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The first comprehensive history of world
philosophy, this book is also a social history of global
intellectual life. Eschewing polemics, it presents a sophisticated
view of the multiple cultures of world history, disintegrates
stereotypes of regional cultures, and reveals how creativity
is driven by a range of conflicting positions in each community.
We see what is sociologically universal about Western, Indian,
and Asian intellectual life, as well as what combinations
of social ingredients have produced their divergent pathways.
Through network diagrams and sustained narrative,
Randall Collins traces the development of philosophical
thought in China, Japan, India, ancient Greece, the medieval
Islamic and Jewish world, medieval Christendom, and modern
Europe. What emerges from this history is a general theory
of intellectual life, one that avoids both the reduction
of ideas to the influences of society at large and the purely
contingent local construction of meanings. Instead, Collins
focuses on the social locations where sophisticated ideas
are formed: the pattern of intellectual networks and their
inner divisions and conflicts. According to his theory,
when the material bases of intellectual life shift with
the rise and fall of religions, educational systems, and
publishing markets, opportunities open for some networks
to expand while others shrink and close down. It locates
individuals -- among them celebrated thinkers like Socrates,
Aristotle, Chu Hsi, Shankara, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger
-- within these networks and explains the emotional and
symbolic process that, by forming coalitions within the
mind, ultimately bring about original and historically successful
ideas.
A self-reflexive sociological philosophy
of intellectual life, Collins's work opens a new path beyond
relativism and realism.
Randall Collins is Professor of Sociology
at the University of Pennsylvania.
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