Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte was a French philosopher and sociologist known for coining the term "sociology" and for his development of positivism. He emphasized the scientific study of society and the application of scientific methods to social phenomena. Comte's work laid the foundation for the discipline of sociology and contributed to the understanding of social order and change.
8 Key excerpts on "Auguste Comte"
eBook - ePubDebates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy
Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses
- Kristin Gjesdal, Kristin Gjesdal(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Part VII Auguste Comte (1798–1857) Introduction Auguste Comte’s work covers a wide span of topics: science, politics, philosophy, and religion, to mention a few. Today, Comte is not always given due credit. In his own time, however, he was viewed as a weighty intellectual presence. Not only did he shape the outlook of French nineteenth-century thought, but he also came to leave a lasting imprint on English and German philosophy. John Stuart Mill, who was engaged in a lengthy correspondence with Comte, later published a book on his work, and Alexander von Humboldt attended his lectures on positive philosophy in Paris. Comte is often viewed as the founder of modern sociology and the father of positivism. However, it is not entirely obvious what positivism means in this context and how it is to be evaluated with respect to Comte’s philosophical commitments. These questions motivate Johan Heilbron’s discussion of Comte’s philosophy of science and Robert C. Scharff’s response to Heilbron. Heilbron’s article, “Auguste Comte and Modern Epistemology,” situates Comte within the intellectual and scientific climate of nineteenth-century France. Heilbron suggests that Comte’s originality should be sought primarily in the formulation of his epistemological position. Of particular importance in this regard is Comte’s awareness of the historicity and diversity of scientific practice, ranging (with increasing complexity) from abstract mathematics to concrete (empirical) research in sociology. Indeed, in Comte’s view, sociology represents the ultimate science, bridging the gap between the natural and the human sciences. While Heilbron discusses Comte’s contribution to the history and sociology of science, Scharff’s “Why was Comte an Epistemologist?” focuses on the philosophical presuppositions of Comte’s contribution, including his account of the historical development of science and philosophy, as well as of human society and reflection as such...
- Ted Benton(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2 Auguste Comte and positivist sociology Ted Benton DOI: 10.4324/9781315763484-2 Central to this chapter will be a consideration of that conception of the nature of scientific sociology which has had the greatest influence both on the practice of social scientists and on their conceptions of what they do. This is the positivist philosophy – or ‘positivism’ – usually associated with the name of Auguste Comte. I have already said a little about the positivist conception of the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences, and in this chapter I propose to discuss the leading doctrines of the positivist philosophy, as expounded by Comte himself. But Comte's positivism was not a closed and finally elaborated system of ideas. On the contrary, it and its relatives have been subjected to a continuous process of revision, development and sophistication up to the present day, and so I shall devote part of my third and fourth chapters to giving some account of these latter-day developments before advancing the more fundamental criticisms of positivist doctrine. Although Comte coined the term ‘positivisme’, he was by no means a profoundly original thinker, either in philosophy or sociology, and it will be necessary to approach his work through a prior discussion of the philosophical tradition to which he belonged, and the traditions of social thought which informed his work. It is also necessary, if Comte's particular combination of philosophical and social thought is to be understood, to speak a little of the economic and political situation in the France of the early nineteenth century. Epistemology The aspect of Comte's philosophy with which I shall be centrally concerned is his contribution to ‘epistemology’, or the philosophical theory of knowledge...
eBook - ePubTheory in Social and Cultural Anthropology
An Encyclopedia
- R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Frédéric Keck Frédéric Keck Comte, Auguste Comte, Auguste 135 138 Comte, Auguste Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was a French philosopher who gave sociology, a term coined by Bishop Sieyés in the 1780s, its definition among other human sciences. After his studies at the École Polytechnique in Paris, he worked as a secretary for Count Saint- Simon. He then gave a philosophy course for scientists, the Cours de Philosophie Positive, starting in 1826 and published between 1830 and 1842. After several personal crises (he spent 8 months at a psychiatric hospital in 1826) and a passionate engagement in the 1848 Revolution, he founded a “religion of humanity,” described in his Systéme de Politique Positive, published between 1851 and 1854. Reorganizing Society: Positivism as a Basis for Social Order Comte’s main problem was the reorganization of French society after the revolution. He rejected the liberal position that modern societies should be founded on individual rights and the laws of the market. He held the conservative view of society as a specific order, but he did not want to go back to the social order prior to the revolution. He referred to the new sciences, particularly biology and medicine (as he was close to the Medical School of Montpellier), to argue that the social order must be based on scientific conceptions, not on theological abstractions. For Comte, sociology was to follow the model of biology as a science based on specific laws. His first law was the law of the three stages, according to which every society passes from a theological stage (when humans think through divinities, as in fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism), to a metaphysical stage (when humans think through abstractions, e.g., individual rights or natural finality), to a positive stage (when humans think through laws based on observations). For Comte, the French Revolution of 1789 was the moment of crisis during which European societies passed from the metaphysical stage to the positive stage...
eBook - ePub- H. Scott Gordon(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This point is of more than passing interest, since, as we shall see, one of the most important features of the thought of the early French sociologists was their focus upon the organization and development of science and other intellectual activities, as social phenomena. Auguste Comte’s main thesis was that there are laws of intellectual evolution which govern the development of the human mind. He used the term ‘positivism’ to describe the epistemic culmination of this development and invented the word ‘sociology’ to denote the science that he himself would create as the final synthesis of all knowledge. In Chapter 1 we noted that man is an extraordinarily ‘altricial’ animal, the young of the species requiring many years of growth and preparatory training before they can assume the functions of mature persons. During this time a process of ‘enculturation’ takes place which fits the individual for life in a particular society or culture. We also noted that, as a social animal, man is unique in being ‘multisocial’, that is, the individual may belong simultaneously to numerous social groups such as occupational associations, religious associations, recreational associations, etc., whose membership may overlap. If we consider the discipline of sociology to be the branch of social science that is especially concerned with these aspects of human sociality the beginnings of sociology should probably be located in eighteenth-century France and Scotland. In France, the Marquis de Condorcet should be mentioned, since his emphasis upon the development of man’s knowledge and intellect as a phenomenon of social evolution focuses upon the aspect of sociality that became the centrepiece of Comte’s sociology...
eBook - ePubA History of Western Thought
From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century
- Nils Gilje, Gunnar Skirbekk(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...chapter 24 The rise of the social sciences BACKGROUND Several sciences, some of which are as old as philosophy, fall under the umbrella of social research. Parallel with the history of philosophy we have previously discussed political theory (beginning with the Sophists). We have also mentioned historiography (from Herodotus and Thucydides to Vico and Dilthey), jurisprudence (Cicero and Bentham), and pedagogics (from Socrates to Dewey). Furthermore, we have discussed economics (Smith, Ricardo, and Marx) and the tendency to shape the social sciences through the use of utilitarian categories, and at the same time we have hinted at another more historically oriented type of social research (based on Hegel’s thought). In this chapter we will survey the rise of sociology, with figures such as Comte, Tocqueville, Monies, Simmel, Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons. We will concentrate especially on their analysis of modern society and the status of sociology. Auguste Comte – THE ‘HIGH PRIEST’ OF SOCIOLOGY Auguste Comte (1798–1856) was a pioneer of the new science of society, sociology. The term ‘sociology’ is introduced in Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (183042) to replace physique sociale (‘social physics’), which he had previously used. Comte viewed the rise of sociology from a historical perspective: man’s intellectual development, according to Comte, has passed through three stages, the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. Mathematics, physics, and biology were already established on the positive stage. They were sciences that had liberated themselves from theological and metaphysical thinking. But the disciplines having man as their research object were still marked by theological and metaphysical speculations. Comte wanted to advance these disciplines to the positive, scientific stage. From this perspective, he became the advocate of sociology as a positive social science. The words positive and positivism have a polemical edge...
eBook - ePub- Gregory Claeys(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
...Andrew Wernick Andrew Wernick Comte, Auguste Comte, Auguste 172 177 Comte, Auguste Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (1798–1857), mathematician, philosopher, social theorist, reformer, and in later years, would-be founder of a new world religion is notable in the history of thought chiefly for his grand, and somewhat eccentric, systematization of positivism. Comte’s System Positivisme, a Comte coinage, meant more than a philosophy of science based on a methodological insistence on empirically based (positive) reasoning, though it was certainly that. A cornerstone of Comte’s system was its claim to have extended scientific principles to cover the entire human domain. But positive had a political meaning, too. Positive philosophy, in contrast with the individualistic and metaphysical négativisme that had come to prominence in the Revolution, was social and constructive, and underpinned a practical program for the rebuilding of post-Revolutionary France. This program was all the more practical, Comte thought, because, unlike the mystical dogmas of theists and the speculative utopias of metaphysicians, it was scientifically based and thus in tune with the real development and workings of society. Savoir pour prévoir, à fin de pouvoir. Not that positivism switched one epistemological absolutism for another. Eschewing the search for ultimate causes, its truths were relative, limited, in the form of scientific laws, to phenomena and their predictable regularities. The historical necessity for such a shift in perspective was both a premise of positivist politics and a unifying proposition internal to its theory of knowledge. Comte’s positivisme, then, was an all-embracing and historically self-situated synthesis of knowledge, thought, and action. For Comte, moreover, the establishment and dissemination of this synthesis was a matter of great urgency...
eBook - ePubMain Currents in Sociological Thought: Volume One
Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, De Tocqueville: The Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848
- Raymond Aron(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Comte was the observer of the contradiction between two social types–a contradiction which can be resolved only by the triumph of that social type which he calls scientific and industrial. This victory is inevitable, but it can be retarded or accelerated. The function of sociology, according to Comte, is to understand the necessary, indispensable, and inevitable course of history in such a way as to promote the realization of the new order. In his second stage, i.e., in the Cours de Philosophie Positive, the ruling ideas have not changed, but the perspective is broadened. For in the Opuscules Comte was primarily an observer of contemporary societies and their history, i.e., the history of Europe, and it would be easy for a non-European to demonstrate that in his first Opuscules Auguste Comte naïvely regarded the history of Europe as synonymous with the history of the human race; or, to employ another formulation, he presupposed the exemplary character of European history. In his second stage, that is, in the Cours de Philosophie Positive, Comte gave more universal scope and deeper meaning to the idea of progress. In particular, he developed and corroborated the two basic themes which he had already expounded in the Opuscules: the law of the three stages of human evolution and the classification of the sciences. 1 The law of the three stages consists in the assertion that the human mind passes through three phases. In the first, the mind explains phenomena by ascribing them to beings or forces comparable to man himself. In the second phase, that of metaphysics, the mind explains phenomena by invoking abstract entities like “nature.” Finally, in the third phase, man is content to observe phenomena and to establish the regular links existing among them, whether at a given moment or in the course of time...
eBook - ePubAuguste Comte and Positivism
The Essential Writings
- Gertrud Lenzer, Gunter Bischof(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Introduction: Auguste Comte and Modern Positivism For many years now the absence of republished editions of the major works of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer 1 has merely reflected the prevalent state of philosophical, social, and political theories. Such theories having achieved the status of “science,” their histories were considered by the majority of their proponents as precisely that: history, which, in accordance with the idea of “progress” that characterizes much of “scientific” thinking, had, if anything at all, only a curiosity value; it was no longer considered to be of any intrinsic importance to the scientific enterprise as such. Once the criteria and standards for what constitutes knowledge and progress in the natural sciences had been successfully adopted by the human and social sciences, all the preceding systems of thought and theories came to be regarded as prescientific, as belonging to the realm of social philosophy and unscientific speculation; they had now been superseded by the advance of scientific methodologies and theories and the research methods and findings of the later twentieth century. This increasing consolidation and prevalence of the scientific spirit represents the dominant form of modern consciousness whether we regard it in its theoretical configurations or in its popular or commonsense forms. Viewed historically, it represents the ultimate realization of the spirit of modern positivism, which in turn is closely related to the spirit of capitalism. Once successfully established on such a basis and elaborated along such lines, modern philosophy and the social sciences tended increasingly to cut themselves loose from history in general and from their immediate roots in the nineteenth century in particular...
