ABSTRACT
The processes of specialization and hybridization have wreaked havoc with the traditional organization of the social sciences. Each formal discipline becomes more and more diversified internally and at the same time more and more open for exchanges with other disciplines. Philosophy, the oldest discipline, has not only fragmented but has lost its fragments over time: from mathematics to theology, physics to psychology. “Original culture,” the early anthropologists assumed, would doubtless be found in some locale at least as remote as the Galapagos, such as Polynesia or New Guinea. Anthropology was bom a comparativist discipline, and exalted cultural heterogeneity, looking mostly at non-literate non-Westem societies. F. A. Hayek has suggested one role for philosophy, at least where it is in contact with the social sciences, in the development of scientific ethics and epistemology. In many ways, philosophy is returning to interact with the natural sciences, increasingly neglecting the social sciences.
