Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T03:12:04.482Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Comte's Ambiguous Legacy: Science Defended or Already Justified?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Robert C. Scharff
Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire
Get access

Summary

In light of Part I, the unusual character of Comte's positivism should now be clear. Whereas later positivists tend to simply begin – without further ado, ahistorically, as if in complete intellectual self-possession – by inquiring how a good scientist thinks, Comte stops to give historico-critical consideration to the current philosophical appropriateness of conducting such an inquiry in the first place. In other words, in contrast with advocates of the positivism we more directly – and now, unhappily – inherit, Comte tries to (as we say now) “contextualize” current inquiry. More specifically and quite unlike a sociologist speaking of the current thought of others, however, Comte is above all concerned with understanding that contextualization in the case of his own philosophizing.

Yet it is time to acknowledge that Comte does not always – in fact, does not mostly – display such historico-critical sensitivity. Indeed, it is no accident that the side of Comte I am trying to retrieve has gone relatively unappreciated. There are plenty of passages in which he appears to speak from a vantage point just as far beyond the need for further reflection as that of any later positivist. Hence, in Part II, my focus is on the fundamental tension in Comte's writings between two conceptions of third-stage philosophizing – namely, the one I have so far emphasized, which pictures its orientation as historically contextualized and defensible, and another, more akin to that of later positivism, which represents this orientation as context-free and somehow already justified.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×