Positivism

positivisme

Worked through in 3 videos · 4 passages.

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani links positivism to Auguste Comte, whose philosophy he also treats as the implicit thinking of the hard sciences. He sets out its law of three stages, which runs from the religious to the metaphysical and then to the positive1. The positive age gives up first and final causes, keeping to the field of experience and going as far as possible in what lies within our reach2 3. He regards this positivism, heir to the Enlightenment, as progress. He draws a clear line between it and neo-positivism, which he judges regressive: it applies the methods of the natural sciences to the human world and erases the advances of Marx and Freud4 5. He gives the example of brain imaging that claims to explain love or anxiety, and dismisses this position alongside irrationalism6. He sees this naturalism as a dominant ideology that limits knowledge to external objects and wants to know nothing of the negative. He connects this to a limit he finds in Comte himself, who ignores that the subject is doubled by itself7.

Summary produced automatically from 9 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Season 11 · 29 Jun 2023Worldliness in Clouscard: Aragon and the positivity of the negative

1:13:09In Comte, three ages: religious, metaphysical, positive, which renounces first and final causes; a respectable thought, an advance against the religious.

Series · 28 Jan 2021Musicosophy 12. Nietzsche (right up) against Wagner

44:06Positivism was a step forward against obscurantism; neo-positivism is a regression coming after Marx, Freud, and the symbolic order.

Season 4 · 14 Jun 2018#4.9 Angélique (by Nerval)

16:19Auguste Comte's philosophy, the implicit thought of the hard sciences; law of three stages: religious, metaphysical, positive.
29:57The positive age gives up first and final causes to concern itself with what lies between the two, within our reach.