Philosophical and Sociological View of Society: Partnership or Rivalry?

Abstract

The article examines the correlation between reflective social philosophy and so­ciology, which, as the author believes, takes the form of their conceptual intersec­tion, forming a system of holistic philosophical and sociological knowledge of man, society and history. To prove this idea, the author considers the subject and conceptual structure of theoretical sociology as a science that studies the so­cial life of people in its systemic integrity, universality, and historical forms of re­alization. Speaking about social philosophy, the author criticizes the point of view that takes it beyond the scope of scientific knowledge, reducing it to manife­stations of value consciousness oriented to the proper rather than the existent in the social world. Along with such a valuative social philosophy, there is a re­flective (epistemic) form of social philosophizing that speaks the language of ver­ifiable judgments of truth rather than judgments of value that cannot be epistemi­cally tested for truth. The author considers the problem of supraorganic social reality, which is one of the subsystems of the surrounding and encompassing world that is created by the goal-oriented, adaptive activity of an ancestral man, to be the subject-forming problem of reflexive social philosophy. Society, studied by theoretical sociology, is considered by the author as an organizational form of existence of social reality, which makes possible the production and reproduc­tion of human life. The author believes that a systemic analysis of society is im­possible without a philosophical understanding of social reality, which leads to the intersection of social philosophy with the general sociological and histori­cal-typological levels of sociological science. The author is convinced that the con­ceptual union of reflective social philosophy and sociology is a necessary con­dition for overcoming the crisis of fragmentation existing in modern theoretical social science.