Les sciences sociales et la philosophie

The social sciences and philosophy. By taking philosophy and its history as its object, sociology can make a contribution to the efforts of philosophy to free itself from the constraints which determine it. Philosophy tends to resolve the antinomy of historicity and truth by updating past works through commentary. This presupposes a more or less total denial of historicity. This refusal is common to the three ways of explicitly dealing with this antinomy : revelation of the primal revelation (Heidegger), retrospective construction of past philosophies as theoretical possibles (Kant), and the dialectic which transcends and conserves (Hegel). A genuine social history which would relocate philosophy in the field of cultural production and in the social field as a whole would make it possible to understand philosophies and their succession as something other than the «philosophizing philosophy of history» and would at the same time enable present-day philosophers to break free of the established «un-thought» written into their heritage.