With Bourdieu, we can say that there is a fictional margin given between philosophy and sociology: a margin that operates as a very specific illusion recreated by philosophy in order to take distance from sociology. Philosophy runs away from sociology, so to speak, while sociology continues to endorse this margin within all its categorizing slant, failing to narrow its illusory distance. However, with its own tools and concepts, sociology is capable to put into question the distinctive status that philosophy has conquered for itself through history and through the canonization of the philosophical oeuvres that constitute it as a discipline. In this sense, Bourdieu’s socioanalytic approach emerges with the sociological maturation required to achieve such a task. Bourdieu has intensively questioned the scholastic view through which philosophy continues to generate and perpetuate its own ontological academic canonizations: he counterposes the scholastic illusion of philosophy to the necessity of ‘radicalizing the radical doubt’, i.e, the urgency of bringing into play the social conditions of philosophical activity, so to specifically dissolve any defense raised against the awareness of this specific illusion. For Bourdieu, the radical doubt requires to be radicalized inside the philosophical practice and by philosophers themselves: it requires not to be conveniently based on the critique of scholastic reason so to prevent its implied illusion to invoke the playful games of scholastic language, i,e. those that cannot break with its effects as they are rooted in a disposition already constituted by scholastic knowledge: the homo-academicus habitus.

Bourdieu considers that philosophers have to put in question the social conditions that objectify their own practice and that give sense to their own existence: by assuming such a risk they ensure for themselves the conditions for a truthful freedom to think as philosophers, i.e, through a critique capable to make visible the causes of the philosophical effects that underlie the conditions of that what is properly recognized as philosophical. Bourdieu also considers that it is necessary to counteract the hermeneutics that consecrate and historically canonize the scholastic tradition of the philosophical texts, i.e, from the analysis of the conditions of philosophical production. For that, he encourages the hermeneuts to retake Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise as a program that establishes a true science of cultural oeuvres and that promotes to break with the ritualistic embalming sponsored by textual canonization, in a way to subject these oeuvres to a rigorous historical research:

“It is clear that resistance to historicization is rooted not only in the habits of thought of a whole corporation, acquired and reinforced by the routine teaching and exercises of ritualized practice, but also in the interests attached to a social position. Consequently, to combat this forgetting of history which, because it stems from belief, is barely amenable to the arguments of reason, I am tempted to set authority against superstition and to refer the devotees of hermeneutic philosophy, a strictly ‘philosophical’ reading of the texts consecrated by tradition as philosophical, to the various passages of the Tractatus in which Spinoza defines the programme for a genuine science of cultural products. Spinoza there invites the interpreters of the Books of the Prophets to subject these works to a ‘historical examination’ seeking to determine not only ‘the life, the conduct, and the studies of the author of each book, who he was, what was the occasion, and the epoch of his writing, whom did he write for, and in what language’, but also ‘into whose hands it fell … by whose advice it was received into the Bible, and … how all the books now universally recognized as sacred, were united into a single whole.’”

Considering this interesting Spinozian disquisitions, we see that the fictional margin between philosophy and sociology is also inadvertently operating as a sort of disciplinary invite made by the former, in a way to challenge the latter to venture an analysis of philosophical production: an analysis that cannot be but helpful to reestablish the conditions to enrich and renew the philosophical practice.