Durkheim's Philosophy Lectures (English, Emile Durkheim | Neil Gross | Robert Alun Jones)

In these lectures, given more than a decade before the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Division of Labor in Society (1893), Emile Durkheim, the founder of French sociology, sets out to introduce secondary school students to the field of philosophy. Moving easily back and forth between the history of philosophy and the contributions of philosophers in his own day, Durkheim takes up topics as diverse as philosophical psychology, logic, ethics, and metaphysics and seeks to articulate a unified philosophical position. Remarkably, the "social realism" that is so characteristic of his later work -- where he insists, famously, that social facts cannot be reduced to psychological or economic ones and that such facts constrain human action in important ways -- is totally absent in these early lectures. For this reason, they will be of special interest to students of the history of the social sciences, for they shed important light on the course of Durkheim! 's intellectual development. But because all members of the French elite would have been exposed to a lycee philosophy course similar in certain fundamental respects to the one Durkheim taught, the lectures actually offer something more: a window into the nineteenth century French mind. Intellectual historians, historically minded philosophers, and scholars of French history will all find the lectures a valuable document. Insofar as they speak to the philosophical foundations of Durkheim's thought, they should also be of great interest to social theorists.