Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-sjtt6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-25T10:12:14.372Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Problems of the Sociology of Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Frank E. Hartung*
Affiliation:
Wayne University

Extract

The sociology of knowledge can most generally be defined as the discipline devoted to the social origins of thought. It is an analysis concerned with specifying the existential basis of thought, and with establishing the relationship obtained between mental structures or thought, and that existential basis. Some very interesting and difficult problems arise from this conception of the sociology of knowledge. Perhaps the most obvious of these is whether or not a sociology of knowledge, as here conceived, is theoretically possible. This is a problem I do not intend to deal with at present because limitations of time prevent me from doing even partial justice to it.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1952

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Paper presented to the meeting sponsored jointly by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Philosophy of Science Association and the American Philosophical Association, New York, December 29, 1949.

References

1. Freud, Sigmund: “One of the Difficulties of Psycho-Analysis,” Collected Papers, Vol. IV, pp. 347356. The Hogarth Press, London. (1948 printing.)Google Scholar
2. Mannheim, Karl: Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. With a preface by Louis Wirth. (Trans. Wirth, Louis and Shils, Edward.) New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1936. Pp. XXXI and 318.Google Scholar
3. Marx, Karl: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. (Trans. Stone, N. I..) Chicago, C. H. Kerr and Co. 1904. p. 314.Google Scholar
4. Marx, Karl: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. (Trans. Eden, and Paul, Cedar.) International Publishers, 1926. p. 192.Google Scholar
5. Speier, Hans: “The Social Determination of Ideas,” Social Research, 5 (1938): 182–205.Google Scholar
6. White, Leslie A.: The Science of Culture. Farrar, Strauss and Company, New York. 1949. p. 444.Google Scholar
7. American Psychiatric Association: One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry. Columbia University Press, New York, 1949. p. 649.Google Scholar