Bell, Desmond (1979) Studies in the dissolution of classical epistemology : the role of philosophical critique in an age of sociological reason and historical method. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

What is the relation between philosophical analysis and sociological
method? Sociology has traditionally looked to Philosophy to provide
either an indubitable epistemic foundation for its practices or alternatively
to legislate invariant criteria of scientificity which might guide
the social sciences in questions of methodology. But has Philosophy
itself such an autonomy from the developing knowledge domains of the
different sciences,natural and social? A structural analysis of philosophic
discourse in the twentieth century reveals as a key element of recent
philosophic'al thought a central anthropologism. This study traces the
rupture in philosophic thought which has occurred with the dissolution
and collapse of classical epistemology and the emergence in turn of a
radically new mode of philosophizing based on a recognition of the
centrality of social reality to ontological judgement and epistemological
critique. Just as the analytic epistemOlogy of the seventeenth century
can be seen as an accommodation by Philosophy to the emergence and development
of the empirical natural sc~ences, so the appearance of 'conversational'
epistemology can be viewed as Philosophy's attempt to think'the implications
for the nature of knowledge-in-general of the emergence and subsequent
development of the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century.
The key theoretical instance which demarcates classical epistemology fram
the anthropologistic philosophy since the 1920's is its inability to
accommodate the category of intersubjectiv:itJY successfully within its
egological structure. Contemporary philosophy, phenomenological, analytical,
pragmatist and marxist, is forced to grapple with the new awareness of man's
essential sociality. This has profound implications for epistemology.
The question of the relationship of philosophical analysis to sociological
method must be re-addressed in the light of the revealed epistemic proximity
of the two disciplines. What sort of philosophical critique, we ask, is
possible and appropriate in an age of sociological reason and historical
method?

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BD Speculative Philosophy
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Philosophy -- History -- 20th century, Social epistemology
Official Date:	January 1979
Dates:	Date Event January 1979 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Sociology
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Extent:	364, [9] p.
Language:	eng

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