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AUGUSTE_COMTE

                                             October 17, 2012

  A review in the NYRB of Mary Pickering's        [ref]
  nook on Auguste Comte clues me in on what          
  Comte was about: he's one of the roots of      This review is by a      
  that old positivism that we all keep           Thomas Meaney, a History     
  hearing such negative things about.            grad student at Columbia.     
                                                                               
     Comte, it turns out, is one of                                        
     the first the great, cranky              His review kept harping on the
     breathren of intellectuals               subject of Comte's influence
     interested in a unification of           on Sociology.  It seemed a
     all human knowledge.                     very narrow focus, but I
                                              gather it's one of the things
     He a was post-French Rev kid,            one says about Comte: his
     determined to do it right,               system of classification
     without The Terror.                      covered existing sciences, but
                                              also pointed the way to the
                                              social sciences he predicted
                                              would develop.

                                                  In general, the reviewer
                                                  indulges in quite a bit of
                                                  retrospective contempt for
     Eventually he came back to                   Comte, enough that it leaves
     the idea of a religion of                    me wondering how much of it
     humanity, of rationality,                    is justified.
     of Science.                   BIBLES
                                                    "Comte was a thinker,
     This is one of the great,                       after all, who attempted
     doomed and probably                             to systematize all the
     fundamentally dumb ideas   Traps in the         knowledge of his age,
     that recurs frequently.    intellectual         but whose strict regime
                                landscape...         of 'cerebral hygiene'
        CULT_OF_REASON                               kept him from reading
                                SANDPITS             much of it."

                                                         Yeah, that sounds
     A great vacation                                    silly, but "read
     destination:                                        everything before
                                                         you make a move"
     "The temple of humanity in Rio                      isn't a formula for
     de Janeiro continues to hold                        success either.
     services to this day."
                                                              MEDIA_FAST
        Truth!
        Order!
        Progress!
                                             A common syndrome:
                                             the creators version
                                             differs from the followers:

                                             "Logical Positivism"
                                              vs Comte's positivism.
         
                                              Peirce vs pragmatism.

                                              Paul vs Christ

                                              To quote Kuhn:
                                              "I am not a Kuhnian".

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