Social philosophy is the study of questions about social behavior and interpretations of society and social institutions in terms of ethical values rather than empirical relations. Social philosophers place new emphasis on understanding the social contexts for political, legal, moral, and cultural questions, and to the development of novel theoretical frameworks, from social ontology to care ethics to cosmopolitan theories of democracy, human rights, gender equity and global justice.
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 jurisprudence, 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.
Some of the topics dealt with by social philosophy are:
- Agency and free will
- The will to power
- Accountability
- Speech acts
- Situational ethics
- Modernism and Postmodernism
- Individualism
- Crowds
- Property
- Rights
- Authority
- Ideologies
- Cultural criticism
Social philosophers
A list of philosophers that have concerned themselves, although most of them not exclusively, with social philosophy:
See also
- List of basic sociology topics
- Sociological paradigms
- Sociology
- Social simulation
- Social theory