Comte, Auguste

Comte, Auguste (1830-1842) Cours de philosophiepositive, Paris, 6 Vols reprint Paris, Hermann, 1975, 2 Vols. 

Comte, Auguste (1844) Discours surTespritpositif, reprint Paris, Vrin, 1995. 

In 1830, Auguste Comte, a French philosopher who is generally recognized as the founder of sociology and positivism, wrote the following 1... 

The learning process with respect to the problem of the origin of life took place in a manner similar to the three stages described by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) for the linear history of progress in human culture. These three stages are ... 

By common agreement among many historians of science, "chemistry" and "physics" became fairly well demarcated communities or disciplines around 1830, some hundred years before the founding of the Journal of Chemical Physics2 This was about the time that Auguste Comte was embarking on his Cours de philosophie positive, in which he laid out a hierarchy of the positive sciences as he observed them in contemporary Paris. In this hierarchy, the mastery of mathematics and physics was historically and foundationally prior to chemistry. 

Comte s account may work for a history of transcendental ideas but not for a history of disciplines. Comte s Cours de philosophiepositive was published in six volumes in Paris during 18301842. See the abridgement by Harriet Martineau, in her edition, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 2 vols. (London J. Chapman, 1853). 

The French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was wary of speculations—he did not like ideas with little support from scientific experimentation or observation. In his multivolume work Cours de Philosophic Positive (Course of Positive Philosophy), published in 1830-42, Comte cited an example of a question that he felt would be forever speculative. Because the planets and stars are so distant, Comte believed that people would never gain firm knowledge of the composition of these astronomical objects. Yet only a few years later, scientists learned about spectroscopy and how to determine the elements that compose stars and planets by analyzing emitted or reflected light. Comte s prediction was soon proven untrue. 

They introduced their spectroscope in a paper published in 1860 (S). They emphasized the utihty of the spectroscope as a very sensitive tool for qualitative elemental analysis. They predicted that the tool would be valuable in the discovery of yet unknown elements. They noted that the spectroscope had convinced them of the existence of another alkali metal besides lithium, sodium, and potassium eventually they foimd two—cesium and mbidium. In that 1860 paper, they noted that their instrument could shed light on the chemical composition of the sun and stars—not many years after Auguste Comte wrote that such knowledge was beyond the reach of human beings. 

After Bunsen had detected and isolated caesium, spectroscopy was taken up with great enthusiasm by William Crookes, and this led to his detection and isolation of thallium in 1861.191 Crookes letters to Charles Hanson Greville Williams, who was also working with the spectroscope, and who felt he deserved some of the credit for the discovery of thallium, have been published.192 The use of spectrochemistry in the search for hitherto unknown chemical elements in Britain over the period 1860-1869 has been described. It was perceived that, like Crookes, a scientist could make his reputation by discovering a new element. This resulted in several claims for the existence of new elements that later proved to be unfounded.193 Once Kirchhoff had established beyond doubt that the dark Fraunhofer lines were caused by the same element that caused emission lines of identical wavelengths, the way was open for the chemical analysis of the atmosphere of the sun and stars. This was a process which had been declared to be an impossibility by Auguste Comte less than 30 years previously.194... 

In 1830, when Poisson took issue with Laplace on the question of liquid structure at interfaces, August Comte, a famous French philosopher of the time wrote "If mathematics should ever take a prominent place in chemistry, an aberration which is happily almost impossible, it would occasion a widespread and rapid degeneration of that science". Again, and in contrast, Kant wrote of the chemis and physiology of his day that it was scientia not Scientia, by which he meant and said that uiUess mathematics and physics figured prominently in chemistry, it was doomed to empiricism. 

A full appreciation of the importance of positivism in the discipline of the history of science must take into account the complexity and variability of this protean philosophy. Tire term positivism was first used by the Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon to designate the scientific method and its extension to the solution of problems in philosophy and society. Adopted by Auguste Comte in the 1840s, it came to designate a general philosophical and cultural movement which exerted a powerful influence on scholars and intellectuals in Europe and America for over a century. The Positivist Movement found its philosophical inspiration in a blend of empiricism, rationalism and utilitarian philosophies developed in the previous century. Combining positive philosophy with positive polity . 

A. Comte, The Positive Philosophy of August Comte (Selections)) in P. Gardiner (ed.). Theories of History From Classical to Contemporary Sources (1893 Glenco, IL Free Press, 1959), pp. 73-82, p. 76. 

M. Pickering, Auguste Comte An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 277-89 and 683-4. 

The positivist philosopher Auguste Comte asserted in 1835, in relation to the sun and other celestial bodies, that we understand the possibility of determining their shapes, their distances, their sizes and motions, whereas never by any means will we be able to study their chemical composition, mineralogical structure, and not at all the nature of the organic beings living on their surface. Such is the reliability of philosophical speculation from armchairs. 

The view that individualism is "the disease of the Western world was first proposed by August Comte (1791-1857), founder of Positivism and father of modem sociology. (Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition, p. 273.)... 

John Stuart Mill. Auguste Comte and Positivism, p. 14s. 

Mill, J. S. Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865). Ann Arbor Univer. of Michigan—Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1965. 

A. Comte], The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Harriet Martineau, London, 1853, v. 1, pp. 298-9 W. H. Brock, ed., The Atomic Debates Brodie and the rejection of the atomic theory, Leicester University Press, 1967, Appendix, Comte, Williamson and Brodie , pp. 145-52. 

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