The Age of the Social

The Discovery of Society and The Ascendance of a New Episteme

Sal Restivo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315307138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

The concept of society sui generis – society as a level of reality which could be studied scientifically – crystallized in the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe, with the work of Durkheim, Marx and Weber and today, more than at any other period in history, the idea of the social has gained a foothold in philosophy, biology, and neuroscience. However, this idea has emerged into prominence not through the historical or contemporary efforts of sociologists, but mainly through the efforts of biologists and neuroscientists.

This book seeks to re-establish the credentials of sociology as the science of society. While acknowledging the amalgamation of traditional disciplines into interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary networks of research and theory, and championing interdisciplinarity in recognising the capacity of converging perspectives to yield more interesting general theories of social life, the author defends disciplinarity in maintaining sociology's achievements as a discipline.

With chapters on the sociological world view, imagining society, the self, love, education, mathematics and religion, The Age of the Social re-states the importance of sociology as the source of robust ideas about the social in an age in which this notion has grown in importance. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, with interests in method and philosophy in the social disciplines.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of boxes
• Prologue
• 1. Inquiry: cautionary, skeptical, and wild
• 2. A biography of society
• 3. The human dimensions of the sociological imagination
• 4. The force awakens: imagining society
• 5. Nietzsche’s revenge: the “I” as a grammatical illusion
• 6. Kingdom of the crystal myth: love and evolution
• 7. Requiem for Plato: the myth of the mathematician and the social construction of mathematics
• 8. Raiders of the last illusion: the last chapter of “God”
• 9. Inside the temple of mind: Einstein’s brain
• 10. Romancing the robots
• 11. The physics-mysticism nexus
• 12. The ecumene revisited in the age of the Anthropocene
• 13. The black hole economy
• 14. The last crusade: the very idea of education
• 15. Through a sociological lens darkly: the sociological cogito and the human condition, a Nietzschean postscript
• Index