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Social philosophy
 
 
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Social philosophy is the philosophical
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
 study of questions about social behavior
Behavior

Behavior or behaviour refers to the action s or reactions of an object or organism, usually in Relational theory to the environment. Behavior can be conscious or Unconscious mind, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary....
 (typically, of human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
s). Social philosophy addresses a wide range of subjects, from individual meanings to legitimacy of laws, from the social contract
Social contract

Social contract describes a broad class of theories that try to explain the ways in which people form nations and maintain social order. The notion of the social contract implies that the people give up some rights to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order....
 to criteria for revolution
Revolution

A revolution is a fundamental social change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time....
, from the functions of everyday actions to the effects of science
Science

In its broadest sense, science refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. In its more usual restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research....
 on culture
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
, from changes in human demographics
Demography

Demography is the statistical study of all populations. It can be a very general science that can be applied to any kind of dynamic population, that is, one that changes over time or space ....
 to the collective order of a wasp
WAsP

WAsP is a PC program for predicting wind climates, wind resources, and power productions from wind turbines and wind farms. The predictions are based on wind data measured at stations in the same region....
's nest.

Subdisciplines
Social philosophy attempts to understand the patterns and nuances, changes and tendencies of societies
Society

A society is a group of humans characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture and/or institutions....
.






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Social philosophy is the philosophical
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
 study of questions about social behavior
Behavior

Behavior or behaviour refers to the action s or reactions of an object or organism, usually in Relational theory to the environment. Behavior can be conscious or Unconscious mind, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary....
 (typically, of human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
s). Social philosophy addresses a wide range of subjects, from individual meanings to legitimacy of laws, from the social contract
Social contract

Social contract describes a broad class of theories that try to explain the ways in which people form nations and maintain social order. The notion of the social contract implies that the people give up some rights to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order....
 to criteria for revolution
Revolution

A revolution is a fundamental social change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time....
, from the functions of everyday actions to the effects of science
Science

In its broadest sense, science refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. In its more usual restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research....
 on culture
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
, from changes in human demographics
Demography

Demography is the statistical study of all populations. It can be a very general science that can be applied to any kind of dynamic population, that is, one that changes over time or space ....
 to the collective order of a wasp
WAsP

WAsP is a PC program for predicting wind climates, wind resources, and power productions from wind turbines and wind farms. The predictions are based on wind data measured at stations in the same region....
's nest.

Subdisciplines


Social philosophy attempts to understand the patterns and nuances, changes and tendencies of societies
Society

A society is a group of humans characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture and/or institutions....
. It is a wide field with many subdisciplines.

There is often a considerable overlap between the questions addressed by social philosophy and ethics
Ethics

Ethics is a word for a philosophy that encompasses proper conduct and good living. It is significantly broader than the common conception of ethics as the analyzing of right and wrong....
 or value theory
Value theory

Value theory encompasses a range of approaches to understanding how, why, and to what degree humans should or do value things, whether the thing is a person, idea, object, or anything else....
. Other forms of social philosophy include political philosophy
Political philosophy

Political philosophy is the study of questions about the city, government, politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what makes a The purpose of government, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it should take and why, what t...
 and philosophy of law, which are largely concerned with the societies of state
State

A state is a political Social contract with effective sovereignty over a geographic area and representing a population. These may be nation states, State or multinational states....
 and government
Government

Government is the body within any organization that has the authority to make and the power to enforce laws, regulations, or rules. Typically, the government refers to a civil government -- local, provincial, or national -- but commercial, academic, religious, or other formal organizations are also administered by governing bodies....
 and their functioning.

Social philosophy, ethics, and political philosophy all share intimate connections with other disciplines in the social sciences
Social sciences

The social sciences comprise academic disciplines concerned with the study of the social life of human groups and individuals including anthropology, communication studies, economics, human geography, history, political science, psychology and sociology....
. In turn, the social sciences themselves are of focal interest to the philosophy of social science
Philosophy of social science

Philosophy of social science considers the nature of confirmation and explanation in the social sciences, such as history, economics, and sociology....
.

The philosophy of language
Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for Analytic philosophys is concerned with four central problems: the nature of Meaning , language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality....
 and social epistemology
Social epistemology

Social epistemology is a broad set of approaches to the study of knowledge, all of which construe human knowledge as a collective achievement. Social epistemologists may be found working in many of the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, most commonly in philosophy and sociology....
 are subfields which overlap in significant ways with social philosophy.

Relevant issues in social philosophy

Some of the topics dealt with by social philosophy are:
  • Agency
    Human agency

    Agency is a philosophical concept of the capacity of an agent to act in a world. The agency is considered as belonging to that agent, even if that agent represents a fictitious character, or some other non-existent entity....
     and free will
    Free will

    The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. Addressing this question requires understanding the relationship between freedom and Causality, and determining whether the laws of nature are causally deterministic....
  • The will to power
    Will to Power

    The will to power is a prominent concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The term may also refer to:*The Will to Power , a posthumous publication of Nietzsche's notebooks...
  • Accountability
    Accountability

    Accountability is a concept in ethics with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as Social responsibility, answerability, enforcement, blameworthiness, liability and other terms associated with the expectation of account-giving....
  • Speech acts
  • Situationism
  • Modernism
    Modernism

    Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century....
     and Postmodernism
    Postmodernism

    Postmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives....
  • individualism
    Individualism

    Individualism is the Morality stance, political philosophy, or social outlook that stresses independence and self-reliance. Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires, while opposing most external interference upon one's choices, whether by society, or any other group or institution....
  • crowd
    Crowd

    A crowd is a group . The crowd may have a common purpose or set of emotions, such as at a Demonstration , at a sports game, or during looting, or simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area ....
    s
  • property
    Property

    Property is any physical or virtual entity that is ownership by an individual or jointly by a group of individuals. An owner of property has the right to consumption, sell, Renting, mortgage, transfer and exchange his or her property....
  • rights
  • authority
    Authority

    In government, authority is often used interchangeably with the term "power ". However, their meanings differ: while "power" refers to the ability to achieve certain ends, "authority" refers to a claim of legitimacy , the justification and right to exercise that power....
  • free will
    Free will

    The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. Addressing this question requires understanding the relationship between freedom and Causality, and determining whether the laws of nature are causally deterministic....
  • ideologies
  • cultural criticism


Social philosophers include:

  • Socrates
    Socrates

    Socrates was a Classical Greece Philosophy. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known only through the classical accounts of his students....
  • Plato
    Plato

    Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
  • Chanakya
    Chanakya

    Chanakya was an adviser and a prime minister to the first Maurya Empire Emperor Chandragupta Maurya , and architect of his rise to power. Kautilya and Vishnugupta, the names by which the ancient Indian political treatise called the Arthasastra identifies its author, are traditionally identified with Chanakya....
  • Confucius
    Confucius

    This articles talks about a Chinese thinker and social philosopher. For a food company in China with its brand name "Master Kong", please refer to Tingyi Holding Corporation....
  • Thiruvalluvar
  • Thomas Hobbes
    Thomas Hobbes

    Thomas Hobbes was an English philosophy, remembered today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory....
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
    Jean-Jacques Rousseau

    Jean Jacques Rousseau was a major philosopher, writer, and composer of the eighteenth century The Age of Enlightenment, whose political philosophy influenced the French Revolution and the development of modern political and educational thought....
  • John Locke
    John Locke

    John Locke was an English philosopher. Locke is considered the first of the British Empiricism, but is equally important to social contract theory....
  • Jeremy Bentham
    Jeremy Bentham

    Jeremy Bentham was an England jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He was the brother of Samuel Bentham. He was a political radical, and a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law....
  • John Stuart Mill
    John Stuart Mill

    John Stuart Mill , United Kingdom philosopher, political economy, civil servant and Parliament of the United Kingdom, was an influential liberalism thinker of the 19th century....
  • Georg Wilhelm Hegel
  • Karl Marx
    Karl Marx

    Karl Heinrich Marx was a Germanphilosophy, political economy, historian, sociologist, humanism, political theorist and revolutionary credited as the founder of communism....
  • Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
    Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

    Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French people politician, Mutualism political philosophy and socialist. He was a member of the French Parliament, and he was the first to call himself an anarchism....
  • Mikhail Bakunin
    Mikhail Bakunin

    Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism.Born in the Russian Empire to a family of Russian people nobles, Bakunin spent his youth as a junior officer in the Russian army but resigned his commission in 1835....
  • Émile Durkheim
    Émile Durkheim

    ?mile Durkheim was a France sociologist whose contributions were instrumental in the formation of sociology and anthropology. His work and editorship of the first journal of sociology, L'Ann?e Sociologique, helped establish sociology within academia as an accepted Social sciences....
  • Max Weber
    Max Weber

    Maximilian Carl Emil Weber was one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Germany, Weber became a lawyer, politician, scholar, political economy, and sociology....
  • Sigmund Freud
    Sigmund Freud

    Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalysis of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of Psychological repression and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for curing psychopathology through dialogue...
  • Carl Jung
    Carl Jung

    Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of Analytical psychology. Jung's approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in counterculture movements across the globe....
  • Theodor Adorno
  • Georg Lukács
    Georg Lukács

    Gy?rgy Luk?cs was a Hungary Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism....
  • Antonie Pannekoek
    Antonie Pannekoek

    Antonie Pannekoek was a Netherlands astronomer and Marxist theory....
  • Simone de Beauvoir
    Simone de Beauvoir

    Simone de Beauvoir was a France author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography in several volumes....
  • Michel Foucault
    Michel Foucault

    Michel Foucault was a French philosophy, historian, intellectual, Critical theory and sociologist. He held a chair at the Coll?ge de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley....
  • Noam Chomsky
    Noam Chomsky

    Avram Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, cognitive science, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
  • Cornelius Castoriadis
    Cornelius Castoriadis

    Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greeks-France philosopher, economist and psychoanalyst. Author of the The Imaginary Institution of Society, co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group and 'philosopher of autonomy'....
  • Guy Debord
    Guy Debord

    Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, Hypergraphics and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International ....
  • Terry Eagleton
    Terry Eagleton

    Terence Francis Eagleton is a British people literary theorist and critic, regarded by some as one of Britain's most influential living literary critics....
  • Sheila Rowbotham
    Sheila Rowbotham

    Sheila Rowbotham is a Great Britain socialist feminism theorist and writer....
  • Susan Sontag
    Susan Sontag

    Susan Sontag was an United States author, filmmaker, philosopher, literary theorist, and activism....
  • Herbert Marcuse
    Herbert Marcuse

    Herbert Marcuse was a German people philosophy and sociology, and a member of the Frankfurt School. His best known works are Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension....


See also


  • List of basic sociology topics
    List of basic sociology topics

    Sociology is the study of society and human social interaction. Sociological research ranges from the analysis of short social contact between anonymous individuals on the street to the study of globalization....
  • Sociology
    Sociology

    Sociology is a branch of the social sciences that uses systematic methods of Empiricism and critical theory to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, sometimes with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare....
  • Sociological paradigms
  • Social simulation
    Social simulation

    Social simulation is a research field that applies computational methods to study issues in the social sciences. The issues explored include problems in sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, geography, archaeology and linguistics ....
  • Social theory
    Social theory

    Social theory is the use of theoretical frameworks to study and interpret social structures and phenomena within a particular school of thought....