Sociology of Philosophies

Randall Collins is Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania.

• * Preface * Acknowledgments * Introduction The Skeleton of Theory * Coalitions in the Mind * General Theory of Interaction Rituals * The Interaction Rituals of Intellectuals * The Opportunity of Structure * The Sociology of Thinking * Networks across the Generations * The Rarity of Major Creativity * Who Will Be Remembered * What Do Minor Philosophers Do? * The Structural Mold of Intellectual Life: Long-Term Chains in China and Greece * The Importance of Personal Ties * The Structural Crunch * Partitioning Attention Space: The Case of Ancient Greece * The Intellectual Law of Small Numbers * The Forming of an Argumentative Network and the Launching of Greek Philosophy * How Long Do Organized Schools Last? * Small Numbers Crisis and the Creativity of the Post-Socratic Generation * The Hellenic Realignment of Positions * The Roman Base and the Second Realignment * The Stimulus of Religious Polarization * The Showdown of Christianity versus the Pagan United Front * Two Kinds of Creativity Comparative History of Intellectual Communities Part I: Asian Paths * Innovation by Opposition: Ancient China * The Sequence of Oppositions in Ancient China * Centralization in the Han Dynasty: The Forming of Official Confucianism and Its Opposition * The Changing Landscape of External Supports * The Gentry-Official Culture: The Pure Conversation Movement and the Dark Learning * Class Culture and the Freezing of Creativity in Indigenous Chinese Philosophy * External and Internal Politics of the Intellectual World: India * Sociopolitical Bases of Religious Ascendancies * Religious Bases of Philosophical Factions: Divisions and Recombination of Vedic Ritualists * The Crowded Competition of the Sages * Monastic Movements and the Ideal of Meditative Mysticism * Anti-monastic Opposition and the Forming of Hindu Lay Culture * Partitioning and the Intellectual Attention Space * The Buddhist-Hindu Watershed * The Post-Buddhist Resettlement of Intellectual Territories * Scholasticism and Syncretism in the Decline of Hindu Philosophy * Revolutions of the Organizational Base: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China * Buddhism and the Organizational Transformation of Medieval China * Intellectual Foreign Relations of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism * Creative Philosophies in Chinese Buddhism * The Ch'an (Zen) Revolution * The Neo-Confucian Revival * The Weak Continuity of Chinese Metaphysics * Innovation through Conservatism: Japan * Japan as Transformer of Chinese Buddhism * The Inflation of Zen Enlightenment and the Scholasticization of Koan * Tokugawa as a Modernizing Society * The Divergence of Secularist Naturalism and Neoconservatism * Conservatism and Intellectual Creativity * The Myth of the Opening of Japan Conclusion to Part I: The Ingredients of Intellectual Life Comparative History of Intellectual Communities Part II: Western Paths * Tensions of Indigenous and Imported Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom * Philosophy within a Religious Context * The Muslim World: An Intellectual Community Anchored by a Politicized Religion * Four Factions * Realignment of Factions in the 900s * The Culmination of the Philosophical Networks: Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali * Routinization of Sufis and Scholastics * Spain as the Hinge of Medieval Philosophy * Coda: Are Idea Imports a Substitute for Creativity? * Academic Expansion as a Two-Edged Sword: Medieval Christendom * The Organizational Bases of Christian Thought * The Inner Autonomy of the University * The Breakup of Theological Philosophy * Intellectuals as Courtiers: The Humanists * The Question of Intellectual Stagnation * Coda: The Intellectual Demoralization of the Late Twentieth Century * Cross-Breeding Networks and Rapid-Discovery Science * A Cascade of Creative Circles * Philosophical Connections of the Scientific Revolution * Three Revolutions and Their Networks * The Mathematicians * The Scientific Revolution * The Philosophical Revolution: Bacon and Descartes * Secularization and Philosophical Meta-territoriality * Secularization of the Intellectual Base * Geopolitics and Cleavages within Catholicism * Reemergence of the Metaphysical Field * Jewish Millennialism and Spinoza's Religious of Reason * Leibniz's Mathematical Metaphysics * Rival Philosophies upon the Space of Religious Toleration * Deism and the Independence of Value Theory * The Reversal of Alliances * Anti-modernist Modernism and the Anti-scientific Opposition * The Triumph of Epistemology * Intellectuals Take Control of Their Base: The German University Revolution * The German Idealist Movement * Philosophy Captures the University * Idealism as Ideology of the University Revolution * Political Crisis as the Outer Layer of Causality * The Spread of the University Revolution * The Post-revolutionary Condition: Boundaries as Philosophical Puzzles * Meta-territories upon the Science-Philosophy Border * The Social Invention of Higher Mathematics * The Logicism of Russell and Wittgenstein * The Vienna Circle as a Nexus of Struggles * The Ordinary Language Reaction against Logical Formalism * Wittgenstein's Tortured Path * Form Mathematical Foundations Crisis to Husserl's Phenomenology * Heidegger: Catholic Anti-modernism Intersects the Phenomenological Movement * Division of the Phenomenological Movement * The Ideology of the Continental-Anglo Split Meta-Reflection * Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas * The Continuum of Abstraction and Reflexivity * Three Pathways: Cosmological, Epistemological-Metaphysical, Mathematical * The Future of Philosophy * Epilogue: Sociological Realism * The Sociological Cogito * Mathematics as Communicative Operations * The Objects of Rapid-Discovery Science * Why Should Intellectual Networks Undermine Themselves? * Appendices * The Clustering of Contemporaneous Creativity * The Incompleteness of Our Historical Picture * Keys to Figures * Notes * References * Index of Persons * Index of Subjects

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.