Auguste comte biography

InComte began delivering a series of lectures on his famous work Course of Positive Philosophywhose audience included the notable French scholars. He was hospitalized for treatment. He had to continue his treatment by getting hospitalized periodically. Inhe started working again on the Course of Positive Philosophy and published its six volumes in, and These volumes emphasized the scientific approach to inquiry in social sciences.

Marx was of the view that like natural phenomena, social phenomena can also be studied using the scientific method to generate valid scientific knowledge. His emphasis on the scientific approach to inquiry in social sciences in his Course of Positive Philosophy made him earn the title founder of positivism. From tohe served as a tutor and examiner at Ecole Polytechnique but due to his differences with its administrator, he was removed from his post in In the same year, he separated from his wife Caroline Massin after 17 years of their marriage.

In the following years of his life, Comte depended on his friends for his financial support. Notable among them was his close friend of John Stuart Mill who was an English philosopher. However, after about one-third of his lecture series, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Apart from being in hospital for a long time, he still managed to produce one of his major works.

This was a six-volume book called The Course in Positive Philosophy. In this work, he argued that, just like the physical world, society operated under its own laws. His efforts also furthered the study of society and sociology development. He supported himself auguste comte biography a job at Ecole Polytechnique, but he unfortunately clashed with administrators and was fired in In the same year, he divorced his wife of 17 years.

After losing his job, he started depending on his friends, family, and benefactors to support him. InComte became involved with Clotilde Vaux who was a French aristocrat and writer. Since she was not officially divorced from her husband, the two had platonic relationship and most people thought they were deeply in love. John Locke. Francis Bacon.

Charles-Louis de Secondat.

Auguste comte biography: Auguste Comte (–) is

Saint Thomas Aquinas. John Dewey. William James. John Stuart Mill. Philosophical Ideas and Sociology On his own, Comte developed a social doctrine based on scientific principles. The dead govern the living. To understand a science it is necessary to know its history. This leaves no confusion of how to act or who is the superior ruler out of the several gods seen in polytheism.

The theological state functions well as the first state of the mind when making a belief about an event because it creates a temporary placeholder for the cause of the action which can later be replaced. By allowing the brain to think of the reason behind phenomena, the polytheistic gods are fillers that can be replaced by monotheistic gods. The theological stage shows how the primitive mind views supernatural phenomena and how it defines and sorts the causes.

It alone has the important property of offering us a provisional theory,… which immediately groups the first facts, with its help, by cultivating our capacity for observation, we auguste comte biography able to prepare the age of a wholly positive philosophy. Comte believed the theological stage was necessary because of the foundational belief that man's earliest philosophy of explanation is the act of connecting phenomena around him to his own actions; that man may "apply the study of external nature to his own".

The theological state was also necessary for human progress on account that it creates a class in a society dedicated to "speculative activity". Comte momentarily admires the theological stage for its remarkable ability to enact this activity amidst a time when it was argued to be impractical. It is to this stage that the human mind owes "the first effectual separation between theory and practice, which could take place in no other manner" other than through the institution provided by the theological stage.

The Theological Stage is the stage that was seen primarily among the civilizations in the distant past. Having been used before the s, this is a very basic view of the world with little to no involvement in the world of science, and a world of illusions and delusions, as Freud would put it. To seek the nature of all beings, mankind puts its focus on sentiments, feelings, and emotions.

This turned mankind towards theology and the creation of gods to answer all their questions. The second stage, the metaphysical stage, is merely a modification of the first because a supernatural cause is replaced by an "abstract entity"; [ 22 ] it is meant to be a transitional stage, where there is the belief that abstract forces control the behavior of human beings.

Because it is a transitional stage between the theological stage and the positive stage, Comte deemed it the least important of the three stages and was only necessary because the human mind cannot make the jump from the theological to the positive stage on its own.

Auguste comte biography: A philosopher, mathematician, and

The metaphysical stage is the transitional stage. Because "Theology and physics are so profoundly incompatible", and their "conceptions are so radically opposed in character", human intelligence must have a gradual transition. Although it is the least important stage, it is necessary because humans could not handle the significant change in thought from theological to positivity.

The mind begins to notice the facts themselves, caused by the emptiness of the metaphysical agents through "over subtle qualification that all right-minded persons considered them to be only the abstract names of the phenomena in question". In understanding Comte's argument, it is important to note that Comte explains the theological and positive stages first and only then returns to explain the metaphysical stage.

His rationale in this decision is that "any intermediate state can be judged only after a precise analysis of two extremes".

Auguste comte biography: Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier

Furthermore, this state "reconciles, for a time, the radical opposition of the other two, adapting itself to the gradual decline of the one and the preparatory rise of the other". Unlike its predecessor and successor, the metaphysical state does not have a strong intellectual foundation nor social power for a political organization.

Rather it simply serves to guide man until the transition from imaginative theological state to rational positive state is complete. The last stage — the positive stage — is when the mind stops searching for the cause of phenomena and realizes that laws exist to govern human behavior and that this stage can be explained rationally with the use of reason and observation, both of which are used to study the auguste comte biography world.

Comte believed that this study of sociology he created was "the science that [came] after all the others; and as the final science, it must assume the task of coordinating the development of the whole of knowledge" [ 22 ] because it organized all of human behavior. The final, most evolved stage is the positivist stage, the stage when humans give up on discovering absolute truth, and turn towards discovering, through reasoning and observation, actual laws of phenomena.

Comte was a positivist, believing in the natural rather than the supernatural, and so he claimed that his time period, the s, was in the auguste comte biography stage. Mathematics, the "science that relates to the measurement of magnitudes", is the most perfect science of all, and is applied to the most important laws of the universe.

Physics, as well as chemistry, are the "general laws of the inorganic world", and are harder to distinguish. It is through observation that humanity is able to gather knowledge. The only way within society to gather evidence and build upon what we do not already know to strengthen society is to observe and experience our situational surroundings.

Comte expresses the idea that we have to open our eyes to different ideas and ways to evaluate our surroundings such as focusing outside of the simple facts and abstract ideas but instead dive into the supernatural. This does not make mean that what is around us is not critical to look out for as our observations are critical assets to our thinking.

The things that are "lost" or knowledge that is in the past are still relevant to recent knowledge. It is what is before our time that guides why things are the way they are today. We would always be relying on our own facts and would never hypothesize to reveal the supernatural if we do not observe. Observing strives to further our thinking processes.

According to Comte, "'The dead govern the living,' which is likely a reference to the cumulative nature of positivism and the fact that our current world is shaped by the actions and discoveries of those who came before us," [ citation needed ] As this is true, the observations only relevant to humanity and not abstractly related to humanity are distinct and seen situationally.

The situation leads to human observation as a reflection of the tension in society can be reviewed, overall helping to enhance knowledge development. Upon our observation skills, our thinking shifts. As thinkers and observers, we switch from trying to identify truth and turn toward the rationality and reason nature brings, giving us the ability to observe.

This distinct switch takes on the transition from the abstract to the supernatural. The condensing and formulation of human knowledge is what Comte drives us toward to ultimately build the strongest society possible. If scientists do not take the chance to research why a certain animal species are going distinct and their facts researched by those in the past are no longer true of the present, how is the data supposed to grow?

How are we to gain more knowledge? These facts of life are valuable, but it is beyond these facts that Comte gestures us to look to. Instead of the culmination of facts with little sufficiency, knowledge altogether takes on its role in the realm of science. In connection to science, Comte relates to science in two specific fields to rebuild the construction of human knowledge.

As science is broad, Comte reveals this scientific classification for the sake of thinking and the future organization of society. By reconstructing human thinking and observation, societal operation alters. The attention is drawn to science, hypothesis', natural law, and supernatural ideas, allows sociology to be divided into these two categories.

By combining the simple facts from the abstract to the supernatural and switching our thinking towards hypothetical observation, the sciences culminate in order to formulate sociology and this new societal division. To continue building a strong intellectual society, Comte believed the building or reformation requires intricate steps to achieve success.

First, the new society must be created after the old society is destroyed because "without…destruction no adequate conception could be formed of what must be done,". On the same terms, there will be no room for progress if the new society continues to compare itself to the old society. If humanity does not destroy the old society, the old society will destroy humanity.

Or on the other hand, if one destroys the old society, "without ever replacing it, the people march onwards towards total anarchy,". The burdens will grow deep and entangle the platforms for the new society, thus prohibiting progress, and ultimately fulfilling the cursed seesaw of remodeling and destroying society. Hence, according to Comte, to design a successful new society, one must keep the balance of reconstruction and deconstruction.

This balance allows for progress to continue without fault. Auguste Comte is well known for writing in his book The Positive Philosophy that people would never learn the chemical composition of the stars. This has been called a very poor prediction regarding human limits in science. In thirty years people were beginning to learn the composition of stars through spectroscopy.

Beyond Comte's substantive theoretical corpus, a less well-known yet interesting aspect of his work is his reflections upon the relation between self and knowledge production. Comte was troubled by the problem of how an individual that is the product of actually existing society could produce science aimed at transforming said society, and speaks in Positive Polity [ 33 ] of a process of self-transformation aimed at improving himself as a knowledge producer.

As the methodologist Audrey Alejandro has elaborated, [ 34 ] these considerations by Comte foreshadow key concerns in contemporary social science regarding the importance of reflexivitymeaning by this the necessity to be critically aware and to assess the ways personal dispositions and unconscious discourses shape the production of knowledge.

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