Auguste Comte and Early Positivism

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Auguste Comte and Early Positivism
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French After the Revolution

• The Intellectual Background of Positivism is the
  efforts in the rehabilitation of the social order
  after the French Revolution 1789. There are two
  mainstreams
• 1. They who will return to the traditional
  society (political romanticists)
• 2. They who seek the new values of modernity and
  dream of future of the scientific industrial
  society (positivists)

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What is Positivism?

• An epistemological doctrine that the true
  knowledge is only about the fact. The fact or the
  factual is an object that can be observed
  empirically with our senses. The term positive
  doesnt mean normatively, but descriptively. It
  means the factual.

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Fact and Phenomenon

• The factual assumes that there is no the reality
  beyond or outside of the observable world. So,
  the positivists neglect the Kantian doctrine of
  das Ding an sich. For them the reality is only
  the phenomenal world.

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Positivist View of History

• According to Comte the history of mankind
  develops in three stages
• 1. Theological Stage
• 2. Metaphysical Stage
• 3. Positivist Stage

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Theological Stage

• Man searched the causes of natural phenomena
  behind the empirical world and found the
  superhuman forces like idols (fetishism), gods
  (polytheism) and God (monotheism).
• There was a progress of knowledge from the
  knowledge of impersonal forces to personal God.
• The social organization was absolutism
• But this stage can be compared with the infantile
  stage of human person.

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Metaphysical Stage

• In this stage the natural forces were not
  imagined as superhuman forces. They were grasped
  with abstract concepts like cause, ether ,
  being, substance etc. There was no more God
  in this stage, because God was conceptualized as
  an abstract entity.
• The social organization was laws oriented society
• This stage is comparable with the stage of
  adolescence of human person.

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Positivist Stage

• Man explains the natural phenomena factually,
  i.e. he doesnt try to explain them through
  theological or metaphysical causes. So, the fall
  of an apple is not cause by God or by the primal
  cause, but by gravitation. We can observe
  neither God nor primal cause. They are not facts.
  Only fact is observable.
• The social organization is industrial society
• In this stage the mankind reach the stage of
  maturity of his knowledge.

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Is Comtes History factual?

• Of course he developed his historical view
  according to certain ideological framework, i.e.
  the positivist ideology. In this ideology it is
  assumed that only the positivism is mature stage
  of knowledge. And the positivist society is the
  purpose of human history.

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The Hierarchy of Sciences

• According to Comte the mathematics is the
  fundamental of all sciences. So, the mathematics
  is the basis of the modern astronomy, and the
  mathematics and astronomy are the basis of modern
  physics. These three sciences are the basis of
  the chemistry, and biology. The complete and last
  science is sociology that assumes the other five
  sciences.

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The Positivist Religion

• In the spirit of positivism Comte will construct
  a new religion like Rousseaus civil religion.
  This positivist religion, so imagined Comte,
  imitates the catholic Church but without personal
  God. The god of positivist Religion is called
  grand etre (supreme being). So, Comtes
  Religion has its own priests, calendar, saints
  etc.