2 Answers

  1. Social philosophy talks about good and bad. For example, which society is good and which is bad, and why it is such or such.

    Sociology is unbiased and treats what seems to exist, what can be changed.

  2. They differ in the purpose of texts, to whom and why they are written.

    Theoretical sociology exists for empirical sociologists and creates theoretical schemes for future empirical work. A good theoretical sociologist, in this sense, one whose ideas have proved useful to empiricists, has found application “in the field”.

    Social philosophy is directed “into eternity” and solves the ultimate questions: justice, meaning and foundations of social life, justification or criticism of the social order.

    Whether the author becomes a social philosopher or a social theorist depends, in the end, not only on him, but also on the readers, what they will do with the source texts. For example, Deleuze and Guattari seem to be pure social philosophers (or even just philosophers), but to the extent that their ideas about, say, networks and flows have influenced modern sociology, they have – perhaps against their will – entered the reading circle of theoretical sociologists. Hobbes wrote his treatises as a social philosopher (then called “moral philosophy”), but Parsons in the twentieth century turned him into a theoretical sociologist, turned the “Hobbesian problem of order” into one of the main ones for sociology, both theoretical and empirical. Parsons himself, on the contrary, clearly set himself the task of a sociologist-theorist, to create a “frame of reference” for subsequent empirical work-but left-wing critics read him “philosophically” as an ideologist of modern bourgeois society, a “new Hegel” who justifies existing orders that are actually unfair and internally conflicting.

    The border, in general, is there, but it is mobile and permeable.

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