Social philosophy
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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.
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
- 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
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