A century ago, shortly before his death, Simmel (1964) formulated an enigmatic idea of a philosophical sociology as a ‘study of the epistemological and metaphysical aspects of society’ (23) concerned with questions that transcend the boundaries of empirical inquiry. Drawing its inspirations from intellectual history, the project built on Nietzschean meditations on the fate of the modern individual in a world with no secure foundations, split between the herd instinct to obey the moral demands of a decadent society, and the experimental project of overcoming humanity. As modernist philosophizing became institutionalized, and a robust apparatus of socio-scientific testing replaced speculative theorizing, it was unsurprisingly Simmel’s ‘formal sociology’ rather than his interpretation of Nietzsche that secured him a place in the sociological canon. Beyond attempts to resituate Simmel’s life-sociology as part of the broader modernist project (Goodstein 2017; Kemple 2018; Pyyhtinen 2017), the limited appeal of his notion of philosophical sociology captures a fundamental sense in which post-Kantian philosophy and social theory often meet only to diverge, despite their shared theoretical vocabularies and intertwined disciplinary histories. It also point towards various enticing if dangerous avenues for thought that open up in recovering those connections, such as Gehlen’s project of anthropological philosophy which provided a socio-scientific basis for testing some of Nietzsche’s most controversial naturalist claims, connecting between the scientific and philosophical registers to elevate humanity beyond the value system of the decadent ‘herd animal’ (Schacht 2015). In Debating Humanity: Towards a Philosophical Sociology, Daniel Chernilo (2017) aims to build conceptual bridges between those fields, reconstructing the idea of philosophical sociology as reengaging ‘unanswerable’ questions one might at first associate with the philosophical tradition, in particular the post-Kantian lineage of philosophical anthropology which views ‘man’ as a species concerned with the conditions of her own meaning-making practices. Neither Nietzsche nor Simmel are being followed here – Chernilo takes Simmel’s original project to be oriented around ‘epistemic self-clarification’ (15) – but the broader idea of the human as a source of value finds its echo in Chernilo’s claim about the centrality of this figure to understandings of social life, both in an epistemic and moral sense. Departing from a bold characterization of humans as ‘ultimate arbiters of what is right and wrong’ (1), Chernilo aims to draw out sociology’s normative stakes and reconstruct its implicit humanist orientation. Arguably, it is the latter which makes his project provocative in the contemporary theoretical landscape: the twenty-first century re-signification of philosophical sociology is framed against the prevalence of broadly Foucauldian and post-humanist themes in socio-scientific thinking, which

中文翻译：

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人类，固执的人类，明智的人类？

一个世纪前，西梅尔（Simmel，1964）逝世前不久，他提出了一种哲学社会学的神秘概念，作为“对社会的认识论和形而上学方面的研究”（23），涉及超越实证研究边界的问题。该项目从思想史上汲取灵感，该项目以尼采冥想为基础，建立在一个没有牢固基础的世界中现代个体的命运的基础上，既有遵循堕落社会道德要求的畜群本能，也有克服人类的实验性项目。随着现代主义哲学化的制度化，以及强大的社会科学测试手段取代了投机理论，毫不奇怪的是，西梅尔的“形式社会学”而不是他对尼采的解释使他在社会学上获得了一席之地。除了尝试将Simmel的生活社会学作为更广泛的现代主义项目的一部分（Goodstein 2017; Kemple 2018; Pyyhtinen 2017）之外，他的哲学社会学概念的有限吸引力还体现了一种基本意义，即后康德哲学和社会理论经常相遇尽管他们有着共同的理论词汇和相互交织的学科历史，但它们之间还是存在分歧。它还指出了各种诱人的，危险的思路，为恢复这些联系开辟了思路，例如盖伦的人类学哲学计划，为检验尼采最有争议的自然主义者的某些主张提供了社会科学基础，并在科学和哲学记载之间建立了联系。将人类提升到beyond废的“牧群动物”价值体系之外（Schacht 2015）。在辩论人类：迈向哲学社会学，丹尼尔·切尔尼洛（Daniel Chernilo，2017）旨在在这些领域之间建立概念性桥梁，重新构建哲学社会学的观念，以重新考虑人们最初可能与哲学传统相关的``无法回答''的问题，特别是后康德后世的哲学世系人类学认为“男人”是一个与自己的意义形成实践条件有关的物种。尼采和西梅尔都没有得到关注–切尔尼洛将西梅尔的原始项目定位为“认识论的自我澄清”（15）–但是，人类作为价值来源的更广泛观念在切尔尼洛关于“人类的中心性”的主张中得到了回响。这个数字从认知和道德的角度理解了社会生活。切尔尼洛不同于人类对“对与错的终极仲裁者”的大胆描述（1），其目的是找出社会学的规范利害关系，并重构其内在的人本主义取向。可以说，是后者使他的研究计划在当代的理论视野中引起了人们的注意：二十一世纪哲学社会学的重新定义与社会科学思想中广泛的福柯派和后人文主义主题的普遍存在形成了鲜明的对比。