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Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Robert C. Scharff
Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire
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Summary

The present work began innocently enough with a small essay correcting Mill's famous and influential misinterpretation of Comte's opposition to “psychology.” As I explain in Chapter 1, what Comte rejects and what Mill defends are two different subjects. Comte's arguments are directed against late incarnations of traditional rational psychology, and his prime target is Cousin's pseudoscientific idea of an “interior observation” that supposedly provides metaphysical knowledge of the soul. Mill criticizes Comte for opposing empirical (sc., associationist) psychology and the “introspection” on which it depends. In fact, Comte never considers either of these topics.

Yet Mill's misinterpretation, once identified, seems so obvious that I began to wonder how he could have made it. Indeed, in researching the psychology controversy, I found several other issues on which Mill misinterprets Comte in equally obvious ways (e.g., by criticizing Comte for never getting around to an “organon of proof,” when Comte in fact opposes the very idea of one). Eventually I saw the larger problem. Mill takes it for granted that, being both “positivists,” he and Comte must be in basic agreement over what this entails. In this, however, Mill – and all of us who have read him rather than Comte – are deeply mistaken. As I explain in Chapter 2, Mill's outlook already resembles our century's Logical Positivism in being both rationally reconstructive and ahistorically oriented.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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  • Preface
  • Robert C. Scharff, University of New Hampshire
  • Book: Comte after Positivism
  • Online publication: 06 July 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511609046.001
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  • Preface
  • Robert C. Scharff, University of New Hampshire
  • Book: Comte after Positivism
  • Online publication: 06 July 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511609046.001
Available formats
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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.

  • Preface
  • Robert C. Scharff, University of New Hampshire
  • Book: Comte after Positivism
  • Online publication: 06 July 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511609046.001
Available formats
×