Volume 26, Number 2, 2022

EN:

This paper questions the adequacy of Georg Simmel’s answer to the question, how is society possible? Treating his essay on the question as a contribution to his overall sociology, it argues that the “a prioris” he identifies add little to the general understanding of social forms, are neither necessary nor sufficient to make society possible as a coherent mental construct, and play at best a modest role in Simmel’s own analysis of forms. Taking a step beyond Simmel’s essay, the paper briefly suggests that, if a Simmelian “epistemological” grounding is to remain relevant to the broader interactionist tradition, conditions for the possibility of society as interaction order should include schemas pertaining to social Wechselwirkung.

EN:

There is a gap between the particulars ofour scholarly knowledge about Georg Simmel and our image of him as a mind in its totality. The existing paradigmatic interpretations of Simmel's thought as a whole are often outdated and driven by anachronistic motivations. The task of the historian is to update these paradigms on the basis of our better and broader knowledge of Simmel and his contexts. My book is one such attempt. The paradigm it puts forward may help us to discard the familiar stereotypes of Simmel, while offering a more nuanced understanding of the main parameters of his thought and its development. It can also serve as a foundation for future non-historical studies of Simmel.

EN:

This brief contribution aims to focus Simmel's filtration of goethean morphology. More specifically, here we think that it could be assumed: a) that Simmel implicitly characterized his social studies through a morphological method; b) that this method can be traced back to Goethean studies of natural philosophy. In order to prove it, we take into account: Simmel's The Philosophy of Money, Sociology, Kant and Goethe and Goethe; some goethean passages about natural philosophy. Firstly, we present some theoretical suggestions related to Goethe's morphology; secondly, we give a look to Simmel's morphological approach involved into the study of society. In the end, we draw some conclusions that arise from this comparison.