THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY OF AUGUSTE COMTE

Mill, John Stuart

Published by Lee and Shepard, Boston, New York, 1871

About this Item

182 pages; Clean and secure in original green cloth binding with gilt lettering at spine; some wear at spine ends and corners; brown endpapers, hinges strong. A nice copy of this classic work. Auguste Comte (1798 1857) is the founder of positivism, a philosophical and political movement which enjoyed a very wide diffusion in the second half of the nineteenth century. It sank into an almost complete oblivion during the twentieth, when it was eclipsed by neopositivism. However, Comte s decision to develop successively a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of physics, a philosophy of chemistry and a philosophy of biology, makes him the first philosopher of science in the modern sense, and his constant attention to the social dimension of science resonates in many respects with current points of view. His political philosophy, on the other hand, is even less known, because it differs substantially from the classical political philosophy we have inherited. Comte s contribution was to initiate an antireligious and an antimetaphysical bias in the philosophy of science that survived into the 20th century.In mid-19th-century England the chief representative of the empirical tradition from Bacon to Hume was John Stuart Mill. Mill s theory of knowledge, best represented in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton s Philosophy (1865), was not particularly original but rather a judicious combination of the doctrines of Berkeley and Hume; it symbolized his mistrust of vague metaphysics, his denial of the a priori element in knowledge, and his determined opposition to any form of intuitionism. It is in his enormously influential A System of Logic (1843), however, that Mill s chief theoretical ideas are to be found.

Seller Inventory # 43344

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY OF AUGUSTE COMTE
• Publisher: Lee and Shepard, Boston, New York
• Publication Date: 1871
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good