Abstract

A brief and selective conceptual glance at the history of sociological foundation shows that a certain assumption about the `ultimate referentiality' of society has been at the heart of sociology. The late modern responses to, and reactions against, foundationalism in various schools in the human and social sciences provide a springboard for a new beginning in sociological inquiry. Drawing on radical phenomenology and postmetaphysical hermeneutical philosophy, this article summons attention to the concept of ultimate referentiality as the point of moorage that supposedly secures our theoretical postulates in a presumed locus in the `real' — namely, `society'. Given our late modern crisis of metaphysical claims about ultimate foundations, the article makes an invitation to an interpretative sociological renewal with an acute sensitivity toward praxis. The article provisionally makes a number of suggestions with respect to the modes of sociological practice that would render the discipline attuned to our age