Social philosophy
Social philosophy is the
philosophical study of interesting 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.
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.
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*
Socrates*
Plato*
Chanakya*
Confucius*
Thomas Hobbes*
Jean-Jacques Rousseau*
John Locke*
Karl Marx*
Émile Durkheim*
Charlotte Perkins Gilman*
Max Weber*
Vivekananda*
Noam Chomsky*
Catharine MacKinnon*
Naomi Wolf*
Terry Eagleton*
John Ralston Saul*
Spencer Heath
