Auguste Comte

Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte French:  listen; 19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857 was a French philosopher & writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the number one philosopher of science in the innovative sense of the term. Comte's ideas were also essential to the developing of sociology; indeed, he invented the term in addition to treated that discipline as the crowning achievement of the sciences.

Influenced by the utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, Comte developed positive philosophy in an try to remedy the social disorder caused by the French Revolution, which he believed spoke imminent transition to a new make-up of society. He sought to introducing a new social doctrine based on science, which he labelled 'positivism'. He had a major impact on 19th-century thought, influencing the construct of social thinkers such(a) as John Stuart Mill and George Eliot. His concept of Sociologie and social evolutionism breed the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into advanced academic sociology featured by Émile Durkheim as practical and objective social research.

Comte's social theories culminated in his "Religion of Humanity", which presaged the developing of non-theistic religious humanist and secular humanist organisations in the 19th century. He may also have coined the word altruisme altruism.

Life

Auguste Comte was born in Montpellier, Hérault on 19 January 1798. After attending the Lycée Joffre and then the University of Montpellier, Comte was admitted to École Polytechnique in Paris. The École Polytechnique was notable for its adherence to the French ideals of republicanism and progress. The École closed in 1816 for reorganization, however, and Comte continued his studies at the medical school at Montpellier. When the École Polytechnique reopened, he did non a formal message requesting something that is portrayed to an a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. readmission.

Following his usefulness to Montpellier, Comte soon came to see unbridgeable differences with his Catholic and monarchist quality and set off again for Paris, earning money by small jobs. Comte had abandoned Catholicism under the influence of his first teacher and protestant pastor Daniel Encontre.

In August 1817 he found an apartment at 36 L'Organisateur Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte's Le Censeur Européen, although he would non publish under his own name until 1819's "La séparation générale entre les opinions et les désirs" "The general separation of opinions and desires".

In 1824, Comte left Saint-Simon, again because of unbridgeable differences. Comte published a Plan de travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société 1822 Plan of scientific studies essential for the reorganization of society. But he failed to get an academic post. His day-to-day life depended on sponsors and financial assistance from friends. Debates rage as to how much Comte appropriated the work of Saint-Simon.

Comte married Caroline Massin in 1825. In 1826, he was taken to a mental health hospital, but left without being cured – only stabilized by French alienist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol – so that he could work again on his plan he would later effort suicide in 1827 by jumping off the Pont des Arts. In the time between this and their divorce in 1842, he published the six volumes of his Cours.

Comte developed afriendship with John Stuart Mill. From 1844, he fell deeply in love with the Catholic Clotilde de Vaux, although because she was non divorced from her first husband, their love was never consummated. After her death in 1846 this love became quasi-religious, and Comte, working closely with Mill who was refining his own such(a) system developed a new "Religion of Humanity". John Kells Ingram, an adherent of Comte, visited him in Paris in 1855.

He published four volumes of Système de politique positive 1851–1854. Hiswork, the first volume of La Synthèse Subjective "The Subjective Synthesis", was published in 1856. Comte died in Paris on 5 September 1857 from stomach cancer and was buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery, surrounded by cenotaphs in memory of his mother, Rosalie Boyer, and of Clotilde de Vaux. His apartment from 1841 to 1857 is now conserved as the Maison d'Auguste Comte and is located at 10 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, in Paris' 6th arrondissement.