I know absolutely nothing about him, and most websites devoted to the father of Positivism are confusing... at best.

What do you guys know?

in full Isidore-auguste-marie-françois-xavier Comte b. Jan. 19, 1798, Montpellier, France
d. Sept. 5, 1857, Paris
French philosopher known as the founder of sociology and of positivism. Comte gave the science of sociology its name and established the new subject in a systematic fashion.


Life.
Comte's father, Louis Comte, a tax official, and his mother, Rosalie Boyer, were strongly royalist and deeply sincere Roman Catholics. But their sympathies were at odds with the republicanism and skepticism that swept through France in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Comte resolved these conflicts at an early age by rejecting Roman Catholicism and royalism alike. He was intellectually precocious and in 1814 entered the École Polytechnique--a school in Paris that had been founded in 1794 to train military engineers but was soon transformed into a general school for advanced sciences. The school was temporarily closed in 1816, but Comte soon took up permanent residence in Paris, earning a precarious living there by the occasional teaching of mathematics and by journalism. He read widely in philosophy and history and was especially interested in those thinkers who were beginning to discern and trace some order in the history of human society. The thoughts of several important French political philosophers of the 18th century--such as Montesquieu, the Marquis de Condorcet, A.-R.-J. Turgot, and Joseph de Maistre--were critically worked into his own system of thought.

Comte's most important acquaintance in Paris was Henri de Saint-Simon, a French social reformer and one of the founders of socialism, who was the first to clearly see the importance of economic organization in modern society. Comte's ideas were very similar to Saint-Simon's, and some of his earliest articles appeared in Saint-Simon's publications. There were distinct differences in the two men's viewpoints and scientific backgrounds, however, and Comte eventually broke with Saint-Simon. In 1826 Comte began a series of lectures on his "system of positive philosophy" for a private audience, but he soon suffered a serious nervous breakdown. He made an almost complete recovery from his symptoms the following year, and in 1828/29 he again took up his projected lecture series. This was so successfully concluded that he redelivered it at the Royal Athenaeum during 1829-30. The following 12 years were devoted to his publication (in six volumes) of his philosophy in a work entitled Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42; "Course of Positive Philosophy"; Eng. trans. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte).

From 1832 to 1842 Comte was a tutor and then an examiner at the revived École Polytechnique. In the latter year he quarreled with the directors of the school and lost his post, along with much of his income. During the remainder of his life he was supported in part by English admirers such as John Stuart Mill and by French disciples, especially the philologist and lexicographer Maximilien Littré. Comte married Caroline Massin in 1825, but the marriage was unhappy and they separated in 1842. In 1845 Comte had a profound romantic and emotional experience with Clotilde de Vaux, who died the following year of tuberculosis. Comte idealized this sentimental episode, which exerted a considerable influence on his later thought and writings, particularly with regard to the role of women in the positivist society he planned to establish.

Comte devoted the years after the death of Clotilde de Vaux to composing his other major work, the Système de politique positive, 4 vol. (1851-54; System of Positive Polity), in which he completed his formulation of sociology. The entire work emphasized morality and moral progress as the central preoccupation of human knowledge and effort and gave an account of the polity, or political organization, that this required. Comte lived to see his writings widely scrutinized throughout Europe. Many English intellectuals were influenced by him, and they translated and promulgated his work. His French devotees had also increased, and a large correspondence developed with positivist societies throughout the world. Comte died of cancer in 1857.

Comte was a rather sombre, ungrateful, self-centred, and egocentric personality, but he compensated for this by his zeal for the welfare of humanity, his intellectual determination, and his strenuous application to his life's work. He devoted himself untiringly to the promotion and systematization of his ideas and to their application in the cause of the improvement of society.

His other writings include Catéchisme positiviste (1852; The Catechism of Positive Religion) and Synthèse subjective (1856; "Subjective Synthesis"). In general, his writing was well organized, and its exposition proceeded in impressively orderly fashion, but his style was heavy, laboured, and rather monotonous. His chief works are notable mainly because of the scope, magnitude, and importance of his project and the conscientious persistence with which he developed and expressed his ideas.


Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Thought.

Comte lived through the aftermath of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, at a time when a new, stable social order--without despotism--was sought. Modern science and technology and the Industrial Revolution had begun transforming the societies of Europe in directions no one yet understood. People experienced violent conflict but were adrift in feeling, thought, and action; they lacked confidence in established sentiments, beliefs, and institutions but had nothing with which to replace them. Comte thought that this condition was not only significant for France and Europe but was one of the decisive junctures of human history.

Comte's particular ability was as a synthesizer of the most diverse intellectual currents. He took his ideas mainly from writers of the 18th and early 19th centuries. From David Hume and Immanuel Kant he derived his conception of positivism--i.e., the theory that theology and metaphysics are earlier imperfect modes of knowledge and that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations as verified by the empirical sciences. From various French clericalist thinkers Comte took the notion of a hypothetical framework for social organization that would imitate the hierarchy and discipline found in the Roman Catholic church. From various Enlightenment philosophers he adopted the notion of historical progress. Most importantly, from Saint-Simon he came to appreciate the need for a basic and unifying social science that would both explain existing social organizations and guide social planning for a better future. This new science he called "sociology" for the first time.

Comte shared Saint-Simon's appreciation of the growing importance of modern science and the potential application of scientific methods to the study and improvement of society. Comte believed that social phenomena could be reduced to laws in the same way that the revolutions of the heavenly bodies had been made explicable by gravitational theory. Furthermore, he believed that the purpose of the new scientific analysis of society should be ameliorative and that the ultimate outcome of all innovation and systematization in the new science should be the guidance of social planning. Comte also thought a new and secularized spiritual order was needed to supplant what he viewed as the outdated supernaturalism of Christian theology.

Comte's main contribution to positivist philosophy falls into five parts: his rigorous adoption of the scientific method; his law of the three states or stages of intellectual development; his classification of the sciences; his conception of the incomplete philosophy of each of these sciences anterior to sociology; and his synthesis of a positivist social philosophy in a unified form. He sought a system of philosophy that could form a basis for political organization appropriate to modern industrial society.

Comte's "law of the three stages" maintained that human intellectual development had moved historically from a theological stage, in which the world and human destiny within it were explained in terms of gods and spirits; through a transitional metaphysical stage, in which explanations were in terms of essences, final causes, and other abstractions; and finally to the modern positive stage. This last stage was distinguished by an awareness of the limitations of human knowledge. Knowledge could only be relative to man's nature as a species and to his varying social and historical situations. Absolute explanations were therefore better abandoned for the more sensible discovery of laws based on the observable relations between phenomena.

Comte's classification of the sciences was based upon the hypothesis that the sciences had developed from the understanding of simple and abstract principles to the understanding of complex and concrete phenomena. Hence, the sciences developed as follows: from mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry to biology and finally to sociology. According to Comte, this last discipline not only concluded the series but would also reduce social facts to laws and synthesize the whole of human knowledge, thus rendering the discipline equipped to guide the reconstruction of society.

Though Comte did not originate the concept of sociology or its area of study, he greatly extended and elaborated the field and systematized its content. Comte divided sociology into two main fields, or branches: social statics, or the study of the forces that hold society together; and social dynamics, or the study of the causes of social change. He held that the underlying principles of society are individual egoism, which is encouraged by the division of labour, and the combination of efforts and the maintenance of social cohesion by means of government and the state.

Comte revealed his conception of the ideal positivist society in his System of Positive Polity. He believed that the organization of the Roman Catholic church, divorced from Christian theology, could provide a structural and symbolic model for the new society, though Comte substituted a "religion of humanity" for the worship of God. A spiritual priesthood of secular sociologists would guide society and control education and public morality. The actual administration of the government and of the economy would be in the hands of businessmen and bankers, while the maintenance of private morality would be the province of women as wives and mothers.

Though unquestionably a man of genius, Comte inspired discipleship on the one hand and derision on the other. His plans for a future society have been described as ludicrous, and Comte was deeply reactionary in his rejection of democracy, his emphasis on hierarchy and obedience, and his opinion that the ideal government would be made up of an intellectual elite. But his ideas influenced such notable social scientists as Émile Durkheim of France and Herbert Spencer and Sir Edward Burnett Tylor of Great Britain. Comte's belief in the importance of sociology as the scientific study of human society remains an article of faith among contemporary sociologists, and the work he accomplished remains a remarkable synthesis and an important system of thought.


(R.Fl./H.E.B./Ed.)

Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

I think he is the inventor of the pencil. There is a French pencil brand named Comté, whose name comes from him.

The social Positivism of Comte and Mill
Comte's Positivism was posited on the assertion of a so-called law of the three phases (or stages) of intellectual development. There is a parallel, as Comte saw it, between the evolution of thought patterns in the entire history of man, on the one hand, and in the history of an individual's development from infancy to adulthood, on the other. In the first, or so-called theological, stage, natural phenomena are explained as the results of supernatural or divine powers. It matters not whether the religion is polytheistic or monotheistic; in either case, miraculous powers or wills are believed to produce the observed events. This stage was criticized by Comte as anthropomorphic; i.e., as resting on all-too-human analogies. Generally, animistic explanations--made in terms of the volitions of soullike beings operating behind the appearances--are rejected as primitive projections of unverifiable entities.

The second phase, called metaphysical, is in some cases merely a depersonalized theology: the observable processes of nature are assumed to arise from impersonal powers, occult qualities, vital forces, or entelechies (internal perfecting principles). In other instances, the realm of observable facts is considered as an imperfect copy or imitation of eternal ideas, as in Plato's metaphysics of pure Forms. Again, Comte charged that no genuine explanations result; questions concerning ultimate reality, first causes, or absolute beginnings are thus declared to be absolutely unanswerable. The metaphysical quest can lead only to the conclusion expressed by the German biologist and physiologist, Emil du Bois-Reymond: "Ignoramus et ignorabimus" ("We are and shall be ignorant"); it is a deception through verbal devices and the fruitless rendering of concepts as real things.

The sort of fruitfulness that it lacks can be achieved only in the third phase, the scientific, or "positive," phase--hence the title of Comte's magnum opus: Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42; The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 1853)--because it claims to be concerned only with positive facts. The task of the sciences, and of knowledge in general, is to study the facts and regularities of nature and society and to formulate the regularities as (descriptive) laws; explanations of phenomena can consist in no more than the subsuming of special cases under general laws. Mankind reached full maturity of thought only after abandoning the pseudoexplanations of the theological and metaphysical phases and substituting an unrestricted adherence to scientific method.

In his three stages Comte combined what he considered to be an account of the historical order of development with a logical analysis of the levelled structure of the sciences. By arranging the six basic and pure sciences one upon the other in a pyramid, Comte prepared the way for Logical Positivism to "reduce" each level to the one below it. He placed at the fundamental level the science that does not presuppose any other sciences--viz., mathematics--and then ordered the levels above it in such a way that each science depends upon, and makes use of, the sciences below it on the scale: thus arithmetic and the theory of numbers are declared to be presuppositions for geometry and mechanics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology (including physiology), and sociology. Each higher level science, in turn, adds to the knowledge content of the science or sciences on the levels below, thus enriching this content by successive specialization. Psychology is conspicuously missing in Comte's system of the sciences. Anticipating some ideas of 20th-century Behaviourism and physicalism, Comte assumed that psychology should become a branch of biology (especially of brain neurophysiology), on the one hand, and of sociology, on the other. As the "father" of sociology, Comte maintained that the social sciences should proceed from observations to general laws, very much as (in his view) physics and chemistry do. He was skeptical of introspection in psychology, being convinced that, in attending to one's own mental states, these states would be irretrievably altered and distorted. In thus insisting on the necessity of objective observation, he was close to the basic principle of the methodology of 20th-century Behaviourism.

Among Comte's disciples or sympathizers were Cesare Lombroso, an Italian psychiatrist and criminologist, and Paul-Emile Littré, J.-E. Renan, and Louis Weber.

Despite some basic disagreements with Comte, the 19th-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill, also a logician and economist, must be regarded as one of the outstanding Positivists of his century. In his System of Logic (1843), he developed a thoroughly Empiricist theory of knowledge and of scientific reasoning, going even so far as to regard logic and mathematics as empirical (though very general) sciences. The broadly synthetic philosopher Herbert Spencer, author of a doctrine of the "unknowable" and of a general evolutionary philosophy, was, next to Mill, an outstanding exponent of a Positivistic orientation.


Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

I love my Britannica. Buy one for every room in your house.

Thanks Kafka, and ummmm.....

I guess thanks toyou too D'Art.

Pencil?

No I was actually totally wrong :o.
the inventor of the pencil was Nicolas Conté a French engineer. He has nothing to do with the guy you mentionned sorry

I figured that out ;)

but it was a nice try :shrug:

Originally posted by D' Artagnan
No I was actually totally wrong :o.
the inventor of the pencil was Nicolas Conté a French engineer. He has nothing to do with the guy you mentionned sorry

Hey, it's the thought that counts. Besides, now we all the practical knowledge of who invented the pencil, in addition to a ton of info on Comte. ;)