HiPhiS seminar "Durkheimian sociology and the genetic method: the origin argument as a revealer of social ontologies".

Tuesday, November 28, 2017 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Polytech, amphi Serge Peytavin, building 31, Triolet campus
Free admission

Inter-university seminar on the History and Philosophy of Science, 2017 cycle "Causes, foundations, origins".
Lecture presented by Jean-Christophe Marcel, sociologist, Professor at the University of Burgundy, Dijon.

Summary:

As early as 1895, in his book Les Règles de la méthode sociologique (Rules of Sociological Method), Durkheim explained that, to understand a social fact, we need to compare its various forms. The aim is to build up the most rudimentary type, and then follow step by step how it has become more complicated. In his view, this method should be able to provide a single analysis and synthesis of a phenomenon, showing in a dissociated state the elements that make it up, and the way they have been added to over time. This field of comparison was better able, in his view, to determine the conditions on which the formation and association of the elements of a phenomenon depend.
In the case of the question of the social origin of self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, the use of the genetic method shows that, for Durkheim and his collaborators, sociological analysis was based not only on an evolutionary conception of the future of societies, but also on a very specific social ontology for thinking about society. In this respect, the question of origin, at the crossroads of causality and metaphysics, reveals the "presuppositions" or axioms - in the sense of unprovable propositions at the foundation of a theory - on which an entire program of sociological research was built.
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