be hard to pin down. It is safe, however, to assume that the complaint includes being too Anglocentric or Eurocentric and generally 'Western', with the background assumption that intellectual historians make themselves into apologists for empire and more local forms of domination, in the manner of the Orientalists identified by Edward Said. 4 Such claims often regurgitate 2

1998

Metaphilosophy, 2017

This book offers an answer to the question "What is philosophy?" by using a novel, semi-anthropological approach that carefully engages with various self-conceptions of philosophy drawn from different historical eras and contexts. In the process, we are offered six different "job descriptions" that have made up the main social roles that philosophers have tended to play at various times and places. Smiths historical narrative seeks to place the practice of philosophy within a broader cultural setting than that usually found in professional philosophical circles. Rather than argue for a particular conception of philosophy or a distinctive view of its proper function and province, Smith wants to enrich and possibly expand our current conception of the project of philosophy through a critical engagement with forgotten selfconceptions from its past. The book is wide ranging, covering various cultures and historical periods, and unorthodox in its methods, including scholarly accounts coupled with autobiographical elements and short fictional interludes. As a result, it has a kind of exploratory feel to it, not shy in the defense of its main claims but also raising many interesting questions left to the reader to reflect on further. My discussion, then, must be selective.

Intellectual history as an academic discipline is nowadays taken for granted: learned journals are devoted to it and universities in the UK and the US offer a variety of graduate and postgraduate courses in the field. However, this was not always the case. After a brief panoramic account of its historical development on both sides of the Atlantic, this article will focus on the main work carried out in intellectual history in the last few decades. Particular attention will be given to some practitioners (e.g., Quentin Skinner, John W. Burrow, Stefan Collini) and their methodological approach to the study of past ideas. By concentrating on the practice and role of the intellectual historian, the object ‘intellectual history’ will be presented not only as a vibrant scholarly activity but also as a valuable attempt at understanding our society from a plurality of perspectives. In order not to sound too optimistic about this intellectual enterprise, attention will equally be paid to the French case as an instance of a country where intellectual history is still seen with suspicion, and of an academic world where it is not that much studied nor practiced.

In the last seventy years, the philosophical community, i.e the people professionally engaged in philosophy, has faced an immense growth, due to huge public investments in universities and research after the Second World War in Western countries [Rescher 2005, Marconi 2014]. We can say that in no other period of the history of philosophy there were so many professional philosophers as in the last fifty years, as there were not so many scientists [Price 1963]. This quantitative increase questions the historian of contemporary philosophy in multiple ways. In the present paper I would like to address the methodological issues in historiography of philosophy related to this increase. Therefore I will ask which are the concepts and methods that we should use in order to understand properly the new situation of contemporary philosophical research. In particular, I will argue that traditional concepts and assumption used in writing the history of philosophy are today just partially fit to describe the contemporary evolution of philosophy. The historical object they aim to describe is transforming in such a way that they are more an obstacle than a help to its comprehension. In order to reach this conclusion, my contribution is structured in the following way. In the first part I will provide some quantitative data about the growth of philosophical enterprise in the second half of twentieth century; secondly, I will sketch an analysis of the key notions used in the traditional everyday work of the historian of philosophy. I will focus on the very workaday " toolkit " , which comprehend notions such as " author " , " text " , " tradition " , " philosophical school " and so on. In the third part, I will present some tensions to which these very commonplace notions are subject due to the quantitative growth of philosophy. In particular, I will attempt to show how the traditional notion of " author " as the central unit of history of philosophy is partially inadequate to describe contemporary philosophy. Hence, I will suggest that quantitative methods used in contemporary studies of science, such as scientometrics and science-mapping, can in part supply this inadequacy, opening at the same time new perspectives on the development of contemporary philosophy. Finally, in the light of the previous considerations, I will reflect upon the role of this non-standard history of philosophy in contemporary philosophical research, situating my view in the debate started with the collection of essays about historiography of philosophy edited by Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner in 1984 [Rorty-Schneewind-Skinner 1984].