A General View of Positivism

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A General View of Positivism (Discours sur l'ensemble du positivisme) was an 1848 book by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, first published in English in 1865. A founding text in the development of positivism and the discipline of sociology, the work provides a revised and full account of the theory Comte presented earlier in his multi-part The Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–1842). Comte outlines the epistemological view of positivism, provides an account of the manner by which sociology should be performed, and describes his law of three stages.

References

Comte, A.; Bridges, J.H. (tr.), A General View of Positivism; Trubner and Co., 1865 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 978-1-108-00064-2)

Positivism

Perspectives	Antihumanism Empiricism Rationalism Scientism

Declinations	Legal positivism Logical positivism / Analytic philosophy Positivist school Postpositivism Sociological positivism Machian positivism (Empirio-criticism) Rankean historical positivism Polish positivism Russian positivism (Empiriomonism)

Principal concepts	Consilience Demarcation Evidence Induction Justificationism Pseudoscience Critique of metaphysics Unity of science Verificationism

Antitheses	Antipositivism Confirmation holism Critical theory Falsifiability Geisteswissenschaft Hermeneutics Historicism Historism Human science Humanities Problem of induction Reflectivism

Related paradigm shifts in the history of science	Non-Euclidean geometry (1830s) Heisenberg uncertainty principle (1927)

Related topics	Behavioralism Critical rationalism Criticism of science Epistemological idealism Epistemology Holism in anthropology Instrumentalism Modernism Naturalism in literature Nomothetic–idiographic distinction Objectivity in science Operationalism Phenomenalism Philosophy of science Deductive-nomological model Ramsey sentence Sense-data theory Qualitative research Relationship between religion and science Sociology Social science (Philosophy) Structural functionalism Structuralism Structuration theory

Positivist-related debate

Method	1890s Methodenstreit (economics) 1909–1959 Werturteilsstreit 1960s Positivismusstreit 1980s Fourth Great Debate in international relations 1990s Science Wars

Contributions	1830 The Course in Positive Philosophy 1848 A General View of Positivism 1869 Critical History of Philosophy 1879 Idealism and Positivism 1886 The Analysis of Sensations 1927 The Logic of Modern Physics 1936 Language, Truth, and Logic 1959 The Two Cultures 2001 The Universe in a Nutshell

Proponents	Richard Avenarius A. J. Ayer Auguste Comte Eugen Dühring Émile Durkheim Ernst Laas Ernst Mach Berlin Circle Vienna Circle

Criticism	1909 Materialism and Empirio-criticism 1923 History and Class Consciousness 1934 The Logic of Scientific Discovery 1936 The Poverty of Historicism 1942 World Hypotheses 1951 Two Dogmas of Empiricism 1960 Truth and Method 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1963 Conjectures and Refutations 1964 One-Dimensional Man 1968 Knowledge and Human Interests 1978 The Poverty of Theory 1980 The Scientific Image 1986 The Rhetoric of Economics

Critics	Theodor W. Adorno Gaston Bachelard Mario Bunge Wilhelm Dilthey Paul Feyerabend Hans-Georg Gadamer Thomas Kuhn György Lukács Karl Popper Willard Van Orman Quine Max Weber

Concepts in contention	Knowledge Phronesis Truth Verstehen

A General View of Positivism

See also

References