HiPhiS Seminar: “Durkheimian Sociology and the Genetic Method: The Argument of Origin as a Revealer of Social Ontologies”

Tuesday, November 28, 2017, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Polytech, Serge Peytavin Lecture Hall, Building 31, Triolet Campus
Free admission

Inter-University Seminar on the History and Philosophy of Science, 2017 Session: “Causes, Foundations, Origins.”
Lecture presented by Jean-Christophe Marcel, sociologist and professor at the University of Burgundy in Dijon.

Abstract:

As early as 1895, in *The Rules of Sociological Method*, Durkheim explained that to account for a social fact, one must compare its various forms. The aim is to establish the most rudimentary type and then trace, step by step, the way in which it has become more complex. According to him, this method should be able to provide both the analysis and the synthesis of a phenomenon at once, by showing, in a disaggregated state, the elements that compose it, and the way in which they have accumulated over time. This field of comparison was, in his view, best suited to determining the conditions on which the formation and association of a phenomenon’s elements depend.
In the case of the question of the social origin of knowledge of the self and the world, the use of the genetic method demonstrates that sociological analysis, for Durkheim and his collaborators, was grounded not only in an evolutionary conception of the development of societies but also in a very specific social ontology for conceptualizing society. In this regard, the question of origin, at the intersection of reflections on causality and metaphysics, proves to be a good indicator of the “presuppositions,” or axioms—in the sense of unprovable propositions underlying a theory—upon which an entire program of sociological research was built.
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