Positivism - Critical Analysis, Mach, Avenarius

positivism

Table of Contents

Introduction
The social positivism of Comte and Mill
The critical positivism of Mach and Avenarius
Logical positivism and logical empiricism
- The earlier positivism of Viennese heritage
  - Language and the clarification of meaning
  - The verifiability criterion of meaning and its offshoots
  - Other issues
- The later positivism of logical empiricism
  - The status of the formal and a priori
  - Developments in linguistic analysis and their offshoots
Criticisms and controversies

References & Edit History Related Topics

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The influences of Hume and of Comte were also manifest in important developments in German positivism, just prior to World War I. The outstanding representatives of this school were Ernst Mach—a philosophical critic of the physics of Isaac Newton, an original thinker as a physicist, and a historian of mechanics, thermodynamics, and optics—and Richard Avenarius, founder of a philosophy known as empiriocriticism. Mach, in the introductory chapter of his book Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886; Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations), reviving Humean antimetaphysics, contended that all factual knowledge consists of a conceptual organization and elaboration of what ...(100 of 7460 words)

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