Augusto Comte Pdf

Auguste Comte was born on January 20, 1798 (according to the Revolutionary calendar then used in France), in Montpellier, France. He was a philosopher who is also considered to be the father of sociology, the study of the development and function of human. Comte On Theory 'No social fact can have any scientific meaning till it is connected with some other social facts' (II, p. 'If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some.

Auguste Comte by Tony Touillon
Born	19 January 1798 Montpellier, France
Died	5 September 1857 (aged 59)
Nationality	French
Alma mater	University of Montpellier École Polytechnique
Spouse(s)	Caroline Massin (m. 1825–1842)
Era	19th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
Notable ideas	Sociological positivism, law of three stages, encyclopedic law, altruism
Bacon, Bichat, Condorcet, Descartes, Saint-Simon,^[1]Denis Diderot^[2]
Émile Littré, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert Spencer, Émile Durkheim, Charles Maurras,^[3]Harriet Martineau, Pierre Laffitte, Eugen Dühring, George Henry Lewes, Edward Spencer Beesly, Frederic Harrison

Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte (pronounced [oɡyst kɔ̃t](listen); 19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857)^[4] was a French philosopher and writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.^[5] Comte is also seen as the founder of the academic discipline of sociology.^[6]

Influenced by the utopian socialistHenri Saint-Simon,^[4] Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French Revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot.^[7] His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology presented by Émile Durkheim as practical and objective social research.

Auguste Comte Sociology

Comte's social theories culminated in his 'Religion of Humanity',^[4] which presaged the development of non-theistic religious humanist and secular humanist organizations in the 19th century. Comte may have coined the word altruisme (altruism).^[8]

2Thought

Life[edit]

Auguste Comte was born in Montpellier,^[4]Hérault on 19 January 1798. After attending the Lycée Joffre^[9] and then the University of Montpellier, Comte was admitted to the École Polytechnique in Paris. The École Polytechnique was notable for its adherence to the French ideals of republicanism and progress. The École closed in 1816 for reorganization, however, and Comte continued his studies at the medical school at Montpellier. When the École Polytechnique reopened, he did not request readmission.

Following his return to Montpellier, Comte soon came to see unbridgeable differences with his Catholic and monarchist family and set off again for Paris, earning money by small jobs. In August 1817 he found an apartment at 36 rue Bonaparte in Paris' 6ème (where he lived until 1822) and later that year he became a student and secretary to Henri de Saint-Simon, who brought Comte into contact with intellectual society and greatly influenced his thought therefrom. During that time Comte published his first essays in the various publications headed by Saint-Simon, L'Industrie, Le Politique, and L'Organisateur (Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte's Le Censeur Européen), although he would not publish under his own name until 1819's 'La séparation générale entre les opinions et les désirs' ('The general separation of opinions and desires'). In 1824, Comte left Saint-Simon, again because of unbridgeable differences. Comte published a Plan de travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société (1822) (Plan of scientific studies necessary for the reorganization of society). But he failed to get an academic post. His day-to-day life depended on sponsors and financial help from friends. Debates rage as to how much Comte appropriated the work of Saint-Simon.^[1]

Comte married Caroline Massin in 1825. In 1826, he was taken to a mental health hospital, but left without being cured – only stabilized by French alienist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol – so that he could work again on his plan (he would later attempt suicide in 1827 by jumping off the Pont des Arts). In the time between this and their divorce in 1842, he published the six volumes of his Cours.

Comte developed a close friendship with John Stuart Mill. From 1844, he fell deeply in love with the Catholic Clotilde de Vaux, although because she was not divorced from her first husband, their love was never consummated. After her death in 1846 this love became quasi-religious, and Comte, working closely with Mill (who was refining his own such system) developed a new 'Religion of Humanity'. John Kells Ingram, an adherent of Comte, visited him in Paris in 1855.

He published four volumes of Système de politique positive (1851–1854). His final work, the first volume of La Synthèse Subjective ('The Subjective Synthesis'), was published in 1856.

Comte died in Paris on 5 September 1857 from stomach cancer and was buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery, surrounded by cenotaphs in memory of his mother, Rosalie Boyer, and of Clotilde de Vaux.His apartment from 1841–1857 is now conserved as the Maison d'Auguste Comte and is located at 10 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, in Paris' 6th arrondissement.

Thought[edit]

Comte's positivism[edit]

Comte first described the epistemological perspective of positivism in The Course in Positive Philosophy, a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. These texts were followed by the 1848 work, A General View of Positivism (published in English in 1865). The first three volumes of the Course dealt chiefly with the physical sciences already in existence (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), whereas the latter two emphasised the inevitable coming of social science. Observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and classifying the sciences in this way, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.^[10] Comte was also the first to distinguish natural philosophy from science explicitly. For him, the physical sciences had necessarily to arrive first, before humanity could adequately channel its efforts into the most challenging and complex 'Queen science' of human society itself. His work View of Positivism would therefore set out to define, in more detail, the empirical goals of sociological method.^{[citation needed]}

Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'.

Comte's stages were (1) the theological stage, (2) the metaphysical stage, and (3) the positive stage.^[11] (1) The Theological stage was seen from the perspective of 19th century France as preceding the Age of Enlightenment, in which man's place in society and society's restrictions upon man were referenced to God. Man blindly believed in whatever he was taught by his ancestors. He believed in a supernatural power. Fetishism played a significant role during this time. (2) By the 'Metaphysical' stage, Comte referred not to the Metaphysics of Aristotle or other ancient Greek philosophers. Rather, the idea was rooted in the problems of French society subsequent to the French Revolution of 1789. This Metaphysical stage involved the justification of universal rights as being on a vauntedly higher plane than the authority of any human ruler to countermand, although said rights were not referenced to the sacred beyond mere metaphor. This stage is known as the stage of investigation, because people started reasoning and questioning, although no solid evidence was laid. The stage of investigation was the beginning of a world that questioned authority and religion. (3) In the Scientific stage, which came into being after the failure of the revolution and of Napoleon, people could find solutions to social problems and bring them into force despite the proclamations of human rights or prophecy of the will of God. Science started to answer questions in full stretch. In this regard he was similar to Karl Marx and Jeremy Bentham. For its time, this idea of a Scientific stage was considered up-to-date, although from a later standpoint, it is too derivative of classical physics and academic history. Comte's law of three stages was one of the first theories of social evolutionism.

Comte's Theory of Science – According to Comte, the whole of the sciences consists of theoretical and applied knowledge. Theoretical knowledge can generally be divided into physics and biology, which are the object of his research and can be further partitioned into subfields such as botany, zoology or mineralogy. Comte's ranking of scientific fields - in order, mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology - symbolizes a decreasing range of research and complexity of theoretical tools, but a growing complexity of the phenomena under investigation. Each field in this ranking depends upon those that came before it; for instance, our understanding of chemistry depends upon our understanding of physics, as all chemical phenomena are more complicated than the physics that underlie them, and although the laws of chemistry are affected by the laws of physics, the converse is not true. Similarly, sciences that appear earlier in Comte's hierarchy are considered to be older and more advanced than those which come later.

The other universal law he called the 'encyclopedic law'. By combining these laws, Comte developed a systematic and hierarchical classification of all sciences, including inorganic physics (astronomy, earth science and chemistry) and organic physics (biology and, for the first time, physique sociale, later renamed sociologie). Independently from Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès's introduction of the term in 1780, Comte re-invented 'sociologie', and introduced the term as a neologism, in 1838. Comte had earlier used the term 'social physics', but that term had been appropriated by others, notably by Adolphe Quetelet.

The most important thing to determine was the natural order in which the sciences stand — not how they can be made to stand, but how they must stand, irrespective of the wishes of any one....This Comte accomplished by taking as the criterion of the position of each the degree of what he called 'positivity', which is simply the degree to which the phenomena can be exactly determined. This, as may be readily seen, is also a measure of their relative complexity, since the exactness of a science is in inverse proportion to its complexity. The degree of exactness or positivity is, moreover, that to which it can be subjected to mathematical demonstration, and therefore mathematics, which is not itself a concrete science, is the general gauge by which the position of every science is to be determined. Generalizing thus, Comte found that there were five great groups of phenomena of equal classificatory value but of successively decreasing positivity. To these he gave the names: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology.

— Lester F. Ward, The Outlines of Sociology (1898)

This idea of a special science (not the humanities, not metaphysics) for the social was prominent in the 19th century and not unique to Comte. It has recently been discovered that the term 'sociology' (as a term considered coined by Comte) had already been introduced in 1780, albeit with a different meaning, by the French essayist Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836).^[12] The ambitious (or many would say 'grandiose') way that Comte conceived of this special science of the social, however, was unique. Comte saw this new science, sociology, as the last and greatest of all sciences, one which would include all other sciences and integrate and relate their findings into a cohesive whole. It has to be pointed out, however, that he noted a seventh science, one even greater than sociology. Namely, Comte considered 'Anthropology, or true science of Man [to be] the last gradation in the Grand Hierarchy of Abstract Science.'^[13]

The motto Ordem e Progresso ('Order and Progress') in the flag of Brazil is inspired by Auguste Comte's motto of positivism: L'amour pour principe et l'ordre pour base; le progrès pour but ('Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal'). Several of those involved in the military coup d'état that deposed the Empire of Brazil and proclaimed Brazil to be a republic were followers of the ideas of Comte.^[14]

Comte's explanation of the Positive philosophy introduced the important relationship between theory, practice and human understanding of the world. On page 27 of the 1855 printing of Harriet Martineau's translation of The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, we see his observation that, 'If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts can not be observed without the guidance of some theories. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them.'^[15]

Comte's emphasis on the interconnectedness of social elements was a forerunner of modern functionalism. Nevertheless, as with many others of Comte's time, certain elements of his work are now viewed as eccentric and unscientific, and his grand vision of sociology as the centerpiece of all the sciences has not come to fruition.

His emphasis on a quantitative, mathematical basis for decision-making remains with us today. It is a foundation of the modern notion of Positivism, modern quantitative statistical analysis, and business decision-making. His description of the continuing cyclical relationship between theory and practice is seen in modern business systems of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Continuous Quality Improvement where advocates describe a continuous cycle of theory and practice through the four-part cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA, the Shewhart cycle). Despite his advocacy of quantitative analysis, Comte saw a limit in its ability to help explain social phenomena.

The early sociology of Herbert Spencer came about broadly as a reaction to Comte; writing after various developments in evolutionary biology, Spencer attempted to reformulate the discipline in what we might now describe as socially Darwinistic terms.

Comte's fame today owes in part to Émile Littré, who founded The Positivist Review in 1867. Debates continue to rage, however, as to how much Comte appropriated from the work of his mentor, Henri de Saint-Simon.

Comte influenced the Young Turks political movement.^[16]

Auguste Comte did not create the idea of Sociology, the study of society, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture, but instead he expanded it greatly. Positivism, the principle of conducting sociology through empiricism and the scientific method, was the primary way that Comte studied sociology. He split sociology into two different areas of study. One, social statics, how society holds itself together, and two, social dynamics, the study of the causes of societal changes. He saw these areas as parts of the same system. Comte compared society and sociology to the human body and anatomy. “Comte ascribed the functions of connection and boundaries to the social structures of language, religion, and division of labor.'^{[citation needed]} Through language, everybody in a society, both past and present, can communicate with each other. Religion unites society under a common belief system and function in harmony under a system. Finally, the division of labor allows everyone in the society dependent upon each other.

The religion of humanity[edit]

Positivist temple in Porto Alegre

In later years, Comte developed the 'religion of humanity' for positivist societies in order to fulfil the cohesive function once held by traditional worship. In 1849, he proposed a calendar reform called the 'positivist calendar'. For close associate John Stuart Mill, it was possible to distinguish between a 'good Comte' (the author of the Course in Positive Philosophy) and a 'bad Comte' (the author of the secular-religious system).^[10] The system was unsuccessful but met with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) to influence the proliferation of various Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century, especially through the work of secularists such as George Holyoake and Richard Congreve. Although Comte's English followers, including George Eliot and Harriet Martineau, for the most part rejected the full gloomy panoply of his system, they liked the idea of a religion of humanity and his injunction to 'vivre pour autrui' ('live for others'), from which comes the word 'altruism'.^[17]

Law of three stages[edit]

Comte was agitated by the fact that no one had synthesized physics, chemistry, and biology into a coherent system of ideas, so he began an attempt to reasonably deduce facts about the social world from the use of the sciences. Through his studies, he concluded that the growth of the human mind progresses in stages, and so must societies. He claimed the history of society could be divided into three different stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive. The Law of three Stages, an evolutionary theory, describes how history of societies is split into three sections due to new thoughts on philosophy. Comte believed that evolution was the growth of the human mind, splitting into stages and evolving through these stages. Comte concluded that society acts similarly to the mind.^[18]

The law is this: that each of our leading conceptions – each branch of our knowledge – passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.

— A. Comte^[19]

The Law of Three Stages is the evolution of society in which the stages have already occurred or are currently developing. The reason why there are newly developed stages after a certain time period is that the system 'has lost its power' and is preventing the progression of civilization, causing complicated situations in society. 10.^[20] The only way to escape the situation is for people within the civilized nations to turn towards an 'organic' new social system. Comte refers to kings to show the complications of re-establishment on society. Kings feel the need to reorganize their kingdom, but many fail to succeed because they do not consider that the progress of civilization needs reform, not perceiving that there is nothing more perfect than inserting a new, more harmonious system. Kings fail to see the effectiveness of abandoning old systems because they do not understand the nature of the present crisis. But in order to progress, there needs to be the necessary consequences that come with it, which is caused by a 'series of modifications, independent of the human will, to which all classes of society contributed, and of which kings themselves have often been the first agents and most eager promoters'.^[20] The people themselves have the ability to produce a new system. This pattern is shown through the theological stage, metaphysical stage, and positive stage.The Law of Three Stages is split into stages, much like how the human mind changes from stage to stage. The three stages are the theological stage, the metaphysical stage, and the positive stage, also known as the Law of Three Stages. The theological stage happened before the 1300s, in which all societies lived a life that was completely theocentric. The metaphysical stage was when the society seeks universal rights and freedom. With the third and final stage, the positive stage, Comte takes a stand on the question, “how should the relations among philosophy of science, history of science, and sociology of science be seen.'^[21] He says that sociology and history are not mutually exclusive, but that history is the method of sociology, thus he calls sociology the “final science.” This positive stage was to solve social problems and forcing these social problems to be fixed without care for “the will of God” or “human rights.” Comte finds that these stages can be seen across different societies across all of history.

Theological Stage
1. The first stage, the theological stage, relies on supernatural or religious explanations of the phenomena of human behavior because 'the human mind, in its search for the primary and final causes of phenomena, explains the apparent anomalies in the universe as interventions of supernatural agents'.^[22] The Theological Stage is the 'necessary starting point of human intelligence', when humans turn to supernatural agents as the cause of all phenomena.^[23] In this stage, humans focus on discovering absolute knowledge. Comte disapproved this stage because it turned to simple explanation humans created in their minds that all phenomena was caused by supernatural agents, rather than human reason and experience. Comte refers to Bacon's philosophy that 'there can be no real knowledge except that which rests upon observed facts', but he observes that the primitive mind could not have thought that way because it would have only created a vicious circle between observations and theories.^[23] 'For if, on the one hand, every positive theory must necessarily be founded upon observations, it is, on the other hand, no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other'.^[23] Because the human mind could not have thought in that way in the origin of human knowledge, Comte claims that humans would have been 'incapable of remembering facts', and would not have escaped the circle if it were not for theological conceptions, which were less complicated explanations to human life.^[23] Although Comte disliked this stage, he explains that theology was necessary in the beginning of the developing primitive mind.

The Theological Stage is the stage that was seen primarily among the civilizations in the distant past. Having been used before the 1300s, 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. In order to seek the nature of all beings, mankind puts their focus on sentiments, feelings, and emotions. This turned mankind towards theology and the creation of gods to answer all their questions.

1. Fetishism
  1. The Theological Stage is broken into three sections, Fetishism, Polytheism, and Monotheism. Fetishism is the philosophy in which mankind puts the power of a god into an inanimate object. Every object could hold this power of a god, so it started to confuse those who believed in Fetishism and created multiple gods and formed Polytheism.
2. Polytheism
  1. The basic meaning of polytheism is the belief in an order of multiple gods who rule over the universe. Within polytheism, each god is assigned a specific thing in which they are the god of. Examples of this would be the Greek god, Zeus, the god of the sky/lightning, or Ra, the sun god, in Egyptian mythology. A group of priests were often assigned to these gods to offer sacrifices and receive blessing from those gods, but once again, because of the innumerable number of gods, it got confusing, so civilization turned to Monotheism.
3. Monotheism
  1. Monotheism is the belief in one, all powerful god who rules over every aspect of the universe. The removal of emotional and imaginational aspect of both Fetishism and Polytheism resulted in intellectual awakening. This removal allowed for the Enlightenment to occur as well as the expansion of the scientific world. With the Enlightenment came many famous philosophers who brought about a great change in the world. This is the reason why “Monotheism is the climax of the theological stage of thinking.'^[24]
Metaphysical or Abstract Stage

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.

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.^[23] Other than this, Comte says that there is no other use for this stage. Although it is the least important stage, it is necessary because humans could not handle the significant change in thought from theological to positivity.^[18] The metaphysical stage is just a slight modification of the previous stage, when people believed in the abstract forces rather than the supernatural. 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'.^[20] The mind becomes familiar with concepts, wanting to seek more, and therefore is prepared to move into the positive stage.

3. Positive stage

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 social world.^[25] This stage relies on science, rational thought, and empirical laws. 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.^[20] Humans realize that laws exist, and that the world can be rationally explained through science, rational thought, laws, and observation. Comte was a positivist, believing in the natural rather than the supernatural, and so he claimed that his time period, the 1800s, was in the positivist stage.^[25] He believed that within this stage, there is a hierarchy of sciences: mathematics, astronomy, terrestrial physics, chemistry, and physiology. 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.^[20] Astronomy is the most simple science, and is the first 'to be subjected to positive theories'.^[23] Physics is less satisfactory than astronomy, because it is more complex, having less pure and systemized theories. Physics, as well as chemistry, are the 'general laws of the inorganic world', and are harder to distinguish.^[20] Physiology completes the system of natural sciences, and is the most important of all sciences because it is the 'only solid basis of the social reorganization that must terminate the crisis in which the most civilized nations have found themselves'.^[23] This stage will fix the problems in current nations, allowing progression and peace.

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. “In the positive state, the mind stops looking for causes of phenomena, and limits itself strictly to laws governing them; likewise, absolute notions are replaced by relative ones,” ^[26] The imperfection of humanity is not a result of the way we think, rather our perspective that guides the way we think. 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 is 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. 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. “Comte’s classification of the sciences was based upon the hypothesis that the sciences had developed from the understanding of simple and abstract principles to the understanding of complex and concrete phenomena.” ^[27] Instead of taking what we believe to be true we turn it around to use the phenomena of science and the observation of natural law to justify what we believe to be true within society. 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 is going distinct and their facts researched by those in the past is 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 in order 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. “Comte divided sociology into two main fields, or branches: social statistics, or the study of the forces that hold society together; and social dynamics, or the study of the causes of social change,” ^[27] In doing this, society is reconstructed. By reconstructing human thinking and observation, societal operation alters. The attention 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. “Every social system… aims definitively at directing all special forces towards a general result, for the exercise of a general and combined activity is the essence of the society,” ^[28] Social phenomena Comte believed can be transferred into laws and that systemization could become the prime guide to sociology so that all can maintain knowledge to continue building a strong intellectual society.

A mistaken prognostication of Comte[edit]

Auguste Comte is well known for writing in his book 'The Positive Philosophy' that people would never learn the chemical composition of the planets. This has been called a very poor prediction regarding human limits in science. In thirty years people were beginning to learn the composition of planets through spectroscopy.^[29]^[30]

Bibliography[edit]

Comte, A.; A general view of positivism [Discours sur l'Esprit positif 1844] London, 1856 Internet Archive
Comte, A.; Bridges, J.H. (tr.); A General View of Positivism; Trubner and Co., 1865 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN978-1-108-00064-2)
Comte, A.; Congrev, R. (tr.); The Catechism of Positive Religion; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1891 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN978-1-108-00087-1)
Comte, A; Martineau, H. (tr.); The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte; 2 volumes; Chapman, 1853 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN978-1-108-00118-2) (but note that C.U.P. say 'Martineau's abridged and more easily digestible version of Comte's work was intended to be readily accessible to a wide general readership, particularly those she felt to be morally and intellectually adrift', so this is not really Comte's own writings)
Comte, A.; Jones, H.S. (ed.); Comte: Early Political Writings; Cambridge University Press, 1998; ISBN978-0-521-46923-4
Comte, A.; System of Positive Polity; various publishers
Comte, A.; Cours de Philosophie Positive, Tome II; Bachelier, Paris, 1835, The Project Gutenberg eBook of Cours de philosophie positive (2/6), par Auguste Comte; scans of the six volumes are at Projet Gallica

When Ernest Renan published his Essais philosophiques, he clearly stated in their preface that all of them were the result of dialogues between his friend Comte and him, with an impossibility to remember who of them said, developed or modified what.

Notes[edit]

^ ^a^bPickering (2006), p. 192ff.
^Pickering (2009b), pp. 216 and 304.
^Sutton, Michael (1982). Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism. The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0521228688. esp. Chapters 1 and 2
^ ^a^b^c^dChisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). 'Comte, Auguste' . Encyclopædia Britannica. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 814–822.
^'Auguste Comte'. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2018.
^'The Founders of Sociology'. www.cliffsnotes.com. Retrieved 14 May 2019.
^http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture25a.html#course
^'altruism (n .)'. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 21 August 2013.
^'Rencontre avec Annie Petit 'Auguste Comte''. Montpellier Agglomeration. 19 October 2007. Archived from the original on 15 February 2009. Retrieved 15 October 2008. Né à Montpellier, brillant élève du Lycée Joffre...' Translation: 'Born in Montpellier, shining student of the Lycée Joffre...
^ ^a^b'Auguste Comte'. Stanford Encyclopaedia: Auguste Comte. plato.stanford.edu. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2018.
^Giddens, Positivism and Sociology, 1
^Des Manuscrits de Sieyès. 1773–1799, Volumes I and II, published by Christine Fauré, Jacques Guilhaumou, Jacques Vallier et Françoise Weil, Paris, Champion, 1999 and 2007. See also Jacques Guilhaumou, Sieyès et le non-dit de la sociologie: du mot à la chose, in Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines, Number 15, November 2006. Naissances de la science sociale.
^1874 translation of System of Positive Polity, Vol. II, pages 356–347, cited in Urbanowicz, Charles F. 1992. 'Four-Field Commentary'. Anthropology Newsletter. Volume 33, Number 9, page 3.
^'BRAZIL: Order and Progress'. wais.stanford.edu.
^Comte, A. b (1974 reprint). The positive philosophy of Auguste Comte freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau. New York: AMS Press. (Original work published in 1855, New York: Calvin Blanchard, p. 27.b)
^Hanioglu, M. Sukru (1995). 'Ch. 9: The Political Ideas of the Young Turks'. The Young Turks in Opposition. Oxford University Press. pp. 200-212.
^'Comte's secular religion is no vague effusion of humanistic piety, but a complete system of belief and ritual, with liturgy and sacraments, priesthood and pontiff, all organized around the public veneration of Humanity, the Nouveau Grand-Être Suprême (New Supreme Great Being), later to be supplemented in a positivist trinity by the Grand Fétish (the Earth) and the Grand Milieu (Destiny)' According to Davies (p. 28-29), Comte's austere and 'slightly dispiriting' philosophy of humanity viewed as alone in an indifferent universe (which can only be explained by 'positive' science) and with nowhere to turn but to each other, was even more influential in Victorian England than the theories of Charles Darwin or Karl Marx.
^ ^a^bDelaney, Tim. 'Auguste Comte'. Council for Secular Humanism. Council for Secular Humanism, Oct.-Nov. 2003.
^From The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (trans. Harriet Martineau; London, 1853), Vol. I, p. 1.
^ ^a^b^c^d^e^fComte, Auguste, and Gertrud Lenzer. Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Print.
^Bourdeau, Michel. “Auguste Comte.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 8 May 2018, plato.stanford.edu/entries/comte/.
^ ^a^b^cBourdeau, Michel. Auguste Comte. Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/comte/ [April 28, 2016].
^ ^a^b^c^d^e^f^g'Auguste Comte.' Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6Th Edition (2015): 1. MAS Ultra School Edition. Web.
^Priya, Rashmi. “Law of Three Stages: The Corner Stone of Auguste Comte's.” Your Article Library, 1 Dec. 2014, www.yourarticlelibrary.com/sociology/law-of-three-stages-the-corner-stone-of-auguste-comtes/43729.
^ ^a^bDelaney, Tim. Auguste Comte. Council for Secular Humanism, 2003.
^Bourdeau, Michel. [plato.stanford.edu/entries/comte/#PosPol. 'Auguste Comte'] Check |url= value (help). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 22 May 2019.
^ ^a^bFletcher, Ronald. 'Auguste Comte'. Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 22 May 2019.
^Comte, Lenzer, Auguste, Gertrud (1975). Auguste Comte and Positivism. Harper and Row.
^How do we know the composition of stars?
^'Comte on Astronomy'. www.faculty.virginia.edu.

Sources[edit]

Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte, Volume 1: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press (1993), Paperback, 2006.
Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte, Volume 2: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2009a.
Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte, Volume 3: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2009b.

External links[edit]

Works by Auguste Comte at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Auguste Comte at Internet Archive
Works by Auguste Comte at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Henri Gouhier, 'Final Chapter – Life in the anticipation of the Grave', from The Life of Auguste Comte (1931). On Comte's last years, practicing his own religion.
Auguste Comte at Find a Grave
The Three Cs and the Notion of Progress: Copernicus, Condorcet, Comte by Caspar J M Hewett
The positive philosophy, Auguste Comte / freely translated and selected by Harriet Martineau, Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection - downloadable version. {Reprinted by} Cornell University Library Digital Collections
Some selections from first lecture of Course of Positive Philosophy
Auguste Comte – High Priest of Positivism by Caspar Hewett

^Mill, John Stuart (9 October 2005). 'Auguste Comte and Positivism' – via Project Gutenberg.

Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Auguste_Comte&oldid=919943569'

Early Life and Education

Auguste Comte was born in Montpellier, France. After attending the Lycée Joffre and then the University of Montpellier, he was admitted to the École Polytechnique in Paris. The École closed in 1816, at which time Comte took up permanent residence in Paris, earning a precarious living there by teaching mathematics and journalism. He read widely in philosophy and history and was especially interested in those thinkers who were beginning to discern and trace some order in the history of human society.

System of Positive Philosophy

Comte lived during one of the most turbulent periods in European history. As a philosopher, therefore, his aim was not only to understand human society but to prescribed a system by which we could make order out of the chaos, and thus change society for the better.

He eventually developed what he called a 'system of positive philosophy,' in which logic and mathematics, combined with sensory experience, could better assist in understanding human relationships and action, in the same way that the scientific method had allowed an understanding of the natural world. In 1826, Comte began a series of lectures on his system of positive philosophy for a private audience, but he soon suffered a serious nervous breakdown. He was hospitalized and later recovered with the help of his wife, Caroline Massin, whom he married in 1824. He resumed teaching the course in January 1829, marking the beginning of the second period in Comte's life that lasted 13 years. During this time he published the six volumes of his Course on Positive Philosophy between 1830 and 1842.

From 1832 to 1842, Comte was a tutor and then an examiner at the revived École Polytechnique. After quarreling with the directors of the school, he lost his post. During the remainder of his life, he was supported by English admirers and French disciples.

Additional Contributions to Sociology

Though Comte did not originate the concept of sociology or its area of study, he is credited with coining the term and he greatly extended and elaborated the field. Comte divided sociology into two main fields, or branches: social statics, or the study of the forces that hold society together; and social dynamics, or the study of the causes of social change.

By using certain tenets of physics, chemistry, and biology, Comte extrapolated what he considered to be a few irrefutable facts about society, namely that since the growth of the human mind progresses in stages, so too must societies. He claimed the history of society could be divided into three different stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive, otherwise known as the Law of Three Stages. The theological stage reveals humankind's superstitious nature, one that ascribes supernatural causes to the workings of the world. The metaphysical stage is an interim stage in which humanity begins to shed its superstitious nature. The final and most evolved stage is reached when human beings finally realize that natural phenomena and world events can be explained through reason and science.

Os Pensadores Augusto Comte Pdf

Secular Religion

Comte separated from his wife in 1842, and in 1845 he began a relationship with Clotilde de Vaux, whom he idolized. She served as the inspiration for his Religion of Humanity, a secular creed intended for the veneration not of God but of humankind, or what Comte called the New Supreme Being. According to Tony Davies, who has written extensively on the history of humanism, Comte's new religion was a 'complete system of belief and ritual, with liturgy and sacraments, priesthood and pontiff, all organized around the public veneration of Humanity.'

Augusto Comte Teoria Sociologica

De Vaux died only a year into their affair, and after her death, Comte devoted himself to writing another major work, the four-volume System of Positive Polity, in which he completed his formulation of sociology.

Major Publications

The Course on Positive Philosophy (1830-1842)
Discourse on the Positive Spirit (1844)
A General View of Positivism (1848)
Religion of Humanity (1856)

Death

Obras De Augusto Comte Pdf

Auguste Comte died in Paris on September 5, 1857, from stomach cancer. He is buried in the famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery, next to his mother and Clotilde de Vaux.

Cosmonin