Social philosophy

Social philosophy examines questions about the foundations of social institutions, behavior, power structures, and interpretations of society in terms of ethical values rather than empirical relations. Social philosophers emphasize understanding the social contexts for political, legal, moral and cultural questions, and the development of novel theoretical frameworks, from social ontology to care ethics to cosmopolitan theories of democracy, natural law, human rights, gender equity and global justice.

Subdisciplines
There is often a considerable overlap between the questions addressed by social philosophy and ethics or value theory. Other forms of social philosophy include political philosophy and jurisprudence, which are largely concerned with the societies of state and government and their functioning.

Social philosophy, ethics, and political philosophy all share intimate connections with other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. In turn, the social sciences themselves are of focal interest to the philosophy of social science.

Social philosophy is broadly interdisciplinary, looking at all of phenomenology, epistemology, and philosophy of language from a sociological perspective; phenomenological sociology, social epistemology and sociology of language respectively.

Relevant issues
Some social philosophy is concerned with identity, and defining strata that categorize society, for example race and gender. Other social philosophy examines agency and free will, and whether people socialized in a particular way are accountable for their actions.

It also looks at the concepts of property, rights, and authority, examining actions in terms of both ethical values and their wider social effect; it applies situational ethics to broader political concepts.

Sociology of language considers communication in the context of social relations, for example speech acts or performative utterances are social actions in themselves.

Other relevant issues considered by social philosophy are:
 * The will to power
 * Modernism postmodernism
 * Cultural criticism

Social philosophies

 * Communitarianism
 * Conflict theory
 * Conservatism
 * Critical theory
 * Individualism
 * Positivism
 * Progressivism
 * Structural functionalism
 * Social constructionism
 * Symbolic interactionism

Social philosophers
A list of philosophers that have concerned themselves, although most of them not exclusively, with social philosophy:


 * Theodor Adorno
 * Giorgio Agamben
 * Hannah Arendt
 * Alain Badiou
 * Mikhail Bakunin
 * Jean Baudrillard
 * Walter Benjamin
 * Jeremy Bentham
 * Edmund Burke
 * Judith Butler
 * Thomas Carlyle
 * Chanakya
 * Cornelius Castoriadis
 * Noam Chomsky
 * Confucius
 * Simone de Beauvoir
 * Guy Debord
 * Émile Durkheim
 * Terry Eagleton
 * Friedrich Engels
 * Julius Evola
 * Michel Foucault
 * Sigmund Freud
 * Erich Fromm
 * Giovanni Gentile
 * Henry George
 * Erving Goffman
 * Jürgen Habermas
 * G. W. F. Hegel
 * Martin Heidegger
 * Thomas Hobbes
 * Max Horkheimer
 * Ivan Illich
 * Carl Jung
 * Ibn Khaldun
 * Peter Kropotkin
 * Jacques Lacan
 * R. D. Laing
 * Henri Lefebvre
 * Emmanuel Levinas
 * John Locke
 * Georg Lukács
 * Herbert Marcuse
 * Karl Marx
 * Marshall McLuhan
 * John Stuart Mill
 * Huey P. Newton
 * Friedrich Nietzsche
 * Michael Oakeshott
 * Antonie Pannekoek
 * Plato
 * Karl Popper
 * Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
 * John Rawls
 * Wilhelm Röpke
 * Jean-Jacques Rousseau
 * John Ruskin
 * Bertrand Russell
 * Jean-Paul Sartre
 * Alfred Schmidt
 * Arthur Schopenhauer
 * Roger Scruton
 * Socrates
 * Pitirim A. Sorokin
 * Thomas Sowell
 * Herbert Spencer
 * Oswald Spengler
 * Charles Taylor
 * Alexis de Tocqueville
 * Max Weber
 * John Zerzan
 * Slavoj Žižek