The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change

About this book

Randall Collins traces the movement of philosophical thought in ancient Greece China Japan India the medieval Islamic and Jewish world medieval Christendom and modern Europe. What emerges from this history is a social theory of intellectual change 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 patterns of intellectual networks and their inner divisions and conflicts.