Positivism

The nineteenth century was a century represented by its actors as one of irreversible progress – one that the advance of the sciences was driving toward an increasingly developed future. In this future, it was thought, knowledge would allow man to emancipate himself once and for all; he would be freed from the heaviest and most punishing tasks, which would be carried out by machines. The control of fossil fuels allowed for the invention of the train, and electricity appeared, as did photography. Medicine progressed. Scientific research permitted an increasing number of illnesses to be cured. These advances fascinated philosophers of the social. Their positivist idea – that it is possible to identify the principal natural laws that govern the development of human groups, just as it is possible to identify the laws that govern the physical world – gained ground. Saint‐Simon, the first of these philosophers, envisaged a social physiology whose task would be to observe social phenomena in the same way as we observe natural phenomena. But it was Comte who, theorizing what we still understand today as sociology, would endorse the particular strand of social philosophy that constituted positivism

Epistemology · Natural (archaeology · Natural law · Positivism · Principal (computer security · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · History · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy, Science, and History · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education

• Pragmatism

  William H James, William James•1907

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• The Positivist dispute in German sociology

  Theodor W Adorno•The Positivist dispute in German…•1976

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• Reassembling the Social

  Bruno Latour•REASSEMBLING THE SOCIAL: AN…•2005

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