The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change - Softcover

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

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.