The Continental Philosophy of Sociology as the Theoretical Insight into Societal Knowledge

Extended Abstract
 
Introduction and Objectives: The contemporary age must be conceived as an age of complexities that continuously disclose new domains and dimensions. It is, precisely, an age in which the limits of enclosure are laid bare. These terminal boundaries of enclosure, however, become intelligible only through a careful apprehension of their manifest and latent linkages with non-teleological foundations. Such foundations confront the closure of this essence and its bounds in a manner that instantiates a fundamental duality: these foundations which used to define the essence as “the Other” in a context which continually reproduced “the Other,” are now re-defined as the origins of the relations that, in the contemporary configuration, have become determinative and that circumscribe human agency in ways that are without close precedent. Accordingly, the emergence and consolidation of an epistemic domain capable of answering these new epistemic exigencies becomes imperative. Since sociology occupies the epistemic fulcrum among disciplines whose vocation is the epistemic adaptation to socially complex conditions, and since sociology, if it is to assume a role that cannot be fulfilled except “through” another field of knowledge, requires a disciplinary “threshold”, this paper advances “the continental philosophy of sociology” as such an intervening agent. This agent, first, renders possible the preparation of scientific communities for the explication and clarification of the epistemic transformation that the contemporary age makes unavoidable; and second, it brings the epistemic structure of sociology into a fundamental reflexivity that can only be properly understood in relation to what we have called an “immanent transcendence”.
Methodology: Accordingly, this study approaches a distinct epistemic domain known as the continental philosophy of sociology as a mediating “agent” that brings the boundaries of the enclosure into focal view due to its epistemic functions. To this end, the present research adopts a distinctly “ideal-type methodology”. It aims to generate a novel conceptual formulation that answers the epistemic demands placed upon sociology when confronting the complexities of our “complex” age. This is accomplished by analytically disentangling the constitutive elements that render the present epoch distinctive, both in terms of its overarching ontological totality and the hierarchical organization of its constituent parts, and reconceiving them through ideal types that embody sociology’s epistemic requisites. Each constitutive element, considered at general and at particular levels, is thereby rendered as an ideal type that justifies, by its very logic, the necessity of that “type”. Indeed, what resolves, or places on the path toward resolving, the problem of sociology’s entry into the interwoven domains of indeterminacy is nothing other than the provision of an ideal type for the variegated social world as a whole and for each of its core and peripheral components. The gravitational points that render salient the linkages among these “types” must be situated with respect to certain nodal points that highlight the commonalities among the ideal types and that constitute the theoretical prerequisites for approaching and engaging the said world. The present article pursues this trajectory in such a manner that these gravitational and nodal points disclose the thresholds of closure.
Results: From this standpoint, the epistemic constraints that inhere in efforts to apprehend the modern epoch can only be transcended through the recognition and articulation of these gravitational and nodal points. Sociology’s intrinsic epistemic limitations mean that it cannot, unaided, mount the radical theoretical interventions required to address the perplexities of contemporary complexity; it therefore needs recourse to a mediating domain whose vital function is precisely to provide that point of entry. The paper demonstrates that understanding both the totality and the discrete constituents of the intervening discipline becomes possible only through the disclosure of an affirmative necessity embedded in the specific functions of this discipline. Consequently, this paper foregrounds the said epistemic branch not merely because it furnishes a robust theoretical perspective for a domain of scholarship charged with addressing the pressing problems of contemporary complex societies, but also because it is itself the very theoretical insight under consideration. Thus, we are confronted with an epistemic branch that, in addition to providing a stable foundation for sociology and simultaneously affirming its own foundationality, not only articulates its theoretical novelties and innovations on the basis of the “omnipresence” of the essential and through constant reference to this very domain, but also advances its exegetical and conceptual elaborations in order to sustain and consolidate the foundational logic according to which any movement toward the exteriority of the inner realm is realized precisely through continual reference back to that very realm.
Discussion and Conclusion: Hence, insofar as sociology is intrinsically bound to the vexed, contingent realities of lived social existence ــــ realities that can be grasped only by attending to their immanent complexities ـــ the discipline requires a philosophical domain that secures its adaptability to novel epistemic imperatives. The philosophy of sociology fulfills this role by (a) articulating and elaborating those specific epistemic functions that distinguish it from parallel domains such as the philosophy of the social sciences and social philosophy and hence clarifying on a theoretical plane that the expansive boundaries of contemporary society and its profound entanglement with the twin principles of “diversity” and “plurality” serve as immediate indicators of the indispensability of its role; (b) revealing that the limits and boundaries of the society under consideration are indeterminate, indistinct, and unstable, and by foregrounding that the aforementioned diversity and plurality can only be apprehended through direct recourse to the principle of “regularity in dispersion”, the essay substantiates the vital cleavage between the “Continental” and the “Analytic” modes of inquiry and aligns the former with an epistemic terrain devoid of certitude and saturated with aporia, a terrain in which ontological discontinuities are exposed and articulated within the unfolding of historical time; and (c) establishing that, in consonance with a society structured by complexity, this epistemic domain constitutes, intrinsically, a substantive theoretical insight: it does not merely enable the production of “social knowledge” about particular problems, but primarily fashions the foundational principles whose appropriation is indispensable for grasping the constitutive structures of the social whole and rendering possible the acquisition of “societal knowledge”.
Acknowledgement: The authors gratefully acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Conflict of Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interests.