Positivism: Comte, the Law of Three Stages, and the Religion of Humanity
Few names of philosophical currents have passed into everyday language as completely as “positivism,” and few have been used in so many different senses. For historians of republican Brazil it is the body of ideas behind the motto on the national flag. For sociologists it is the method that proposes to treat social facts “as things.” For philosophers of science it is the program of the Vienna Circle, which condemned metaphysics as meaningless. For the Frankfurt School it is above all an attitude: accepting the given and reducing reason to technique. This article traces these senses, beginning with the man who coined both the word and the doctrine: Auguste Comte. ...