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The Sociology of Intellectual Life
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The Sociology of Intellectual Life
The Career of the Mind in and Around Academy

First Edition


September 2009 | 192 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

The Sociology of Intellectual Life outlines a social theory of knowledge for the 21st century.

With characteristic subtlety and verve, Steve Fuller deals directly with a world in which it is no longer taken for granted that universities and academics are the best places and people to embody the life of the mind. While Fuller defends academic privilege, he takes very seriously the historic divergences between academics and intellectuals, attending especially to the different features of knowledge production that they value.

Key Features

  • Presents an account of the problematic relationship between postmodernism and the university as an institution
  • Addresses the problems facing an academic who wishes also to function as an intellectual
  • Offers a critical survey of the emerging fields of social epistemology and the sociology of philosophy
  • Discusses the ethics and politics of public intellectual life, especially given its largely improvisational character

 
Introduction
 
PART ONE: THE PLACE OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE UNIVERSITY
 
The University as an Institutional Solution to the Problem of Knowledge
 
The Alienability of Knowledge in our So-called Knowledge Society
 
The Knowledge Society as Capitalism of the Third Order
 
Will the University Survive the Era of Knowledge Management?
 
Postmodernism as an Anti-university Movement
 
Regaining the University's Critical Edge by Historicizing the Curriculum
 
Affirmative Action as a Strategy for Redressing the Balance between Research and Teaching
 
Academics Rediscover Their Soul: The Rebirth of 'Academic Freedom'
 
PART TWO: THE STUFF OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE: PHILOSOPHY
 
Epistemology as 'Always Already' Social Epistemology
 
From Social Epistemology to the Sociology of Philosophy
The Codification of Professional Prejudices?

 
 
Interlude: Seeds of an Alternative Sociology of Philosophy
 
Prolegomena to a Critical Sociology of Twentieth-century Anglophone Philosophy
 
Analytic Philosophy's Ambivalence Toward the Empirical Sciences
 
Professionalism as Differentiating American and British Philosophy
 
Conclusion: Anglophone Philosophy as a Victim of Its Own Success
 
PART THREE: THE PEOPLE OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE: INTELLECTUALS
 
Can Intellectuals Survive If the Academy Is a No-fool Zone?
 
How Intellectuals Became an Endangered Species in Our Times: The Trail of Psychologism
 
A Genealogy of Anti-intellectualism: From Invisible Hand to Social Contagion
 
Re-defining the Intellectual as an Agent of Distributive Justice
 
The Critique of Intellectuals in a Time of Pragmatist Captivity
 
Pierre Bourdieu: The Academic Sociologist as Public Intellectual
 
PART FOUR: THE IMPROVISATIONAL NATURE OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE
 
Academics Caught Between Plagiarism and Bullshit
 
Bullshit: A Disease Whose Cure Is Always Worse
 
The Scientific Method as a Search for the (Piled) Higher (and Deeper) Bullshit
 
Conclusion: How to Improvise on the World-historic Stage

...an inspiring read for those who think that big ideas matter and intellectuals can change the world. Fuller's style is iconoclastic, but this is balanced by his erudition and his brilliant one-liners...Challanging and thought provoking, The Sociology of Intellectual Life is a rollicking defence of the possibilities and challanges of intellectual life in the modern university.
Eleanor Townsley
Contemporary Sociology


Steve Fuller is an academic and a public intellectual. In this powerful and polemical book he addresses the contemporary problem that confronts so rare a beast: the absence of a public… Academics, he argues, must take up the role of 'educated thinking in public' if they are to inform social action. What he means is that they have to act to create a new public. The cost of inaction will not only be the death of the university but of intellectual life. This responsibility should weigh like a nightmare on the dull brains of academics in the 21st century
Dennis Hayes
Visiting Professor, Oxford Brookes University and the founder of Academics For Academic Freedom


This text moves along easily and the reader is often genuinely impressed by Steve's learning and insight; there was a lot in here that I enjoyed
Steve Yearley
Professor of Sociology, University of Edinburgh


Steve Fuller is a trip. His flamboyant style is crisp, simultaneously colloquial and insider-professional, wasting no time on polite euphemisms
Randall Collins
International Sociology Review of Books


The Sociology of Intellectual Life is the latest salvo from Steve Fuller in his ongoing fight for a strongly prescriptive philosophy of science. Fuller’s writing is pugnacious, passionate, and unabashedly political... smart and sophisticated, and we should feel lucky to have him in our midst, haranguing us for what he perceives to be our intellectual sins
Jeff Kochan
Metascience

Sample Materials & Chapters

Introduction

Chapter One


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