This article introduces the idea of philosophical sociology as an enquiry into the relationships
between implicit notions of human nature and explicit conceptualizations of social life within
sociology. Philosophical sociology is also an invitation to reflect on the role of the normative
in social life by looking at it sociologically and philosophically at the same: normative selfreflection
is a fundamental aspect of sociology’s scientific tasks because key sociological
questions are, in the last instance, also philosophical ones. For the normative to emerge, we
need to move away from the reductionism of hedonistic, essentialist or cynical conceptions of
human nature. Sociology needs equally to grasp the conceptions of the good life, justice,
democracy or freedom whose normative contents depend on more or less articulated
conceptions of our shared humanity rather than on strategic considerations. The idea of
philosophical sociology is then sustained on three main pillars and I use them to structure this
article: (1) a revalorization of the relationships between sociology and philosophy; (2) a
universalistic principle of humanity that works as a major regulative idea of sociological
research, and; (3) an argument on the social (immanent) and pre‐social (transcendental)
sources of the normative in social life. As invitations to embrace posthuman cyborgs, nonhuman
actants and material cultures proliferate, philosophical sociology offers the reminder
that we still have to understand more fully who are the human beings that populate the social world
