This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Social philosophy is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
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 philosophy of law, 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
- free will
- 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
See also
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 16 August 2008, at 15:21.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Social philosophy".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.