TUM Library

chapter 1 Inquiry: cautionary, skeptical, and wild -- chapter 2 A biography of society -- chapter 3 The human dimensions of the sociological imagination -- chapter 4 The force awakens: imagining society -- chapter 5 Nietzsche’s revenge: the “I” as a grammatical illusion -- chapter 6 Kingdom of the crystal myth: love and evolution -- chapter 7 Requiem for Plato: the myth of the mathematician and the social construction of mathematics -- chapter 8 Raiders of the last illusion: the last chapter of “God” -- chapter 9 Inside the temple of mind: Einstein’s brain -- chapter 10 Romancing the robots -- chapter 11 The physics–mysticism nexus -- chapter Epilogue: “Holonomy in physics and society” (an homage to / David Bohm) -- chapter 12 The ecumene revisited in the age of the Anthropocene -- chapter 13 The black hole economy -- chapter 14 The last crusade: the very idea of education -- chapter 15 Through a sociological lens darkly: the sociological cogito and the human condition, a Nietzschean postscript.

The concept of society sui generis – society as a level of reality which could be studied scientifically – crystallized in the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe, with the work of Durkheim, Marx and Weber and today, more than at any other period in history, the idea of the social has gained a foothold in philosophy, biology, and neuroscience. However, this idea has emerged into prominence not through the historical or contemporary efforts of sociologists, but mainly through the efforts of biologists and neuroscientists. This book seeks to re-establish the credentials of sociology as the science of society. While acknowledging the amalgamation of traditional disciplines into interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary networks of research and theory, and championing interdisciplinarity in recognising the capacity of converging perspectives to yield more interesting general theories of social life, the author defends disciplinarity in maintaining sociology’s achievements as a discipline.With chapters on the sociological world view, imagining society, the self, love, education, mathematics and religion, The Age of the Social re-states the importance of sociology as the source of robust ideas about the social in an age in which this notion has grown in importance. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, with interests in method and philosophy in the social disciplines.