Positivism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Positivism refers to a set of epistemological perspectives and philosophies of science which hold that the scientific method is the best approach to uncovering the processes by which both physical and human events occur. The concept was developed in the early 19th century by the philosopher and founding sociologist, Auguste Comte. Irrationalism and aestheticism were philosophical movements which formed as a cultural reaction against positivism in the early 20th century.
Antecedents
Positivism is part of a more general ancient [[quarrel between philosophy and poetry, notably laid out by Plato and later reformulated as a quarrel between the sciences and the humanities, Plato elaborates a critique of poetry from the point of view of philosophy in his dialogues Phaedrus 245a, Symposium 209a, Republic 398a, Laws 817 b-d and Ion. the distinction, popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey, between Geisteswissenschaft (humanities) and Naturwissenschaften (natural science),
The consideration that laws in physics may not be absolute but relative, and, if so, this might be more true of social sciences, was stated, in different terms, by G. B. Vico in 1725. Vico, in contrast to the positivist movement, asserted the superiority of the science of the human mind (the humanities, in other words), on the grounds that natural sciences tell us nothing about the inward aspects of things.
See also
- Antipositivism
- Philosophy of social science
- Logical positivism
- Postpositivism
- Analytic philosophy
- Quarrel between philosophy and poetry
- Scientism
- The New Paul and Virginia