This book presents a set theoretical approach to sociological research. It revisits existing sociological approaches and discusses their limitations, before suggesting an alternative. While the existing canonical approaches of Positivism, Conflictualism, and Pragmatism are based on biology, history, and physics, respectively, the set theoretical approach is based on mathematics. Utilising its philosophical exploration delineated by Alain Badiou, the book further translates his work into the field of social science. The result of this translation is termed Multiplitism, which evades the limiting contradictions of existing approaches. Drawing on the mathematical notion of ‘set’ and relating it to recent sociological turns such as the relational and the ontological, the book proposes a scale-relativity through which the researcher (as subject) and the researched (as object) are integrated. The book will be of interest to social scientists, particularly social theorists and advanced level students.
Author(s): Eliran Bar-El
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 135
City: Cham
Preface
About the Book
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Part I: Towards Sociology of Multiplicities
Chapter 1: Introduction and Retroduction: The Logic of the Social
References
Chapter 2: The Antinomies of the Social: Self-reference, Identity and Society
References
Chapter 3: Problems Abound: Multiplicities—Beyond the One and the Many
References
Part II: The Events of the Social: Counting the Dialectic
Chapter 4: 1 → 2: From Science to Social Science—Positivism
References
Chapter 5: 2 → 3: From Kant to Hegel—Conflictualism
References
Chapter 6: 3 → 2: American Interlude—From James (Back) to Kant: Pragmatism
References
Chapter 7: 3 → 4: From Hegel to Badiou—Ontology of the Void
References
Part III: Means and Ends: The Four of the (Greimasian) Square
Chapter 8: Four Examples of Squared Analysis
Badiou’s Philosophy
Fraenkel’s Mathematics
Žižek’s Correction to Rumsfeld’s Theory of Knowledge
Bar-El’s Sociology
References
Chapter 9: Societies, Multiplicities, Sets: From Typology to Topology
References
Chapter 10: Conclusion: Multiplitism and the Singular
References
