This text demonstrates the link between philosophy of science and scientific practice. Durkheim's sociology is examined as more than a collection of general observations about society, since the constructed theory of the meanings and causes of social life is incorporated.

First published in English in 1953, this volume represents a collection of three essays written by seminal sociologist and philsopher Emile Durkheim in which he puts forward the thesis that society is both a dynamic system and the seat of moral life. Each essay stands alone, but their connecting thread is the dialectic demonstration that a phenomenon, be a sociological or psychological one, is relatively independent of its matrix. The essays provide a valuable insight into Durkeheimian thought on sociological and philsophical matters and offer an excellent guide to Durkheim for students of both disciplines.

Moving back and forth between the history of philosophy and the contributions of philosophers in his own day, Durkheim takes up topics as diverse as philosophical psychology, logic, ethics, and metaphysics, and seeks to articulate a unified philosophical position. Remarkably, in these lectures, given more than a decade before the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), the 'social realism' that is so characteristic of his later work - where he insists, famously, that social facts cannot be reduced to psychological or economic ones, and that such facts constrain human action in important ways - is totally absent in these early lectures. For this reason, they will be of special interest to students of the history of the social sciences, for they shed important light on the course of Durkheim's intellectual development.

This title, first published in 1975, contains two complimentary studies by Paul Q. Hirst: the first based on Claude Bernard’s theory of scientific knowledge, and the second concerning Emile Durkheim’s attempt to provide a philosophical foundation for a scientific sociology in The Rules of Sociological Method. The author’s primary concern is to answer the question: is Durkheim’s theory of knowledge logically consistent and philosophically viable? His principal conclusion is that the epistemology developed in the Rules is an impossible one and that its inherent contradictions are proof that sociology as it is commonly understood can never be a scientific discipline.

This book offers a reassessment of the work of Emile Durkheim in the context of a French philosophical tradition that had seriously misinterpreted Kant by interpreting his theory of the categories as psychological faculties. Durkheim's sociological theory of the categories, as revealed by Warren Schmaus, is an attempt to provide an alternative way of understanding Kant. For Durkheim the categories are necessary conditions for human society. The concepts of causality, space and time underpin the moral rules and obligations that make society possible. A particularly interesting feature of this book is its transcendence of the distinction between intellectual and social history by placing Durkheim's work in the context of the French educational establishment of the Third Republic. It does this by subjecting student notes and philosophy textbooks to the same sort of critical analysis typically applied only to the classics of philosophy.

First published in English in 1953, this volume represents a collection of three essays written by seminal sociologist and philsopher Emile Durkheim in which he puts forward the thesis that society is both a dynamic system and the seat of moral life. Each essay stands alone, but their connecting thread is the dialectic demonstration that a phenomenon, be a sociological or psychological one, is relatively independent of its matrix. The essays provide a valuable insight into Durkeheimian thought on sociological and philsophical matters and offer an excellent guide to Durkheim for students of both disciplines.

How far is scientific knowledge a product of social life? In addressing this question, the major contributors to the sociology of knowledge have agreed that the conclusions of science are dependent on social action only in a very special and limited sense. In Science and the Sociology of Knowledge Michael Mulkay's first aim is to identify the philosophical assumptions which have led to this view of science as special; and to present a systematic critique of the standard philosophical account of science, showing that there are no valid epistemological grounds for excluding scientific knowledge from the scope of sociological analysis. The rest of the book is devoted to developing a preliminary interpretation of the social creation of scientific knowledge. The processes of knowledge-creation are delineated through a close examination of recent case studies of scientific developments. Dr Mulkay argues that knowledge is produced by means of negotiation, the outcome of which depends on the participants' use of social as well as technical resources. The analysis also shows how cultural resources are taken over from the broader social milieu and incorporated into the body of certified knowledge; and how, in the political context of society at large, scientists' technical as well as social claims are conditioned and affected by their social position.