ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the third part of this book. The part deals with that part of Georg Simmel's work which lies in that the field of philosophical inquiry flanking the empirical sciences of the socio-historical actuality, namely, social metaphysics. In this field the results of the different social sciences are correlated with the results of other sciences and brought to completion. In this sphere lie Simmel's characteristic contributions to the philosophy of culture. They have this formal similarity, that they are all attempts to reach a fundamental understanding of a sphere of life by viewing a selected phenomenon of that sphere as its characteristic expression. For the purpose of this study Simmel's Philosophy of Money is best suited to illustrate his conception of the function of a social metaphysics as distinct from the function of a social science or a philosophic inquiry into the presuppositions of the social sciences.
