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 movement during the second half of the 19th century in response to the inability of speculative philosophy, witch was indeed Romanticism.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   During the first half of 19th century, the Romanticism brought new views that helped the civilization of that time reach a higher level but it also brought the negative side effects. It brought the chaotic effect that people started in a extremely liberal way to threat the social order in the increasing dispute of 1847 to 1848 which was posed not just by revolutions but by the eruption of an insidious, continually growing, struggle of class against class. The imperceptive economic thoughts, as those in France of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, eloquent 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 thinking that brought to the idea of Positivism.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, French socialist/philosopher, conceived the idea of a new science 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 introduce the term â€Å"positivism.† According to Comte, the new natural sciences indicated that a new social science should be built on observation and experience. Comte also described 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 different principles at each stage. Those were the theological stage, metaphysical stage and at last the positive era.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  After its birth in France, positivism continued to spread to England where it obtained a new and better 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. Mill’s theory of logic is based on the laws association.