positivism summary

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Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte, drawing by Tony Toullion, 19th century; in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

positivism, Any philosophical system that confines itself to the data of experience, excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations, and emphasizes the achievements of science. Positivism is closely connected with empiricism, pragmatism, and logical positivism. More narrowly, the term designates the philosophy of Auguste Comte, who held that human thought had passed inevitably through a theological stage into a metaphysical stage and was passing into a positive, or scientific, stage. Believing that the religious impulse would survive the decay of revealed religion, he projected a worship of mankind, with churches, calendar, and hierarchy.

Hippolyte Taine Summary

Hippolyte Taine was a French thinker, critic, and historian, one of the most-esteemed exponents of 19th-century French positivism. He attempted to apply the scientific method to the study of the humanities. Taine was born into a professional middle-class family; his father was a lawyer. He was

Auguste Comte Summary

Auguste Comte was a French philosopher known as the founder of sociology and of positivism. Comte gave the science of sociology its name and established the new subject in a systematic fashion. Comte’s father, Louis Comte, a tax official, and his mother, Rosalie Boyer, were strongly royalist and

Herbert Spencer Summary

Herbert Spencer was an English sociologist and philosopher, an early advocate of the theory of evolution, who achieved an influential synthesis of knowledge, advocating the preeminence of the individual over society and of science over religion. His magnum opus, The Synthetic Philosophy (1896), was

Bertrand Russell Summary

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, a founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Russell’s contributions to logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics established