Positivism And The Real :: essays research papers

Positivism is a trend in bourgeois philosophy, which acknowledges the orthodoxy towards empirical knowledge of natural phenomena where metaphysics and theology are regarded as inadequate and imperfect systems of knowledge. Positivism, began to rise as the main intellectual ride during the second half of the 19th century in response to the unfitness of speculative philosophy, witch was indeed love story.     During the first half of 19th century, the Romanticism brought new views that helped the civilization of that time reach a higher direct but it also brought the negative side effects. It brought the chaotic effect that battalion started in a extremely liberal way to threat the fond order in the increasing dispute of 1847 to 1848 which was posed not tho by revolutions but by the eruption of an insidious, continu all in ally growing, struggle of syndicate against class. The imperceptive economic thinkings, as those in France of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, e loquent if inconsistent writer, denounced the property classifying it as theft. The revolutions of 1848 lead the way for European thinkers to develop new visions for the way of view that brought to the idea of Positivism.     Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, French companionableist/philosopher, conceived the idea of a new learning of society that would result in the economic and intellectual emancipation of man. Saint-Simon thought that the new idea must be a positive philosophy based on experience and science. Another Frenchman Auguste Comte, who is considered the founder of Positivism, was the first to close in the term positivism. According to Comte, the new natural sciences indicated that a new social science should be built on observation and experience. Comte also expound the human history as a three-staged chronology of progress, with each stage having a different social organization based on the social environment of the time, with action based on diffe rent principles at each stage. Those were the theological stage, metaphysical stage and at last the positive era.     After its extradite in France, positivism continued to spread to England where it obtained a new and check form. In fact, it was in England that the biggest positivist arose. James Stuart Mill, a writer on economy, was one of the main figures in English positivism. In his largely influential System of Logic (1843) Mill introduced the logical positivism that declared all discoveries of truth not self-evident consist of inductions and the interpretation of inductions. Mills theory of logic is based on the laws association.