General readers may be put off by a hefty tome with chapters given such titles as "The Post-revolutionary Condition: Boundaries and Philosophical Puzzles" (which includes the subsection "The Vienna Circle as a Nexus of Struggles"), but those with a dedicated interest in the history of philosophy will find much to enjoy in the multicultural examples Collins draws upon. Ancient China, classical Greece, medieval Islam, and the French existentialists are just the tip of the iceberg illustrating his theory that intellectual progress is made through the personal interaction of philosophers and other thinkers. "Great intellectual work," Collins writes, "is that which creates a large space on which followers can work," and The Sociology of Philosophies certainly qualifies. --Ron Hogan

First, each section on a particular philosophical tradition (e.g. ancient Greece, Indian, Medieval Islamic, Chinese, Modern) is an interesting high-level history of tradition in its own rights. This alone makes the price tag worthwhile.

More importantly, Collins included very interesting insights about individual period that is not covered by other general histories:
1) How some schools of thoughts become popular not because they are correct but because they are extreme
2) Parallelisms that occur in different periods of the same tradition (e.g. Post-Shankara positions in India has its parallel during the hey-day of Buddhist philosophy)
3) Parallelisms that occur across traditions (e.g. compelling coverage of how medieval Christian & Islamic philospophy shares a similar structure)

With these characteristics, I think this book clearly satisfies the need us interested in global history of philosophy, for which Collins is clearly very passionate about.

On the sociology theoretical piece, I think the theory is fine: it articulates a lot of aspects of which most students of philosophy has a vague sense. The theory is almost 'common sense'-- just that it doesn't seem to have been clearly articulated that way in academic circles. As such, the theory piece is less interesting, but it is not intruding and it provides a sound umbrella thesis for Collins' insights on individual traditions.

Lastly, one point about the 'data' that Collins use-- the 'maps' that link the different philosophers in networks. I think it is interesting to read (because it includes a lot of interesting names-- familiar or otherwise), but they don't really provide the 'data' on which the sociological theory can be based. I think Collins himself recognized this-- and thus his appendix about the important 'isolates' like Ibn Sina.

The book 'The Sociology of Philosophies' purports to be 'The first comprehensive history of world philosophy,' as well as 'a social history of global intellectual life.' Collins in this book takes as his subject the whole of human intellectual endeavour, exploring the strands and developments of philosophical thought in all the major cultures of the world.

Collins begins this weighty and, at times, hyper-intellectual tome by building a theory of intellectualism, ritual, education, and philosophical reflection. He identifies two of the longest and most dominant philosophical strands as being those arising in Greece and China.

Collins posits the theory that intellectual pursuits do not arise in a vacuum, and are more of a societal and communal development than an individual pursuit or achievement.

'That ideas are not rooted in individuals is hard to accept because it seems to offend against a key epistemological point. Here the question is analytically distinct from the propensity to worship intellectual heroes.'

However, when one looks at the history of ideas, they usually arise in groups. While there are certainly key individuals who arose at different times in history, it is also true that there are patterns -- the age of philosophy in Greece, the Renaissance in Italy, etc. There is a particular atmosphere and sociological aspect to the culture that encourages and develops intellectual development that is unique to each, and leads to differing developments.

After exploring this history and the rituals of intellectuals and intellectualism (which is little acknowledged among scholars in the West), Collins explores who the major individuals are, who the minor individuals are, and what places they occupy in the chain of intellectual history. These chains are most pronounced in developments from Greece and developments from China; the Chinese strands continue through almost all subsequent Eastern thought, which is always responding to or reacting against key ideas formed there; in Western thought, almost all philosophical and intellectual development does the same with regard to the Greek development.

Collins proceeds from this to a theoretical framework (in which he develops more closely the Greek philosophical reflective framework, being the one from which Collins was educated, and thus the dominant underpinning of his writing) that explores the importance and rarity of true creativity. From this, he continues, doing a comparative analysis of intellectual communities, drawing in, in addition to Ancient Greece and Ancient China, India, Japan, Neo-Confucian China, Medieval Christendom, Islamic philosophies, Jewish philosophical development, then surveying modern western philosophies, French, German, and British.

Strong historical themes, political and other intellectual developments (such as the shift from faith-based to experimental-based knowledge and the rise of scientific method and mathematical objectivism) are included in his analysis. Collins concludes this work with Meta-Reflections, in which he explores the sequence and branches in the production of ideas socially (exploring the future of philosophy, which Collins states is 'a partisan theme which announces that the era of foundational questions is over. The call for the end of philosophy is recurrent, a standard ploy in intergenerational rearrangements, usually a prelude to a new round of deep troubles and new creativity.'

Collins' meta-reflections also include an epilogue on sociological realism. The quote that starts this review comes from this section. Self-evident truths are explored here.

'Virtually no one actually doubts the reality of the world of ordinary experience. It is only within specialised intellectual networks that the question has arisen whether this banal reality can be proven to a high standard of argument; and even intellectuals, when they are 'off duty', go back to assuming the reality of the ordinary time-space world.'

Sociological realism accepts the world as it is, which is not always the case with philosophy, even though philosophy purports to explain the world. This is a disconnect that occurs frequently in history. Collins further looks to mathematics and 'rapid-discovery science' for complications and developmental pieces in the intellectual history of the world.

Collins includes an extensive bibliography (worth the value of the book in itself), indexes of persons and of ideas, keys and timelines to figures, and a very interesting appendix entitled 'The Clustering of Contemporaneous Creativity', in which the ebb and flow of intellectual development on a global scale is examined and shows interesting results. He charts here the 'cultural production' of intellectuals, and their influence on their respective cultures. He traces such developments across hundreds of major and minor figures, determining fewer than 20 'isolates' in any cultural strand, and those being only among the minor figures.