This volume critically engages with the work of the acclaimed Australian sociologist John Carroll. It makes the argument for a metaphysical sociology, which Carroll has proposed should focus on the questions of fundamental existence that confront all humans: ‘Where do I come from?’, ‘What should I do with my life?’ and ‘What happens to me when I die?’. These questions of meaning, in the secular modern West, have become difficult to answer. As contemporary individuals increasingly draw on their inner resources, or 'ontological qualities', to pursue quests for meaning, the key challenge for a metaphysical sociology concerns the cultural resources available to people and the manner in which they are cultivated. Through wide-ranging discussions which include, film, romantic love, terrorism and video games, Metaphysical Sociology takes up this challenge. The contributors include emerging and established sociologists, a philosopher, a renowned actor and a musician. As such, this collection will appeal to scholars of social theory and sociology, and to the general reader with interests in morality, art, culture and the fundamental questions of human existence.

This updated edition provides an ideal teaching text for first-year university and college courses.

Published in 1918, The View of Life is Georg Simmel’s final work. Famously deemed “the brightest man in Europe” by George Santayana, Simmel addressed diverse topics across his essayistic writings, which influenced scholars in aesthetics, epistemology, and sociology. Nevertheless, certain core issues emerged over the course of his career—the genesis, structure, and transcendence of social and cultural forms, and the nature and conditions of authentic individuality, including the role of mindfulness regarding mortality. Composed not long before his death, The View of Life was, Simmel wrote, his “testament,” a capstone work of profound metaphysical inquiry intended to formulate his conception of life in its entirety. Now Anglophone readers can at last read in full the work that shaped the argument of Heidegger’s Being and Time and whose extraordinary impact on European intellectual life between the wars was extolled by Jürgen Habermas. Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel’s last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.

This book departs from approaches to truth in social science and ideas in philosophy that connect truth to the ability of language to fulfil certain ‘real-world’ conditions of objectivity. Pointing to an extra-linguistic level in our cognition at which scientific creativity occurs, it highlights the manner in which epistemic communities share, work on and modify not only the world-imaginaries that they endorse, but also those world-views that they reject or which partially overlap with their own. Through the concept of the social imaginary, the author explores the theoretical interrelations among various metaphysical world-imageries by which we organise our scientific understanding of the world and our expectations of experience, thus shedding light on the manner in which social ontology can inform our practices of sharing belief. A study at the intersection of metaphysics and social theory, The Fundamental Predicament of Contemporary Philosophy and the Social Sciences will appeal to scholars of sociology and philosophy with interests in questions of ontology and epistemology.

In this fresh look at the serious challenges posed to sociology by poststructuralist philosophy, Clayton W. Dumont Jr. maintains that disempowered, marginalized peoples have much to gain from a poststructuralist interrogation of sociology's philosophical and theological presuppositions. He argues that debates among American sociologists in the 1980s and 1990s over the value of difficult poststructuralist writings failed to examine cultural assumptions rooted in the discipline's extended Greek and Christian inheritances. Writing in an accessible style, the author situates complex poststructuralist ideas in tangible examples drawn from everyday life. The book concludes with analyses of the heated political conflict surrounding the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 and affirmative action programs, illustrating the promise of increased political efficacy and civic responsibility of a poststructuralist-informed sociology.