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In India, philosophers have not attempted to overcome the existing limitation between social theory and social philosophy. Surprisingly, many of them are not even aware of this as a philosophical issue. This explains why there is a social variance between India and the West. Like the West, Indian society is becoming modern, but modernity in India has to coexist with the pre-modern. This introduction examines the uniqueness of Rene Descartes's method and presents a different perspective on modernity. It considers the intermediate attempts to overcome solipsism into three major movements, each constituting a distinct stage in the movement of ideas. It also considers the views of Alasdair MacIntyre on modernity and tradition in the West.

This chapter introduces the general methodological challenges that confront extrapolation in the biological and social sciences, and sketches the outlines of the mechanisms approach to those challenges that is developed in the rest of the book.

It takes exception to the claim that since his political theory addresses legislators and statesmen rather than citizens or subjects, Aristotle is therefore not concerned about the interests of citizens and subjects and is thus unimpressed by the issue of political obligation. This chapter argues that once due consideration is given to Aristotle’s adoption of a practical viewpoint in his study of social reality, it is reasonable to conclude that the interests of citizens or free subjects are indeed a concern of his. It also explains that Aristotle’s political theory is not merely descriptive and/or explanatory but also basically normative. Special emphasis is given to the normative subtext of many of his descriptive and explanatory statements.

The theory on how people evaluate valuable things in life as it is influenced by social conditions is explained in this book, which presents a revised text from the Tanner Lectures on Human Values delivered by the author in March 2001 at the University of California in Berkeley. Philosophers including Christine Korsgaard, Robert Pippin, and Bernard Williams contribute their commentaries on divergent approaches to moral and social philosophy issues. Raz expounds on the social dependence of value by focusing on pluralism, change, and understanding. He also takes critical responses from his commentators, one of which is from Korsgaard, challenging views based on Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, while Pippin scrutinises social dependence in its ironic form as Williams agrees with Pippin’s arguments. Reflecting on responses from Raz, this introduction examines the holistic method that Raz himself deploys in reaching his conclusion about social dependence.

This chapter sketches a portrait of Alfred Krupp. It describes how Alfred Krupp perfectly fits the mold of the heroic entrepreneur. Profoundly skeptical of joint-stock companies, banks, and capitalism in general, but also of big-scale science and modern research methods, he was a genius at extending to its utmost limits the possibilities of the craft entrepreneur. He developed an extraordinarily successful business model that allowed the principles of the small workshop to be extended on a gigantic and global scale. Moreover, the chapter credits him with a social philosophy which eventually created a community of Kruppianer, workers bound to the enterprise and the community by pride in the product of their labor.

During the Revolutionary and Constitutional period, politics dominated the intellectual elite in a way that almost excluded religious claims. After this time, social and political thought developed in their own more practical, less philosophical tradition, oriented to the secular concerns of the Founding Fathers and following the interests of Benjamin Franklin. The tradition of philosophical theology, dominated by students of Jonathan Edwards only studied politics and society as a study derivative of its ideas about religious knowledge, and this tradition was eventually critical in American philosophy.

This chapter examines the idea that laws in society limit the arbitrariness of a ruler if a social philosophy gains acceptance that sees the ruler as subject to the laws. Laws in nature limit the arbitrariness of the gods, if the worldview seeing the gods as subject to the laws prevails. Both tendencies were noticed in ancient Chinese social theory and religion. Chinese religion was, with the emergence of the natural sciences, markedly depersonalized and ritualized in a way that secured harmony among the people, but did not promote the worship of deities. The attraction of Buddhism, introduced in the first century ad from India, clearly shows that the dominant worldview in China basically had nothing to offer that could come to meet the desire of many people for a god the father or god the mother. The idea of the regularity of nature may therefore have also complied with political interests in the Warring States period and later. The basic conditions for the emergence of medicine in China were thus fulfilled.

This chapter provides detailed information on the variety of therapeutics available over the years. The influence of the Christian worldview had already been encouraging a religious healing for centuries. The Scholastics made an attempt to unite Christian teachings and ancient philosophy. The anatomists conducted autopsies but with their view into the corpse, they sought the confirmation of the meager knowledge taken by Mondino from an anatomically insignificant text of Galen's and from his own experience. The situation in the Greek cultural domain led to the development of the polis democracy. The ideal structure of the societal organism offered insights into the structure of the body. The initial situation in China was similar. From the sociopolitical upheavals and social philosophies of the fourth to second centuries bc, two opposing traditions emerged, each with its own view of the body. The two basic directions of thought were clear and understandable.

Chapter 6 notes that the overview of the Ostroms’ work in the light of some of its pivotal concepts (such as polycentricity, institutional diversity, IAD framework, institutional resilience, institutional design) reveals two things. The first is that this work sets up the stage for a reconstruction of our very approach to institutional theory by challenging us to rethink assumptions, methods and entire theoretical perspectives. The second is that a certain philosophical profile, unmistakably associable to the pragmatist intellectual tradition, seems to be latent in it, both as an assumption and an implication. The chapter is a first attempt so far to probe and elaborate the link between a foundational pragmatist perspective and Ostromian institutionalism.

This chapter first looks into Mills' relationship with pragmatism. It begins with a discussion of his first published essays on language and culture, which were written while he was still a graduate student. These essays on the sociology of knowledge not only demonstrate the influence of pragmatism on his thinking but also his precocious audacity, which consists chiefly in his ambition to take on existing systematic knowledge of the social world, and both the theoretical underpinnings and the methodologies of the social sciences. The chapter then turn to Mills' first sustained intellectual work, his dissertation, A Sociological Account of Pragmatism, which was published in 1966 under the title Sociology and Pragmatism. What Mills achieves here is not only an examination of pragmatism from the perspective of a sociology of knowledge by showing the degree to which the institutions of “higher learning in America” influenced it as a philosophy but also an interrogation of the separation of sociology from philosophy.

This chapter presents a dialogue with Axel Honneth, professor of philosophy at the Frankfurt School and director of the Institute for Social Research, regarding the status of Critical Theory as a tradition of thought. Honneth attempts to develop a normative foundation for a theory of society, based on his belief that early Critical Theory possessed a flawed sociology. He agrees with many of Habermas' reformulations of Critical Theory except the Habermasian pragmatics of language, opting instead for a theory of recognition. Honneth's discussion further includes the relationship of his theories with French social philosophy, the question of instrumental reason, the reformulation of the Habermasian theory of the public, and his idea of developing a tradition of social philosophy concerned with distinguishing social pathologies.

Concluding, the monograph attempts to address the major objections that might be raised against this rereading of Hegel’s final system. Specifically, it responds to the claim that such a reading conflates the inchoate activity of spirit in nature with nature itself and so proceeds by way of conflation. Resisting this criticism, the conclusion returns to crucial passages from Hegel’s writings on nature that explicitly characterize nature as impotent and radically external—two features antithetical to the concept of spirit. Consequently, the conclusion argues that there must be a reticent independence assigned to the domain of nature that is not the result of misreading Hegel’s mature philosophy. Instead, this reticence is the very expression of material nature and it functions as a problem for the project of spirit, a problem which permeates the entirety of Hegel’s final system, specifically his philosophy of the real (Realphilosophie). The conclusion then highlights three symptomatic expressions of nature’s paradoxical and problematic status. Subsequently, the conclusion also shows how spirit’s project of freedom persistently transgresses two distinct senses of nature.