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Lecture given at the School of Philosophy of Oviedo on November 11, 2024. https://www.fgbueno.es/efo/efo348.htm The French thinker Emile Durkheim is generally considered one of the founding fathers of sociology, if not at least of its French branch. A prominent place in this process is occupied by The Division of Social Labor, his doctoral thesis, published in 1893 (and translated into Spanish by Carlos González Posada, Biblioteca Científico-Filosófica, Daniel Jorro, Madrid 1928), in which he analyzes the changes that would be taking place in modern industrialized society, in relation to the division of labor, a concept inherited from the English economy (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc.), in light of his theory of modes of social solidarity (mechanical and organic) and from a functionalist methodological budget, indebted to the philosophies of Auguste Comte and Heriberto Spencer. Its historical importance lies, therefore, in the fact that the felicitous investigation contains, by a sort of dialectic, not only a germ of his later production (The Rules of the Sociological Method, Suicide, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life), but also a microcosm of sociology itself. Consequently, the gnoseological analysis that we will offer, from the framework of the Theory of Categorical Closure, the philosophy of the science of philosophical materialism, developed by the philosopher Gustavo Bueno, together with several of his disciples and followers, will require transcending the immanence of the book, as well as the development of the thought of its author, to serve as a canon of the epistemic place occupied by sociology, in relation to philosophy and in the whole of the "republic of sciences." Likewise, we will try to specify the way in which this work can be encoded, and under what determinations, an "origin" of its respective science, based on a global conception of sociology as a discipline. Finally, a critique will also be offered of the use that the category of the division of social labor has assumed, in the Durkheimian theoretical system, from the perspective of a philosophical anthropology and a materialist philosophy of history. Daniel Alarcón Díaz (Murcia 1996), has offered at the School of Philosophy of Oviedo the lessons “Criticism of the concept of 'gender (sexual)' from Philosophical Materialism” (4/Apr/2022), “Criticism of the concepts of sexual and gender identity from philosophical materialism” (6/Feb/2023) and “Sociology in general and the sociology of religion as its specialty” (30/Oct/2023).