Jørn Bjerre

Gregory Bateson developed his transdisciplinary thinking in the shadow of sociology, but his ideas are not generally viewed as part of the field of classical sociology. This article will explain this exclusion by arguing that Bateson’s way of theorising – while attempting to make progress in the understanding of reality – returns to ideas that were already rejected within the field in which he first worked. Furthermore, as a reading of Bateson through the lens of Durkheim will show, Bateson’s theories fail to provide a better understanding of social reality than those of his predecessors. This type of critical analysis demonstrates the weakness of some of Bateson’s central claims and contributes to a more in-depth understanding and reassessment of his ideas from a sociological perspective. Pointing out that Bateson’s critique of the modern worldview is based on a pre-critical and pre-modern philosophy of wholeness is not to invalidate Bateson’s foundational intuition that our current mode of thinking challenges our chances of surviving as a species. However, in order to make a theoretically convincing argument concerning how our thinking challenges our survival, a more critical understanding of the relation between mind and society than the one Bateson offers is required.

While the influence of classical philosophy on sociology has been the subject of several studies, less attention has been given to the question of how the founders of sociology viewed classical philosophy. This article discusses Émile Durkheim’s account of the historical role of Greek philosophy as described in his lectures on The Evolution of Educational Thought. It demonstrates how Durkheim makes several erroneous claims concerning Greek morality that, taken together, produced a stereotyped image of the Greeks as intellectual giants but moral dwarfs. Downplaying the historical role of Greek morality, Durkheim attributes one of the most important social facts in connection with the development of Western moral individualism – the inward-oriented morality – to the innovative power of Christian religion. Despite this bias, the great twentieth-century interpreters of social thought, such as Talcott Parsons, Steven Lukes and Robert A. Jones, have continually referred to Durkheim’s historical analyses without questioning his assertions. Sociologists need to cease citing Durkheim as an authority on moral education in the classical world inasmuch as so many of his claims promote a false image of Greek morality and education.

This article discusses how the results of infant research challenge the assumptions of the classical sciences of social behaviour. According to A.J. Bergesen, the findings of infant research invalidate Durkheim's theory of mental categories, thus requiring a re-theorizing of sociology. This article argues that Bergesen's reading of Emile Durkheim is incorrect, and his review of the infant research in fact invalidates his argument. Reviewing the assumptions of sociology in the light of the findings of infant research, it is argued that the real challenge is to formulate a research strategy that combines the findings of the two sciences

The aim of John Searle’s philosophy of society is to provide a foundation for the social sciences. Arguing that the study of social reality needs to be based on a philosophy of language, Searle claims that sociology has little to offer since no sociologist ever took language seriously. Attacking Durkheim head-on, Searle not only claims that Durkheim’s project differs from his own but also that Durkheim’s sociology has serious shortcomings. Opposing Searle, this paper argues that Durkheim’s account of social reality is still viable and that Searle’s attack backfires on his own theoretical project