Elements of Epistemology

	Chapter I Socrates and Plato
	Chapter II Corpus Aristotelicum
	Chapter III Weeping and Laughing Philosophers
	Chapter IV Stoicism and Skepticism
	Chapter V Scholastic Epistemology
	Chapter VI Roger and Francis Bacons
	Chapter VII Cosmology and Epistemology
	Chapter VIII Classic Protagonists of Epistemology
	Chapter IX The Sociologists
	Chapter X Galactic Stage of Cosmological Argument
	Chapter XI Logical Positivism and Beyond ...
	Chapter XII Visual Statistics in Search of Meaning

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sociologists

 

Comte de Saint-Simon When he was 13-years-old, Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) refused to make his first Communion. During the War of Independence he followed his relative, the Marquis de Saint-Simon, to America where he took part in the battle of Yorktown. Before leaving America, in 1783, he presented to the Viceroy of Mexico the plan of a canal between the two oceans. During the French Revolution he was imprisoned for eleven months and while in prison, he formulated his main ideas about a scientific and social reform of humanity.

Saint-Simon envisaged the reorganization of society with elite of philosophers, engineers and scientists. He also advocated a secular humanist religion to replace the traditional religions with scientists as instructors. When dying, Saint-Simon said to Olinde Rodriguez, a philanthropist who liked his social ideas and supported him financially:

 

"Remember that to do anything great you must be impassioned".

 

Saint-Simon was crucial for the development of the social sciences, as he proposed a "science of society," based on the same foundations as the natural sciences. Saint-Simon highly influenced his disciple Auguste Comte. Saint-Simon's vision was highly influential throughout Europe through the 19th Century. Among his adherents were the mathematician Lagrange and Emperor Napoleon III.

Auguste Comte  Auguste Comte (1798-1857) strived to develop a science of society that could explain past events and predict the future. Initially, he called this new science social physics, and, later, 'sociology.' Comte stressed the necessity of separating facts and values during the course of scientific inquiry and dreamed about the ideal society, a sociocracy, ruled by scientists with decisions made on the basis of scientific, sociologic evidence. The natural science of Comte's time was largely liberated from the restrictions the medieval Church had placed on the surviving knowledge of the ancients. It lessened its dependence on authority and relied instead on a combination of reason, observations, and experiments as the primary means of attaining knowledge. Comte maintained that his new science, sociology, should not only be of academic interest, but also should benefit society and contribute to the improvement of the quality of life. A strong point of Comte's blueprint for the new science and new society was the stress he placed on the self-corrective nature of scientific theory. This he contrasted with theories and societies based on religious dogma, coerced to accept canonical beliefs as permanently valid and enforcing the laws as absolute criteria of conduct. Among the methodologies Comte envisioned for his new science was that of the natural experiments. In his book, A General View of Positivism (1848), Comte proposed to replace religion with humanism guided by the principles of social science.  The inscription on tombstone of Auguste Comte reads Love as the Principle, Order as the Means, Progress as the Goal.

In his book The Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-1842), Comte theorized that humanity is progressing through a series of stages of intellectual and cognitive development, consisting of:

Theological Stage
Theological Stage, where cognitive structures of people are dominated by supernatural entities with priests ruling society

                Metaphysical Stage
  Metaphysical Stage, where the cognitive structures of people are shaped by abstractions and lawyers rule the society.

Positive Stage
Positive, Scientific Stage, where the cognitive structures are primarily built on the basis of facts discovered by methods of science and verified through experimentation, observation, and logic.

 

Oeuvres de Auguste Comte

         Cours de philosophie positive. 2 vol. Paris, Hermann, 1975.

         Leons de sociologie.

         Systme de politique positive. 4 vol. Paris, Anthropos, 1969

         Du pouvoir spirituel. 1 vol. comprenant les opuscules de jeunesse. Paris, Le livre de poche, Pluriel, 1978.

         Le catchisme positiviste. Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1966.

         Discours sur l'esprit positif. Paris, Socit positiviste internationale, 1923; rd. Paris, Vrin 1987.

         Trait philosophique d'astronomie populaire. Paris, Fayard, 1985.

         La synthse subjective. Paris, chez l'auteur, 1856.