166
Sociology and Other Sciences I
Language: English
Since the nineteenth century it has been commonly believed that academic discipline needs to establish itself by identifying research subjects and methods and excluding others from exploiting them. Positioning a new science involves determining its relationship to other extant sciences and a self-conceptualizing effort which refers to them for defining features.
It is our goal in this session to discuss this self-conceptualizing efforts of sociology both in its early and more recent days. Whereas some disciplines, like philosophy, history or psychology, are known to have been congenial to many sociological classics, there are other disciplines whose connection to sociology seems equally salient, like law, ethnology, anthropology, religion studies, linguistics, geography, biology, mathematics or economy. We are interested in all kinds of analysis covering interdependencies of sociology and other sciences, both friendly and antagonistic, including in particular theoretical delimitations and alliances, conceptual lendings and borrowings, academic networking and academic feuds, biographical entanglements and institutionalization patterns in sociological centers and peripheries. Our focus would be a historical view of the interplay between interdisciplinary and disciplinary features of sociology, with due attention to distinctive national and regional development paths as well as fashions and turns in scholarly politics.