Social philosophy

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2009)

Social philosophy is the philosophical study of questions about social behavior (typically, of humans). Social philosophy addresses a wide range of subjects, from individual meanings to legitimacy of laws, from the social contract to criteria for revolution, from the functions of everyday actions to the effects of science on culture, from changes in human demographics to the collective order of a wasp's nest.

Subdisciplines

Social philosophy attempts to understand the patterns and nuances, changes and tendencies of societies. It is a wide field with many subdisciplines.

There is often a considerable overlap between the questions addressed by social philosophy and ethics or value theory. Other forms of social philosophy include political philosophy and jurisprudence, which are largely concerned with the societies of state and government and their functioning.

Social philosophy, ethics, and political philosophy all share intimate connections with other disciplines in the social sciences. In turn, the social sciences themselves are of focal interest to the philosophy of social science.

The philosophy of language and social epistemology 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 and free will
• The will to power
• Accountability
• Speech acts
• Situationism
• Modernism and Postmodernism
• individualism
• crowds
• property
• rights
• authority
• ideologies
• cultural criticism

Social philosophers include:

• Socrates
• Plato
• Chanakya
• Confucius
• Thiruvalluvar
• Thomas Hobbes
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• John Locke
• Jeremy Bentham
• John Stuart Mill
• Georg Wilhelm Hegel
• Karl Marx
• Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
• Mikhail Bakunin
• Émile Durkheim
• Max Weber
• Sigmund Freud
• Carl Jung
• Theodor Adorno
• Georg Lukács
• Antonie Pannekoek
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Michel Foucault
• Noam Chomsky
• Cornelius Castoriadis
• Guy Debord
• Terry Eagleton
• Sheila Rowbotham
• Susan Sontag
• Herbert Marcuse

See also

• List of basic sociology topics
• Sociology
• Sociological paradigms
• Social simulation
• Social theory